The Hidden Cameras are a Toronto-based, 13-piece band led by Joel Gibb, who writes all the songs and plays a mountain of instruments, creating a joyful, pounding surge of passion and love. With songs like "Music is my Boyfriend" and "I Want Another Enema," it doesn't take long for your average listener to catch on to their homorock perspective. But they aren't just using it as an appeal a la Stephen Meritt or even Morrissey, they are pure homo as much as some bands are pure hetero, and they want to take gayness back to its revolutionary roots. "I get excited about that whole idea of what it meant to be gay in the sixties and how it was really actually revolutionary and dangerous and important" explains Gibb.
Rooted in the depths of pre-Stonewall gay culture, the Cameras call their soft pop "gay folk church music" which seems like a huge contradiction, and of course, it is. While half the band may identify as queer, the Cameras are not just gay but gay--cheerful and celebratory: baton-throwers with streamers. Reaching gospel highs and hymnal lows, Joel Gibb knows how to stir a crowd with playful, canoodling erotic lyrics and bring them back down with slower songs of heartache and loss--overall a beautiful and complete album. Among this rich mixture of Romantic simple-life pleasures and pains lies a commanding open your mind message laced with fun and frivolity that, once played through your home's speakers, becomes unleashed, contagious, and affirmed. For example, during "I Believe in the Good of Life," Gibb sings the phrase "I believe in the good of life, as I kneel for a taste of man" which comes happily through my speakers, and instantly I feel as if someone were speaking my language, as if I were oddly at home--simply thanks to gay lyrics on the radio.
There is a certain officialness to hearing something come through the stereo, as if the speakers make it official, make it OK. But this time, the message is gay! In the same song Gibb continues: "I'll testify on the word of a radio [that I dream of the fate of democracy]," acknowledging the importance and influence the radio, or even television, holds over people. Perhaps this is where they draw there name from. The Hidden Cameras--a vague reference to the theory of the panopticon--offer a glimpse into a humorous but dead-serious world of bacchanalia, revolution, and celebration that may be a smoldering dream in America (sorry Walt Witman), but still alive and well in Canada. |