Age [Vinyl]

The Hidden Camera’s "Age" references a ‘zine created by Joel Gibb and his friend, Canadian painter Paul P. when they worked in a copy store located in an underground mall in downtown Toronto. Putting the kink in Kinkos, so to speak, the two would creep back after hours; descend into their fluorescent-lit image laboratory and cobble together representations of the joyous erotic misbehavior of a group of boys. Their crudely stapled concoction was just that: a fantasy, seeming to document a ‘scene’ that, in fact, didn’t exist anywhere but on the pages they cut and pasted together. The Barbara Kruger-esque formatting and presence of the two grinning, shirtless adolescents on the cover of Age, invokes this earlier moment as an invitation to the heady mixture of bildungsroman, desire and politics that inform the music found within.

The first single, Gay Goth Scene, suggests the experience of a teenager struggling to exorcise internalized voices of homophobic prohibition: ‘no Gay Goth ‘zine in our house, no gorgeous teen in your mouth.’ Identifying with the protagonist, the listener is caught between parental instruction and the need to control a desiring body subject to proscribed drives. With the ominous fate of “facing trial” and being “forced to reconvert,” we are split between the demands of personal identity and the socially approved regulation of desire.

Seduced into an allusive soundscape haunted by the pop music of an alienated 90s adolescence, the listener is reminded of the dilemma faced by all marginalized subjects seeking recognition: how to become the author of your own life and celebrate oneself as an aesthetic whole. Age is lesson in the life science of excremental alchemy, or to again quote Nietzsche, in how “to transform all this shit into gold.”