Alex Cameron is just as much a musician as he is a performance artist. He takes on personas—usually that of a sleazebag everyman, the kind of guy who frequents strip clubs and casinos on weekday afternoons. His work is deliberately provocative, deliberately transgressive, and rarely serious. In an era of indie music that can sometimes feel so self-consciously woke that it suffocates, Cameron can feel like a breath of fresh air. He’s a latter-day Harmony Korine character: Alien in Spring Breakers playing Britney Spears on a piano with white-guy cornrows and grills, or the titular Beach Bum walking around the pool in a pink marabou bathrobe. On 2016’s lo-fi opus, Jumping the Shark, Cameron gave off the vibe of a down on his luck wedding singer performing Suicide b-sides. On 2017’s Forced Witness, he penned a propulsive, weirdly moving ’80s synth-pop ballad that involved rhyming “Down Syndrome Jew,” with “the real estate crew.” His music, at its best, is a slightly problematic—but needed—reprieve from the status quo, a good laugh.
Oxy Music is a different beast, but it doesn’t try to be. Cameron’s fourth record attempts all of the same tricks that made his music so compelling earlier in his career, but with far less success. The sleazebag bit has grown old and the character-study work attempts to be transgressive but is actually just trite and, crucially, not particularly funny. The ’80s sound palette that gave so much life into his earlier records now has lapsed into pastiche. “Sara Jo,” has a catchy melody, blasts of saxophone, and chintzy synths. But it is catchy in the way that a song in the grocery store is, something tinny and distant. You’re singing along while figuring out the calorie content of S’Mores Pop-Tarts, even though you don’t know the lyrics. Which, by the way, involves Cameron singing the phrase, “Who told my brother that his kids are gonna die from this vaccine?” a bunch of times.
Maybe the one funny thing about the record is its name. It’s Roxy Music minus the “R”, an homage to the drug known as Oxycontin. It’s pretty edgy stuff, which is a grim caveat of his less than compelling social commentary to be found within. Cameron tries to show that he is a) totally not woke and not interested in being PC but also b) not like, a total nihilist, he’s totally a cool, self-aware, caring dude. Look no further than “Cancel Culture,” which is both a critique of cancel culture and a critique of people who think cancel culture is bad. “Lily-white/But I use ebonics when I’m online,” Cameron croons in a falsetto, “Because everything’s dope/And I can barely hide it, baby.” He’s calling out hypocrites and culture vultures with the kind of air of someone who thinks he’s enlightened, but the meta nature of the song makes it feel even more slimy than if it actually had something novel or interesting to say about cancel culture—which it doesn’t.
The thing is, Cameron wants you to think he’s totally in on the joke. You see, these songs are supposed to sound bad. But the self-awareness really only carries you so far in an album that sounds like Costco-brand Roxy Music on purpose. The spartan production is some of the weakest in Cameron’s career, mostly consisting of cheap-sounding software plugins and maybe a handful of vintage synthesizers. More than anything, it takes on the quality of a short story written by a young student trying to cram as many neon lights, bongs, uzis, blow jobs, g-strings, and jokes into 10 pages as possible. For how clearly smart, ambitious, and upsettingly tuneful Cameron is, it’s a pity that he uses his talent for these exercises in sophistry, music that feels so vacuous and fleeting that it becomes one with the very modernity it seeks to lampoon. I guess that’s pretty funny.
