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The Hidden Cameras Made 2 Albums About Raunchy Gay Sex. Then It Stopped

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Gay indie rock band The Hidden Cameras released their new album Origin:Orphan today. It gave Daniel Villarreal the perfect opportunity to revisit their old records — and see whether they’re still as hardcore.

There’s an expression that goes, “If you’re not a punk at 20, there’s something wrong with you but if you’re still a punk at 30, there’s something wrong with you.” At 20, Joel Gibb of The Hidden Cameras composed some of the most uplifting pop songs about being peed on and sniffing cum that you’ve ever heard.

Their first two albums, The Smell of Our Own and Mississauga Goddam, used masturbation, anal douching, and gagging on cock not as throwaway shock humor, but as analogies for immaturity, body obsession, and growing up too fast. It was beautifully confessional music with brutal symbols that any alienated gay guy could relate to. The albums are still pretty revolutionary, considering all these songs had organ and guitar arrangements straight out of church — and that most indie rockers would rather gaze at their shoes than ever discuss sex, least of all gay sex.

Then suddenly, on their third album Awoo, almost all the Cameras’ attention to raunchy gay sex disappeared.

Sure, Awoo had some innuendo about being bent over, sucking on “lollipops,” and maybe even one song about auto-erotic asphyxiation, but the next gayest tracks were about swooning over kneecaps and talking to your dad. It also had a song called “She’s Gone.”

She?!

You had to wonder whether Joel Gibb had traded in the piss play and leather sex that helped make his band famous just to end up crafting innocuous pop songs that straight people would enjoy.

But Gibb is 32 now, and his band’s latest album Origin:Orphan shows he hasn’t traded gay sex for popular appeal; he’s just stopped focusing on his cock and started refining his craft.

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Origin’s continued exploration of religion and alienation feature lyrics more sophisticated than anything in Awoo. And though the analogies have become more universal and less overtly sexual, they’re just as brutal and confessional as in the first two albums. Origin:Orphan’s titular track has Gibb wondering if he’s just as whorish as the whores that created him; “Kingdom Come” ponders whether waiting for a lover makes you a saint or a slave; and “The Colour Of A Man” compares stoic men to ash-colored statues deadening everything they touch. Whether you’ve dated an emotionally absent lover or have been one yourself, each song implicates listeners from both sides of the bed.

Most impressive is how confidently Origin surpasses the guitar-centric compositions of Smell and Mississauga by realizing the full emotional potential of drums, horns, and electrical instruments in grand orchestral arrangements.

In the past, their concerts have featured ninja-masked go-go boys doing interpretive stripping, graveyard zombies banging their bones in an instrumental interlude, and energetic dancers handing out lollipops to the audience. The band also used to perform in porn theaters, art galleries, and abandoned churches in North America and Europe.

In retrospect, Awoo sounds like the experimental precursor that helped Gibb hone tighter, more resonant productions with larger live performances in mind. The album still features the band’s trademark playful rock ditties like “In The NA” and “The Little Bit,” with Gibbs vocal exuberance and complex arrangements yielding many satisfying surprises; although “Do I Belong?” and “Underage” sound adolescent and underdeveloped compared to the album’s other chamber pop gems. And while’s it a rewarding listen, Origin:Orphan’s 1980’s pastiche is neither pointedly gay nor revolutionary.

What is revolutionary, though, is Gibb’s overall approach to making music. He first began creating The Hidden Cameras’ songs without any formal training on a four-track that he learned to use in 20 minutes. Since then, he’s written, scored, and produced every Hidden Cameras song, designed their CD covers, directed their videos, chosen venues, promoted shows, and designed staging. The band’s name refers to the ever-watchful eyes inside our own heads that discourage self-expression, and Gibb’s independent handling of the band has allowed him to dismantle his own hidden camera and really push his own capacity for emotional honesty. He acknowledges that each fan appreciates different aspects of the music and his live performances encourage each to rejoice in the aspects they love most.

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Gibb loves it most when fans offer to take part in their shows. In the past, their concerts have featured ninja-masked go-go boys doing interpretive stripping, graveyard zombies banging their bones in an instrumental interlude, and energetic dancers handing out lollipops to the audience. The band also used to perform in porn theaters, art galleries, and abandoned churches in North America and Europe. Though they’ve moved to more upscale digs, they still play the occasional soccer field and always try to utilize local creative resources. As a result, each show becomes a unique celebration—Gibb says, “the things that make live music worthwhile.” So it seems a natural extension of this collaborative impulse that’s compelled Gibb to start developing Origin:Orphan’s music into a Berlin theatrical music production. It’ll provide a community of artists and art lovers with the opportunity to explore the theme of “the universal orphan” alongside Gibb in an international context.

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But no matter how sunny and inviting Gibb’s revolution seems, as with any revolution, a white hot undercurrent of discontent runs through it. His second album concludes with the title track “Mississauga Goddam,” a nod to Nina Simone’s 1964 protest song “Mississippi Goddam.” Though Simone’s song sounds like a show tune, she wrote in response to the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and in opposition to those who said civil rights activists should work more slowly. In it she sings, “Picket lines, school boycotts/ they try to say it’s a Communist plot / all I want is equality for my sister my brother my people and me… Do things gradually… bring more tragedy.”

Gibbs’ song (named after the Toronto suburb where he grew up) is one of The Hidden Cameras’ angriest yet most melancholy tracks of all time. For him, the real tragedy isn’t murder, but that his community values sameness as a way of life. Gibb sings, “Mississauga people carry the weight of common evil / and go about their lives / with a whisper and a whine… I’ll be wearing my disguise / Until I lead my life from Mississauga goddam.”

Gibb returned to his hometown to play Toronto Pride in 2008. When interviewed beforehand about his pointed gay content, Gibb said, “It’s just a matter of being who you are and just being natural about these things. If you’re a songwriter of course you have to have politics. Your identity that can be political, just representing that.”

Gibb used his sexuality as a defiant identity in his first two albums. After a childhood being told we’re different, it’s no wonder that some of us want to rip that system apart and force itself to look at its orphans. But his multimedia collaborations reveal the multitude of ways we can challenge that system, not just sexually, but with every inch of our creative being.

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