I read a profile the other night about a woman living in London and working as a cam girl. She had previously worked in health care and recruiting but had to quit due to mental health reasons. Within a few months of leaving her salaried job, she found herself behind on rent and other bills with few options. So she started camming.
According to the quotes provided in the article, she now makes around £150k ($207,966.75) a year, sets her own hours, goes on vacation to Continental Europe when she feels like it, and is already planning for retirement. She also no longer suffers the mental health issues that forced her to exit her office job. It kind of makes you think about what the fuck you're doing with your own life, doesn't it? Two significant takeaways from the profile that I think are worth noting: 1) Her mental health issues were the result of the conditions and pressures of a "normal" work environment, and 2) Camming (at least in the way the woman profiled was doing it) is less exploitative than her traditional 9-5, evidenced by both her improved mental health and the drastically increased take-home pay.
I think most people intuit that the jobs they are forced to take in order to earn money to live are only slightly preferable to the alternative, ie dying. I think this is why so many people try to make art their livelihood, or at least why the appeal of doing is so widespread. It's a way of doing meaningful work that isn't exploitative. It's a way of rending some semblance of control from the systems that run roughshod over you. There is a potential to earn more as an artist of some kind than in more traditional careers (if you're lucky). It's also a potential route towards doing work that you find fulfilling and don't mind staking your identity on. This flight from exploitation takes many forms. Whether it is painting, writing (yo!), camming, or... DJing!
DJ Camgirl is Georgian producer Jeff Cardinal rolls out his second album and Doom Trip release with the amusingly titled CANNON /Problems. Jeff seems to approach house and drum and bass with the same anarchic zeal as a breakcore producer- recklessly clashing beats and textures together to render new, beautiful, bastardization forms. This is definitely house music, but only after a fashion. One in which baselines are shot through an ethernet cable to spin like a cat on fire around a corrupted hard drive before being spit back out into the lobby sound system at a body hacker convention. Cool synths cross-firing with bratty circuit board power serges, shattering along with flash-frozen beats and aggressively imploding lines of nightclub-esque grooves, and rippling over a shivering cleave of body rotating, piston hip powering dance catalysts. Animating current of inhibition annihilating percussion shot through with enough licks of flavorful contra-melodies it will make you think you're skiing down the crystalline circumference of an enormous bubblegum flavored snowcone. This is soft-lipped, hard-biting electronic music deserving of the name techno in the most honorable sense in which that term can be applied.
You can get a copy of CANNON / Problems from Doom Trip Records here.
