Yahtzee Croshaw, the video game critic behind Zero Punctuation, once described making content for YouTube as “throwing messages in bottles out into a churning sea made up entirely of messages in bottles.” That was back in 2007, when YouTube was only two years old; since then, the sea has become an entire water planet. In his case, his bottle washed ashore in the right place, and he’s enjoyed a successful career giving deadpan, hyper-profane takes on popular games. But the vast majority of bottles never get opened: there are simply too many of them, and making them is too time-consuming. Some people throw out one or two bottles and move on to something else; others have been throwing out bottles for years, still hoping that they’ll be discovered.
The Internet on the whole is filled with obscure content: YouTube channels with single-digit subscriber counts, podcasts with one or two episodes, blogs that haven’t updated since 2015. Success stories come down to a mixture of incredible luck and sheer, stubborn persistence. It’s easy to understand why so many people give up before they reach that point: it’s disheartening to feel like you’re shouting into a void. I’ve actually achieved modest success as a content creator, and I still feel like nobody’s really listening to me.
The plight of the anonymous content creator is exactly the sort of thing Alex Cameron would write a song about. The Australian singer-songwriter has become a cult figure by making seedy, dingy retro pop about complete screw-ups, ranging from hapless losers to Tim Robinson-level pieces of shit. The protagonist of “Best Life,” an earnest yet frustrated creator on the Internet, is undeniably a screw-up, and Cameron highlights how fundamentally inarticulate he is: “there’s nothing like the feeling/when you finally do a thing/or just wake up like this/like, what even is life?” What, indeed.
But while it’s clear why he hasn’t been getting many followers, Cameron takes a gentler approach on “Best Life” than some of his other songs. A smart satirist knows exactly how much venom is required for a given subject, and Cameron understands that the protagonist deserves a more sympathetic approach than, say, a porn addict who lusts after his stepdaughter. When he sings “am I really just not for some people?” on the chorus, it’s relatable to anyone who’s been stung by someone’s benign indifference.
Even though the narrator is dissatisfied with his place in the world, “Best Life” isn’t a total lament. The music is a sweet, chiming piece of 80s-esque synthpop, and while Cameron has often given miserable lyrics happy tunes there still seems to be a note of hope here. The narrator is unhappy, but he’s not about to let it show to anyone but him and his girlfriend. He tells her that, when someone asks what he’s doing, she should respond and say that he’s “living his best life.” It’s obvious that this request is borne of his own insecurity, but I wonder if there’s more truth to it than he might think. He is, after all, otherwise happy with his life, and he seems to love his girlfriend sincerely. With an adjustment of his expectations regarding content creation, he might end up living his best life after all.
