‘Short King’: Decoding Alex Cameron’s brazen attack of vertically challenged males
Australian art-pop provocateur Alex Cameron is a shapeshifting enigma who often blurs the line between parody and sincerity in his art. He’s a man of many different guises, whether that’s a Bryan Ferry impersonator or a washed-up pop star forgotten by everyone outside the music industry, while himself being a dashingly good-looking six-foot-four guy.
The last point might come across as somewhat irrelevant, but being blessed with both attractiveness and the height to match it normally brings a confidence in men that some might perceive as arrogance, so for Cameron to have recently re-emerged from a three-year slumber with the song ‘Short King’, where he enters into a diatribe about his various grievances with the diminutive males of our society, feels somewhat rich coming from someone who has all of the traits that one might label as ‘classically handsome’.
While it’s normally used as a backhanded compliment, and I’ve been called a ‘short king’ on many occasions, I’ve also been called plenty of pejorative alternatives to this in my time, too. Replace ‘king’ with any foul-mouthed four-letter word of your choice, and you get an idea of the stick I’ve had to reckon with. I’ve had to spend all my life coming to terms with the fact that my height is an easy punchline for pointing out a supposed flaw in my genetic makeup, and while the name-calling used to bother me when I was little(r), I can’t possibly get riled up by a song like ‘Short King’.
At a measly 5’5”, which I’ve been told is a generous estimate by my peers, I find myself as the accidental target of Cameron’s ire throughout the song. However, rather than directly taking his rage out on someone who is a fraction of his size, he’s wallowing in a sense of self-pity because the object of his desire has been taken from him by a man he towers over. “Somebody come get her, she’s in love with a short king / That boy is under 5’9”, the opening lines seethe, before he bemoans how he’s constantly “ducking through doorways” and “angry all the time”.
He continues to get frustrated by a short man emerging victorious over him in a battle of love, with some of the lyrics becoming even more ludicrous than the last. A personal favourite is: “You won’t even give me a chance / And these short motherfuckers, oh man they can dance”, because first of all, it comes across as so comically petulant and insecure, creating an inversion of the supposed ‘small man syndrome’, whereby all little guys get easily wound up, and second of all, it isn’t remotely true. I don’t want to speak on behalf of the entire short community, but not all of us have moves.
So, why am I not vexed by this mockery of men of a smaller stature? If it wasn’t already evident from the excessive self-loathing, twinned with Cameron’s history of singing songs from the perspective of unsavoury characters, ‘Short King’ is a satire that pokes fun at toxic masculinity, highlighting the stupidity of a fully-grown man who gets jealous because of some stubby-legged lad. He’s the butt of the joke in this instance, and rather than pitying him, we’re meant to snigger at how uptight he is.
Cameron isn’t the first to make a satirical jab at his dislike for vertically challenged blokes in the form of a song, and if you want to hear an even more cutting series of remarks about the ‘tiddler’s plight’, look no further than Randy Newman’s ‘Short People’. Unlike Newman, Cameron isn’t spewing slanderous mistruths such as “short people got no reason to live” and “you got to pick ‘em up just to say hello”, which, for the record, you should never do. What Cameron’s character is doing is grappling with his own reverse-Napoleon complex, coming to the realisation that he feels threatened by a short man, and is taking his anger out on himself.
In reality, there is no victor in the battle between the short and tall men of the world. If you’re seeing a difference in height as a marker of superiority or inferiority, you’re no better of a man than the protagonist of the song that Cameron adopts the persona of. I doubt that he actually harbours any ill will towards us short folk, but if he does, and the joke’s gone over my head, you better believe I’ll come back swinging below the belt.
