{"id":73894,"date":"2016-05-23T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2016-05-23T11:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=73894"},"modified":"2016-05-20T17:27:31","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T16:27:31","slug":"cruel-optimism-the-daunting-ambition-of-anohni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/cruel-optimism-the-daunting-ambition-of-anohni\/","title":{"rendered":"Cruel Optimism – The Daunting Ambition of Anohni"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"At<\/a>

At times, Anohni\u2019s new album feels like an attempt to break up with America. Credit Illustration by Rune Fisker<\/p><\/div>\n

2 May 2016 – <\/em>The strangest thing about \u201cDrone Bomb Me,\u201d the first track on Anohni\u2019s d\u00e9but solo album, \u201cHopelessness,\u201d isn\u2019t the fact that it\u2019s written from the perspective of a young Afghan girl, looking up at the sky, waiting for death. \u201cBlow me from the side of the mountain\u00a0\/\u00a0Blow my head off,\u201d Anohni sings, in a quivering falsetto, searching out the drone\u2019s camera eye. The strangest thing is that the song is a seduction: with its triumphant fanfare of synths and cavernous drops, it\u2019s a slow jam. There\u2019s a relationship here, albeit a perverse and destructive one. As the girl awaits her executioner, she scrambles our sense of who\u2019s zooming in on whom. \u201cLet me be the one,\u201d she sings, part dare and part demand. \u201cThe one that you choose from above.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fatalism has always been a part of Anohni\u2019s work, though until now this sense of melancholy was directed inward. During the aughts, Anohni, who is transgender, performed under her birth name, Antony Hegarty, as the lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons. The group made earnest and enchanting music, a kind of restrained, baroque pop built around Anohni\u2019s voice, an instrument that, like that of her sometime collaborator Bj\u00f6rk, is impossible to forget, a sublime wonder that calls to mind Boy George, Nina Simone, and what I imagine a radiant, healing crystal sounds like. On albums such as \u201cI Am a Bird Now,\u201d which won the 2005 Mercury Prize, Antony and the Johnsons sang songs of resignation, fear, and loneliness, dreaming all the while of a free and fluid future.<\/p>\n

Throughout her career, Anohni has sought out a range of collaborators, from Lou Reed to the New York dance-music group Hercules and Love Affair, for whom she played the role of the pensive disco diva. She even worked with the E.D.M. titan Skrillex, though that music was never released. Anohni recently told the Web site Pitchfork that it was during her sessions with Skrillex that she began wondering if she could fit heavy ideas into \u201cplastic\u201d pop tunes. She decided to make a dance record, collaborating with Hudson Mohawke, the Scottish producer and d.j., who is known for his abrasively textured approach to beat-making, and the American experimental musician Oneohtrix Point Never, who specializes in uncanny, analog, synth-driven soundscapes. \u201cHopelessness,\u201d the resulting album, is no less vulnerable than her previous records. Its sense of fragility, however, is situated not between soul mates but between citizen and state. \u201cDaddy, Daddy,\u201d Anohni sings, over a voluptuous synth line, on \u201cWatch Me.\u201d \u201cI know you love me\u00a0\/\u00a0\u2019Cause you\u2019re always watching me.\u201d It may be the most erotic song ever written about the surveillance state, as she addresses a government that tracks her every move, from city to city and from Web site to Web site.<\/p>\n

At times, \u201cHopelessness\u201d feels like an attempt to break up with America, to quit a way of life. (Though Anohni was born in the U.K., she grew up in California.) \u201cYou left me lying in the street\u00a0\/\u00a0You left me without body heat,\u201d she sings, on the flickering \u201cI Don\u2019t Love You Anymore.\u201d On \u201cObama,\u201d she twists and strains her voice until it approaches an ugliness that matches her words: \u201cAll the hope drained from your face,\u201d she mutters. \u201cLike children we believed.\u201d The majestic soar and gruff synths of \u201c4 Degrees\u201d recalls Hudson Mohawke\u2019s production work for Kanye West. But unlike West, who revels in hubris and swagger, Anohni uses the occasion to offer a lament for an overheating planet, sarcastically pantomiming the logical end of climate-change denialism: \u201cI want to burn the sky, I want to burn the breeze\u00a0\/\u00a0I want to see the animals die in the trees.\u201d Her interest in environmental issues is not new; it cohered on \u201cThe Crying Light\u201d (2009), which interspersed a search for inner peace with elegies to a vanishing landscape. Earlier this year, \u201cManta Ray,\u201d her contribution to the soundtrack of \u201cRacing Extinction,\u201d a film about man\u2019s role in the disappearance of species, received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. The composition employed lush, intimate arrangements to warn of ecological disaster, with Anohni\u2019s vocals giving an illusion of control. The drama of \u201cHopelessness,\u201d by contrast, comes from listening to her rage against chaos and club escapism. It\u2019s a backdrop that feels aggressive and more overtly man-made.<\/p>\n

We often think of protest music in terms of its capacity to mobilize people to respond to a crisis. After all, it is the collective imagination of the listeners that turns a piece of music into politics: think of Kendrick Lamar\u2019s \u201cAlright,\u201d a song of buoyant defiance that took on a new life once it was adopted as an unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement. As I listened to Anohni\u2019s songs about melting ice caps, the death penalty, and Guant\u00e1namo, I kept thinking that the daunting scale of their ambition verged on the ridiculous. How do you focus on such a sweeping panorama of despair? At whom do we direct our outrage? It\u2019s hard to take in so much of the world without its becoming an abstraction. Last month, the British singer P. J. Harvey released \u201cThe Hope Six Demolition Project,\u201d an album based on her travels to the most blighted regions of Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington, D.C. Some critics saw this well-intentioned album as na\u00efve and voyeuristic. This reflects the challenges of creating art that draws not from lived experience but from empathy, a problem that is present in Anohni\u2019s work as well.<\/p>\n

And yet: there were moments when I believed that the otherworldly glow of Anohni\u2019s singing was what our collective consciousness must sound like\u2014that the divine possibilities of her voice were more persuasive than the bluntness of her language. While listening to \u201cHopelessness,\u201d I thought about the concept of \u201cslow violence,\u201d the theorist Rob Nixon\u2019s term for threats that unravel gradually, with a nearly imperceptible rhythm, like deforestation or an oil spill\u2014dangers that can\u2019t be conveyed in a single image.<\/p>\n

For Anohni, the evils that surround us are ambient, the products of inertia and indifference. Maybe the most devastating threat is the one we see in the mirror. In the end, \u201cHopelessness\u201d is about her collusion in all that she assails. \u201cHow did I become a virus?\u201d she asks on the title track. As a firecracker-like drum pattern rises through the song, she confesses, \u201cI\u2019ve been taking more than I deserve\u00a0\/\u00a0Leaving nothing in reserve\u00a0\/\u00a0Digging till the bank runs dry\u00a0\/\u00a0I\u2019ve been living a lie.\u201d It\u2019s the closest that \u201cHopelessness\u201d comes to a reckoning. It\u2019s not quite guilt, which suggests the possibility of finding a different way of being.<\/p>\n

Listening to the album over and over never complicated my pre\u00ebxisting opinions about American exceptionalism, Obama\u2019s drone policy, or ecological disaster. I\u2019d be surprised if anyone who is drawn to Anohni\u2019s music would need to be swayed on any of these issues.<\/p>\n

But \u201cHopelessness\u201d does not live down to its naysaying title. As I fell deeper under the spell of Anohni\u2019s voice, I forgot about the logistics of creating a better world, and began thinking about what I demand from art, why I had scoffed at the grand premise of this album. Why doesn\u2019t more art aspire to do something that seems impossible? \u201cHopelessness\u201d won\u2019t turn back history or undo politics\u2014that would be a foolish presumption. But, like the most powerful music, it reminds us of the importance of dignity, integrity, and imagination. The world Anohni describes on \u201cHopelessness\u201d is unrelentingly awful; it is our world. But at the center of it is a transcendent voice singing against heavy machinery, daring you to listen to the words coming out of your own mouth.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Hua Hsu is a contributor to <\/em>The New Yorker<\/em> and newyorker.com. His first book, <\/em>A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2016.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newyorker.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The strangest thing about \u201cDrone Bomb Me,\u201d the first track on Anohni\u2019s d\u00e9but solo album, \u201cHopelessness,\u201d isn\u2019t the fact that it\u2019s written from the perspective of a young Afghan girl, looking up at the sky, waiting for death\u2026 As the girl awaits her executioner, she scrambles our sense of who\u2019s zooming in on whom. \u201cLet me be the one,\u201d she sings, part dare and part demand. \u201cThe one that you choose from above.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[141],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}