Anohni Talks Protest-Minded Pop, Identity Politics, Oscar Boycott
Beyoncé’s sixth LP made a seismic cultural impact, but she hasn’t cornered the market on soulful, sweeping, politically minded pop in 2016. Just two weeks after the release of Lemonade came Hopelessness, the superb solo debut from Anohni. It too is an album about loss, betrayal and destruction, a towering work fueled by unbridled rage and staggering vocals. However, on Hopelessness the stakes are much higher. In Anohni’s disturbing tales of drone warfare, dying animals and government surveillance, the darkest possible outcome is not the disintegration of a marriage, or even the deterioration of a nation plagued by bigotry. It is the collapse of entire ecosystems.
During the past decade, Anohni has become increasingly fixated on our relationship with the environment. In 2005, the England-born, California-raised trans singer-songwriter – then performing as Antony Hegarty – released I Am a Bird Now, her Mercury Prize-winning album with her group Antony and the Johnsons. The LP’s final track, “Bird Gerhl,” was an elegant metaphor in which its narrator compares transitioning to finding her wings and finally taking flight. This past January, the artist was nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar for “Manta Ray,” a piano-led lament she contributed to the documentary Racing Extinction.
“In the past I’ve worked a lot with sadness and shied away from anger,” Anohni said when we spoke for Out in March. “But I’m still alive, and there’s still work to be done, and I just wanted to do it as vigorously as I could.” So for Hopelessness she enlisted Scottish DJ-producer Hudson Mohawke (who’s supplied beats for Kanye West and Drake) and electronic experimentalist Oneohtrix Point Never to construct a massive, melodic framework that lends her poignant protest pop a necessary urgency. She spoke about tackling global issues, boycotting the Oscars and what it means to be trans in 2016.
Hopelessness marks a shift in style for you. Why the choice to represent the album’s weighty subject matter through electronic music?
I’ve created a body of work that is mostly symphonic. It has a pastoral tone to it. Continuing to choose that old aesthetic felt kind of … passive.
What made you decide to work with Hudson Mohawke?
Hudson sent me a bunch of his tracks, which are really anthemic and celebratory, but it seemed like the perfect way to express some of these very challenging ideas. Honestly, it scared me to articulate some of this stuff. It felt counterintuitive, much less safe, like I was using my voice in a very different way. People that know my music tend to rely on my voice as a source of comfort. This album was me not only making a series of indictments of our world, but also dealing with my own complicity as a participant in this prevailing consumer culture we’re all enmeshed in.