ANOHNI: Activist Instinct
In ANOHNI’s dreams, there is no perceptible trace of benevolent aspiration. The world is burning, and the view from all slants is unsightly.
ANOHNI’s porcelain beauty, pictured above. Promotional image used in circulation for her 2024 ‘It’s Time To Feel What’s Really Happening’ Tour. Courtesy of Rebis Music. Image available via Factory International. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
“Why am I part of a species that seeks to destroy its own home?” – ANOHNI, in dialogue with GLOR1A for The Travel Almanac
As Earth’s green turns ashen, chemtrails surge across Her porous skies (a telltale sign that our membrane with the cosmos is wearing ever thinner), ANOHNI’s sonic dialogues depict widespread truancy from our most urgent, corporeal post, remaining complicit in the face of crisis. The effect is potent across the Mercury Prize winner’s most recent, politically spurred full-length projects—2016’s HOPELESSNESS and 2023’s My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross—but it has long subsisted, the work conducted more than just musical in throughline.
British-born and New York-found, with brief interludes of settlement in Amsterdam and San Francisco, ANOHNI’s well-traveled, origin-of-no-place-yet-indomitably-everywhere transatlanticism is probably why she feels everything earthen that more deeply. Call it an allegiance of necessity to the manifold, having to assert oneself in all those wondrous in-between spaces where the natural world flourishes in order to get by. ANOHNI has thus scrapbooked more than a lifetime of material, abetting her bleak but impassioned performance, its subjects degrading under the grip of Abrahamic, patriarchal belief systems.
In ‘80s San Fran, this was defined by a penchant for Wicca and wanderlust, unearthing beauty in the dense detritus of the canopy floor, finding transcendental oneness in all the lofty, imposing stature of a since-seared redwood tree. However, for ‘90s New York, swept up in stagnation to reform and the systematic besmirching of queer and ethnic minority identities—erased by legislation as much as the HIV/AIDs epidemic—the environment was starkly different for ANOHNI, though equally formative to the essence of her artistic vitality. For it is the same source who perpetrates characteristically inhumane atrocities against nature and its living denizens in the name of what’s deemed “natural” under warped governmental and theological dogma, and the very entity who saturates ANOHNI’s unfiltered visions: we, the apathetic, aggravated spring of fire, fanning persecution.
It was also a dream that brought the young ANOHNI to the bright lights of the Big Apple in the first place, albeit one less grafted by the biting truths that proliferate her current lyricism. At this point, it should be noted though that it is not that these expository insights had not been learned; ANOHNI maintains that you cannot inherit a transfeminine state of being without knowing the perils of evading detection nor the likelihood of subsequent expulsion (or, in severity, overt hostility) should one be outed. At the cusp of a queer America embracing its stalwart presence, it was still more about crafting the “right level of existence”: not enough to kill the soul, but sufficient to tamper it. Luckily, for ANOHNI, and unfortunately unlike many youth, this was not strife of the individual, for she soon found like-minded peers in performance artists Johanna Constantine, Psychotic Eve, Julia Yasuda, and Lily of the Valley beyond the bounds of her studies at NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing. When you don’t see yourself represented, you have to make it so.
In fact, ANOHNI’s extracurricular activities arguably warranted more utility for the budding musician than the credentials of her degree, staging theatrical post-modernist productions as part of the Blacklips, to the tune of original music. The troupe was a self-admitted ‘queer performance art cult’ indebted to the Bloolips name, who themselves had taken off across the pond a decade and then-some earlier as a drag cabaret. What Blacklips brought to NY was a morbid, gothwave inflection, inferred in their mouths’ shadowing, far removed from the bleach-set coruscant locks that now frame the face of the ANOHNI we know. It was raw, real, and ragged around the edges, and their notable few only grew in roster, enlisting the likes of icon Amanda Lepore and even RuPaul—in one instance—to stage grave matters of the Rapture. Eventually, the Blacklips became the Johnsons as an ode to the late and great trailblazing Marsha P. Johnson, cemented in perpetuity for her instrumental role in spearheading the Stonewall Riots of 1969, fighting for LGBTQ+ liberation. Many of the songs produced at this time ended up categorically forming part of 2005’s highly acclaimed, sophomore studio album I Am A Bird Now, catapulting ANOHNI’s career from the underground into the masses, all under an unabashedly trans insignia—of remonstrance against disenfranchisement and ecological devastation.
Hers is an ethos that is truly unmatched, offset to disrupt, and she certainly possesses the might in vox to project it too, finessing the power had in tears and vulnerability. It has been so deeply arresting as to invite the adoration and collaborations of other talented onlookers, including Lou Reed, Björk, Marina Abramović, Jimmy Scott, and Boy George (to name a limited few). In sweeping generality, using light and dark analogies, her utterances oft provide a foil to the utopian ideal, adopting the outlook of the hardened oppressor in all their denial and baseness on tracks like ‘Scapegoat’ and ‘4 DEGREES’. It is barbarism at its finest, congenital, and ANOHNI gives it voice, vicariously assuming this role not out of empathy, but in reckoning how our willful ignorance is too often mistaken for passivity. In juxtaposition, she just as easily becomes our celestial Mother planet in all her mourning, and the witness she fears she is in it all, portraying the climate crisis’ most liminal effect on the latest single ‘Breaking’—the loss of birdsong.
The story is played out by now, but it seems we are in for the long haul: and it must change. Social reform has been transfixed by the inflammation of the human condition, and it is a sorry, sordid state of emergency we find ourselves in. These are but not dreams; they are our reality, and ANOHNI cannot escape. She embodies the toll of pent-up vitriol, and the soulful weight of her voice provides countenance for liberation—a sounding gong that, at the same time, eschews hope in all senses. By making complacency salient, she says something about the long-petered rhythms we so easily slip into. She is the mouthpiece of a tired generation, who sees a bright future in the hands of the next, such as Hunter Schafer, Munroe Bergdorf, and Juliana Huxtable.
