The cover of My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, the latest album by ANOHNI and the Johnsons, features a soft-focused black-and-white photograph of transgender activist Marsha P Johnson looking effortlessly glamorous. Her gaze is disarming. Her smile puts you at ease.
Cover stars on previous ANOHNI albums have included Andy Warhol starlet Candy Darling and the Japanese Butoh dancer Kazuo Ôno, so I asked the musician over Zoom why she decided to feature Johnson on her latest release. “My band is named after Marsha P. Johnson,” she tells me bluntly. For a moment, I feel a bit under-researched, especially for a longtime fan of her work. But she kindly elaborates, “When I was young, I thought of Marsha as the most American story. She was the dream of America. She was Jesus as a girl. She was the transcendence of America. She became a blessing over my work.”
My basic introductory question becomes an impromptu LGBTQ+ history lesson delivered by one of our most beloved contemporary queer musicians. ANOHNI tells me about why Marsha chose the surname Johnson, the creation of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, the activism of Sylvia Rivera and, perhaps most powerfully, the time ANOHNI met Marsha P. Johnson during Pride in 1992, shortly before the icon passed away. (“I met her at Pride. And at that point, I knew exactly who she was. I was looking for a family. I was looking for a place where I belonged.”) My head buzzes with visions of the early ’90s New York City in which Anohni began her journey as a musician, performance and visual artist — a world in which the joy of connection was counterposed with the turmoil and tragedy of the AIDS crisis. It’s these stories that Anohni wants to proliferate through her work, ensuring that the revolutionaries who inspired her are not lost to time.
“We don’t have a history,” she says. “We don’t have legacies of ancestry or beautiful cultural paths that were cut by our predecessors, laying groundwork for each new generation to emerge from.”
The stunning and heartbreaking My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross reflects on the current hostile landscape for queer people in America, and the crises facing the planet more broadly, managing to be unabashedly political and excruciatingly personal all at once. On the standout track “Why Am I Alive Now?” which is accompanied by a music video directed by Hunter Schafer, ANOHNI tackles our collective environmental distress. The breezy R&B-tinged track is breathtaking, with lyrics about looking for places to hide as the earth crumbles around us. The record balances beauty and catastrophe with moments of devastation, tales of violence, and songs about the loss of loved ones, all of them crafted with a restrained sonic palette.
Though ANOHNI does not consider songwriting itself activism, she tells me with moving urgency that she considers it to be a way of “not giving up.” Through that lens, the titular question posed by “Why Am I Alive Now?” is not an inconsolable wail to the heavens, but an impetus for action.
“We can more easily imagine the collapse of the biosphere than a shift in systems of governance towards more feminine systems,” ANOHNI tells me. “The patriarchy can more easily imagine a fulfillment of apocalyptic fantasies that they wrote about in their religions, that they shove down our throats for 2000 years while burning us at the stake.”
And with that pronouncement, I feel less like I’m conducting an interview and more like I’m being infused with a sort of energized serenity, empowered to slough off hopelessness and challenge power structures. “Bring this feeling to the other babies, because everyone’s in the same boat,” she tells me as I start to well up. “Let’s proliferate this feeling.”
Below, ANOHNI speaks with Them about advocating for the girls, laughter as medicine, and our connection to Mother Earth.
Do you feel like your songwriting is a form of activism?
I think that all of us living our lives in the face of forces that wish the worst for us are doing activism. Staying present and walking with dignity through fields of people who wish the worst for you is showing up. I don’t know if it’s really political activism, but it’s certainly active, let’s put it that way. It’s not giving up, it’s not hiding from the sun.
The situation has gotten so extreme. Most people are in survival strategies trying to figure out how to navigate the system, let alone how to change the system. Collectively, it’s very challenging for us to take the time necessary to ask ourselves, “How can we really meaningfully deeply change this system that we’re working within in order that it become a more life-giving river for us moving into the future?”
That reminds me of the track “Why Am I Alive Now?.” It touches on those fears and the sadness of impending doom on our planet. “Why am I alive?” could be a cry of sorrow, but I feel like it’s really about asking for a plan of action: “Why am I alive? What am I supposed to do?”
I agree with you. That song was so central to me; it’s the heart of the album. It’s about not pushing away the feelings, because this is a time for grieving. This is a time of great falling. This is a time of vanishing, where nature is suffering. We’re not wrong when we feel that way. When we feel bad when we look outside, or we read the newspaper, or we just intuit that something’s not right, it’s because something’s not right.
Things are really out of balance in a way that they’ve never been in the history of our species. What we’re intuiting is the feeling of the earth herself. It’s not hard to imagine that our bodies are part of a bigger organism here and that she is in a stress position right now. We’re all made of the same materials; there’s something almost elemental happening in our bodies that would attune us to the fact that there’s something wrong. It’s called a gut instinct. It’s called intuition. It’s called feeling. But we’re in a society that has systematically subjugated those three things in order to push [us] forward into continued compliance, into consumerism that’s hurting us.
I have a right as a feminine person to have feelings. And my feelings are not grounds for being disqualified from a conversation of reason. That feeling should be a central aspect of a reasoning strategy. But in patriarchy, feeling, and intuition, and gut reactions— those things are discarded, or are used as grounds for disqualification from those conversations. Just as women have always been ushered away from circles of governance, because they’re too “hysterical,” or because they’re too feeling-full. But actually, we now that actually [feeling and sensing] were the biggest form of checks and balances that were built into our bodies. You don’t invent nuclear bombs while your heart is open and you’re full of intuition and feeling.
I relate so much to that, because I’ve always felt like, "Oh my God, I’m too much.”
Because you’re a queen. And, we all feel that way. We’re raised to believe we’re too much, because we’re feeling-full, we have too much empathy with the feminine aspect, and that’s grounds for disqualification from seats of power.
There is a lot of anger on this album with some strong and at times violent language. Can you speak to those aspects of the lyrics?
If I was exaggerating, it would be one thing. But I’m not exaggerating. What I’m describing is the current condition of many human relations. I’m describing life on life’s terms right now. They call it a culture war. But actually it’s a genocidal, sadistic impulse to exterminate or to extinguish groups of people that they’ve been erasing for literally thousands of years.
There’s a reason why every mother, every generation says, “Well, I didn’t even know that gay people existed. I didn’t know we could give birth to trans people.” It’s because the trauma of erasure and genocide against those bodies has been so profound and consistent in the supposedly Western world for so many centuries that we have a genetic knee-jerk reaction to it of self-erasure. It’s an ahistorical point of view.
We don’t have a history. We don’t have legacies of ancestry or beautiful cultural paths that were cut by our predecessors that lay groundwork for each new generation to emerge from. There’s no space in the imagination of the culture. Even now, when I go into a hotel and I’m misgendered, on one hand, it strikes me on a personal level, but then I realized recently that the reason that they’re saying it like that to me is because there’s no space. They literally can’t imagine that I exist.
I wanted to ask about “Sliver of Ice,” a song that is about appreciating something as basic as the taste of water. Facing our truly unknown ecological future, there might be a time we look back and say, "Why didn’t we enjoy these simple things we took for granted?" I don’t know if I hit that at all on the mark…
I think it’s a beautiful interpretation of it. I really do. I wrote that song about a specific friend of mine and something that he had said to me as he was dying, but effectively, he was saying what you’re saying, which was, “Why didn’t I understand this ecstatic experience of living before I was closer to the end of losing this experience of living?” That was what I was trying to document in that song. It’s like he was saying, “It was this rapturous feeling to touch the coldness of the water to my tongue. And it reminded me that I was alive.” He was very embodied in the miracle of living.
I like this song because your album is not just about the negative. There is still joy to be had. I just feel like there’s a glimmer of hope for us still.
I wanted to say this earlier, but the music on the album is full of unfurling beauty. And so is this landscape that is still there. She’s still feeding us. This life isn’t finished. This is still a world of proliferating creativity, and it’s her world, it’s her body. And we are a part of this. For me, the challenge in this record is to be able to find the adult resilience and the strength to be able to hold space for what’s really happening ,and also to continue to be effective and access the whole spectrum of living.
I think one of the biggest gifts that queens have is we are joy magicians. We’ve been bringing that to people for thousands of years, dancing, twirling since we were babies, we twirled for our mothers. We bring delight. We saw the colors more brightly than our brothers and sisters, we were more willing to express it. The dazzle of mystery that was in our eyes as children, [and] the eagerness to explore — that’s all a part of the birthright of being a queen. That’s the same for queens in every single culture. That’s a magical, innate aspect of the specific gender-variant manifestation of the child who is a queen. That laughter, those explosions of joy that we have with each other — that’s medicine. Part of our work as nurses of this culture that’s dying on the vine, this society is to administer medicine. I’m not against joy at all. In fact, laughter is a lifeline for me.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross is available now from Secretly Canadian & Rough Trade.
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