As more queer and trans artists are launching solo careers in the music industry, Brooklyn rapper and FOR THE GWORLS founder Asanni Armon has instead banded together with friends to launch a Black and brown trans music collective called Siren. The six members of the band — Asanni Armon, s.e.r, Demi Vee, PHARAOH RAPTURE, WHATSGOOD!, and SunChild — have been close friends for almost five years, having met at the closing party for the queer Brooklyn nightclub Spectrum. After originally trying to start a trans record label with each artist pursuing their own music careers, they eventually decided to work together, and they just released their debut project, THE GREAT OFFERING: VENUS UNDERWATER last month. “It was exciting to think of a planet like Venus that is largely comprised of hot gasses and hot rock being introduced to something cooling like water, and using that as a metaphor for improving relationships,” Armon said.
The project features each of the musicians taking the lead on a collaborative song, embodying a different phase of love, and giving their own creative interpretations of a love song. Some rap over fast ballroom beats, others have electronic pop-punk sensibilities, some have a more classic trap rap style, and others sing melodies and deliver smooth rhymes over Blood Orange-esque airy alt R&B tracks. But the whole thing is weaved together by a mystical afrofuturist world they build out in the interludes voiced partly by actress Sis Thee Doll who you might know from American Horror Story or Oklahoma on Broadway.
In a world where trans musicians struggle to avoid being pigeonholed, downplayed, or trapped in predatory record deals, Siren hopes to pave a new way. Them caught up with five members of the group to learn more about the themes behind GREAT OFFERING and the group's goals for its new endeavor.
How did this group come to be?
Asanni Armon: Myles [aka PHARAOH RAPTURE] had the idea for us to become a group together.
PHARAOH RAPTURE: I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, we're having these complete sonic artistic expressions individually, but I really think it's powerful together.’ And I'm extremely corny [laughs], so I know that the idea of seeing Black and brown, queer, and trans people together moves me. I remember how proud I felt listening to groups like En Vogue and TLC and being like, oh, those are our Black folks. And we have the opportunity to do that together. I thought it could really be something great.
Armon: We sat in a room pulling some tarot cards trying to figure out what the name should be. And every card that came out depicted a water entity. And the majority of them were mermaids. I was like, “Child, we ain't calling ourselves mermaids, that's a little bit too rainbow.” So, we landed on Siren, as in, the sirens that call you into the water and lure you to your death based on their beautiful artistic abilities. So it’s a play on that because we're fab cunts that do fab things. Duh. Yes.
Totally. Would you say that pursuing music has gotten significantly easier as a group? What challenges were you guys facing beforehand that this idea of pursuing a career as a group has helped?
RAPTURE: In general, there’s an act of self awareness that's not always practiced when you're doing something individual. For instance, I had to not just ask myself, what am I good at or what do I want to hear? But how can I be of service to this bigger project? So the songs that I ended up doing are more pop songs because I saw that was a place for me to fit in and to show the breadth of what we can do. So way more selfless.
s.e.r: From my perspective, producing with everybody, it really showed me the through line of all the artists. ‘Cause even though we were working individually at one point, in essence, when we all came together, it was like, oh no, we have a collective sound. And I feel like this album showed us, even though we were working individually, we were kind of always this uniform mind.
Your styles are so different that you have songs in a few different genres on the album. But how would you describe what this through line sound you mention is?
Demi Vee: We're not afraid to experiment. We're not afraid to deconstruct a pop song and add an element of jazz. We're not afraid to add a gospel riff to some 808s. If it feels good, we're gonna do it. Because why not?
RAPTURE: And I think another through line is just simply African descent. One of the things that we were all able to do was really prove that there's no genre that Black queer people don't have any business inside of, because we did create them all. So the through line is our Blackness, is our transness, is our queerness. And we're not being confined by these created genres in order to perpetuate white supremacy. We're saying, no, this all belongs to us and we could piece it together any way we see fit. And that's what we did.
Can you tell me more about the mythological story or world of this album and why you chose it for this project?
Armon: For this project, because it dropped on Valentine's day, in my head I had an idea of like St. Valentine asking these six sirens to help move water to Venus so that humans can live on Venus, so love can exist there. Right, because Venus in astrology really rules different types of love—be it romantic, familial, platonic—just the way we kind of show up in love. We started from there, building out music and skits to make that happen. And we went through some extensive paring down. So the project now looks different than it did originally because we would send it to one another and the end result is a beautiful marriage–no pun intended–of all the ideas of the people sitting here.
How did you play with what a love song is or sounds like, especially coming from a collective of Black and brown trans folks?
RAPTURE: There was this interesting queering of romance on the project, too. Even when I think about s.e.r’s “Hudson View,” there's this kind of like horror, psychedelic element to it. Asanni, with “Parkour,” she's comparing something that's very hyper-masculine to something very vulnerable and soft and feminine. And then even with me, my actual partner, SunChild, we made a love song together that's a duet, but it's about like, me being this mermaid who Yemaya doesn't let come out from under the sea, and then he's just like on the tide surfing, and I'm underneath everything, like begging to come up. And my two songs, “Venusflytrap” and “Reign Dance,” they’re self-love songs about seeing the parts of me that are shallow, parts of me that are rageful, parts of me that are darker; and really me being like, you know what, that's all really useful, and I'm gonna love it as well. But I do think there's a queering of the theme that we all did through our own specific channels.
WHATSGOOD!: The first thing that I thought about was vulnerability. Even as I listen to this project, there is such a vulnerability in so many of these songs. My song “Cry With Me,” that’s about how difficult it is for me to be vulnerable and cry in my adult age. But we still need to let things go, to just be freer. And Asanni's song with Parkour is about that vulnerability of struggling with romantic love because of certain things in the past that you also have to move through in order to be a better romantic partner or even a better person with yourself, right? So I feel like this project did a really good job at exploring the different highs and lows of what love can be, whether that's for yourself or romantically or however.
RAPTURE: I noticed there was a maturity, or heaviness, in everybody's stuff that isn't necessarily appropriate for all the ages that we are. When I was listening to Demi's songs, they’re the most traditional love songs on the project. But because she's embodying this Black trans woman experience, there's this added layer of complexity and maturity to what she's saying around, unrequited love. And even with “Venusflytrap,” it's such a silly song, but I think that, in order for me to arrive at that kind of levity it's understood that that was not just easy, that had to be worked for. If you're like a blonde cis straight 18-year-old white girl with a record deal then being frivolous and light is kind of part of the identity. Whereas you kind of know that that's something that we have to earn, you know?
Vee: It's so important for us and myself, most importantly, because I'm speaking about it, to really do the work to talk about the heaviness and the weight of what it feels like to be a Black trans woman who’s dating, who’s has been in love, who’s moving through love, right? And it is not filled with June rainbows or campaign pride.
RAPTURE: Or butt plugs.
Vee: Or butt plugs. It's really not. I feel like there's just something so fantasy and very childlike about what's happening in music as it pertains to transness, and queerness, and I feel like a lot of people are riding off the very same fact that they're trans in music. There's no weight to it. We want weight. We want substance, right? Yeah, you're trans, but what else? Yeah, you're queer, but what else? You see what I'm saying? We're too comfortable with these labels holding the weight. Where the fuck is the music?
What are your hopes for the future of this group?
Armon: When I say storm the world I really do mean it. I think that the shit that we do is so unique, and it's just nowhere. I can think of a bunch of artists that we are inspired by. But the way we bring our unique experiences and our unique ears for music and our unique sounds to create this thing, it's just not anywhere. I want everything to get bigger and better so that every time something comes out, it is far beyond what we did before. I think that the world needs to see us—and not on some vanity shit. But we bring such a unique thing to music that music will forever be changed because of what we're trying to do. I think that we are shifting the musical experience and that it's necessary. The reception has been really beautiful so far, I've been very thankful for that. And it goes to show there really is power or strength in numbers.
RAPTURE: I'm gonna declare something. I declare what will happen is, in the same way that we break down genres, we will be breaking down the walls — from what's supposed to be on a billboard, to what's supposed to be in a museum, to what's supposed to be in a theater, and what's gonna be on a podcast. Hopefully, in 10 years, you'll still want to interview us because there will be another interesting thing that we're all doing as far as music and theater and art goes. So I think that will be the marker of success that we're still able to talk to you in 10 years, about another project because we kept it going.
You can listen to THE GREAT OFFERING: VENUS UNDERWATER now.
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