Chronicle of a dive bomber

Singer Enony is a transgender star of modern music, which changed the idea of ​​a song of protest

Singer Enony - former Anthony Hegarty from Antony & The Johnsons

The native of England, who moved to America in an early youth, Enony has always identified herself as a transgender. Feeling the obvious difference between her biological and inner sex, until the time she took for granted that the press and the audience were operated on by the passport name and the floor received at birth. Everything changed when in one of the interviews the singer mentioned that actually relatives, speaking of him, use the pronouns of a female family, and indeed: “He” is a word that neglects me. ”

Around the same time, the singer announced that she would release her new plate under the closest name Enony (Anohni), and not within the framework of the Antony & The Johnsons group, with which it was recorded before. Respecting the will of the musician, we will talk about her in the female gender. Moreover, this restructuring, apparently, was also an ideological gesture. A year and a half after Enony publicly became herself, she released Hopelessness - her most politicized record. A set of tragic and painfully beautiful manifestos presenting to humanity as a whole and the United States of America in particular the accusation that they shamefully destroy themselves and their planet.

For stones and for people

Once I saw how she sings in an abandoned limestone career somewhere in the Swedish wilderness. The concert hall itself, located an amphitheater inside a huge hole in the ground, looked like a monument of human frantic in terms of devastating its own planet. Surrounded by violinist and guitarists in white clothes, dressed at part not even appropriate to the place and time, jeans and black sweater, she talked from the stage about her relationships with the elements and about the feelings of stones, talked about walks in New York, and most importantly, sang. Her voice, a mountain, embroidered, clear, fulfilled by a piercing radiance, filled the whole space of this monumental gap, giving her some final naturalness.

Then, in 2007, her name was Anthony Hegarty, and it was customary to call her in a male gender. Then she was taken care of the feelings of stones. Now, it seems, she came to the conclusion that in order to save them, one must first deal with people.

The change of floor was already marked for Enony with a scandal - she was not invited to speak at the Oscars, although it was nominated

It is even strange that this did not happen before - the whole creative biography of Enony whispers “political art”. She arrived with her family in San Francisco in 1981, when she was eleven, and could not help but see how the euphoria of sexual freedom of the 1970s was replaced in the most free city of America with an endless horror from the absorbing merry and gueliks of the AIDS epidemic. She moved to Manhattan to make her own creative career in the early 1990s, for a decade she put low-budget avant-garde performances, as part of the Blacklips troupe, she arranged performances, within which she rushed to the audience with a beef liver, and often recalls that New York looked like New York A ghost city, swayed by a terrible disease. In the 2000s, a large and strange person with an incomprehensible gender, angelic voice, big heart and dazzlingly beautiful songs with headlines like “Hitler in my heart” finally noticed-at first the English mystic David Tibet from the Current 93 group, then the singer of New York perversion Lu Rid and finally critics and elites who awarded Enoni in 2005 in England Mercury Music Prize. Bjork, along with Hegarty, sang, among other things, Tyutchev’s poems, and a little by the singer was appreciated by the general public. For two decades, Enoni has gone from periphery to center, from a strange marginalia to a universally recognized miracle of modern popular music. Her social experience is more complicated, more traumatic and richer than most colleagues - and now that she finally had an appropriate tribune, it is not surprising that her reverent voice sang the tongue of magazine editorials and began to call the guilty people.

Songs of hopelessness

Antony & The Johnsons, Enoni's former musical incarnation, from an acoustic point of view almost in the academic surroundings: a chamber string ensemble, piano; Soaring, graceful and subtle music for thoughts about high. Hopelessness is a completely different matter: it is necessary to speak an urgent language about urgent things, and the singer here takes his partners of two prominent figures of modern electronics: the British Hudson Mojuk, who produces mighty and smart dance music for stadiums, and a descendant of Soviet emigrants Daniel Lopatin, who composes a complex emboss. Hopelessness rings, buzzes, roars with digital Jericho pipes - all to give a voice to those who are deprived of him to highlight and sing the endless self -destructive cruelty of this world. Here, of course, there is a metaphorical meaning: the album is largely a protest against technology in their repressive sense; technology for murder, surveillance and destruction, dividing the planet. Hopelessness can also be understood as an attempt to humanize cars, eliminate the contradiction between them and nature with the help of art.

Then she was taken care of the feelings of stones. Now, it seems, she came to the conclusion that in order to save them, you need to begin to deal with people first

Enony takes the listener by the breasts from the first sound - and does not exchange for compromises. The first song, the Drone Bomb Me, is a monologue of a nine -year -old Afghan girl, addressed to a military drone who shot her family: "Blave me / Let me be the one / whom you will choose from heaven." The second, 4 Degrees, is a loud and bitter sarcastic hymn the consequences of the global climate change: “I want to see how fish in the sea pop up up your belly / all these lemurs and other cute creatures / I want to see how they burn. Only four degrees ”(this refers to global warming for four degrees Celsius, in the case of which irreparable damage will be caused to the planet). The third, Watch Me, is dedicated to the domestic state that climbs into the private life of its citizens: "Daddy, I know that you love me because you are watching me all the time." The fourth, execution, is the death penalty. The fifth, I Don 'Love You Anymore, as if about personal, but given that the family and love is generally interpreted as a metaphor for relations between the state and a person, also, of course, about the social, about how society has betrayed those who dared to challenge the usual gender conventions. The sixth is completely called “Obama” and is an open letter to the 44th US President, sung by electronic rollene, which resembles the noise of an approaching fighter: “When you were chosen, the world cried with happiness. We thought that our sincere messenger came to power. And now you will spy, execute without trial, betray virtues. ”

Crisis and threats

Hopelessness, of course, is appropriate to interpret as a diagnosis of modern America, made by the country of its rapidly left -handed youth and specifically supporters of Bernie Sanders (in support of which Enony carefully spoke out in an interview). Hegarty lived in the United States for a long time to take there to the heart, but was born outside the country and therefore does not share the missionary idea of ​​American exclusivity. In addition, as any subtly feeling artist, it tends to bring certain positions to the limiting revolutions - but the emotion of the album is easily recognizable. It is she who moves students rioting in liberal university campuses, and people united around a person who calls himself a socialist. This is an emotion of disappointment, the final loss of faith that you can achieve peace and harmony with the help of a dominant system of values.

Enony's new album is simply called "hopeless"

The song "Obama" on the record is not in vain in the center: the current president is the most visual symbol of this disappointment. Progressive idealists chose him in the wake of enthusiasm and hope for changes; The first African American at the helm of the country seemed to be the embodiment of a new era of justice and humanism. In fact, Obama turned out to be an effective liberal manager - a good leader of the empire from the point of view of real politics, but for those who are sure that reality is rotten so much that it can only be cured only by turning it inside out - another personification of how the system is able to grind anyone.

“Crisis (that is, CRISIS, a word that is consonant with ISIS*, as ISIS*.-Auth.), If I killed your father, how would you feel?” - Annie asks in another song, hinting at the obvious: America is fighting with the threats that she creates. This vicious circle of cruelty will not be interrupted if you do not change the reference point. It should be noted that Enony in 2008 and he actively campaigned for Obama. Hopelessness is largely a song of repentance, tragic apologies for their own hopes.

“When you were elected, the world cried with happiness. We thought that our sincere messenger came to power. And now you will spy, execute without trial, betray virtues "

However, the case, of course, is not in one individual country. If you like, Hopelessness is a sentence to humanity as such, lullaby - if not waste - for Western civilization. According to Enony, the main problem is not in politics, but in relation to the planet, in how a person sequentially destroys his habitat, and at the same time his own kind. The last phrase of the album sounds like “we are all Americans now”; America, thus, becomes a kind of type of consumer attitude towards itself and to life. The climax is almost triumphant in its painful solemnity a thing called Why Did You Separate Me from the Earth (“Why did you separate me from the Earth”), crying for unattainable harmony with nature.

All this, of course, is also tied to the questions of Gender: Enoni says a lot about the fact that all the troubles of the world - from the male, patriarchal attitude towards him; That humanity should return to the understanding of the Earth as a mother - and that it is the maternal, family type of management can help us survive. Although this, of course, is an idealistic, abstract design: there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton the singer despises no less than Obama.

The plates like Hopelessness are customary to call protest music, but Enony gives this term a somewhat new meaning. Usually politically active musicians want not only to draw attention to injustice, but also to put an end to it. Not that Enony: it is not without reason that the album is called "hopelessness." There is neither polemic nor agitation - there is only a sad and beautiful contemplation of the abyss; Search for harmony in the discomfort zone. This, in essence, is an absolutely amazing album - but it does not completely abolish its grace and statues: if everything is lost, this does not mean that there is no need to sing. And in this sense, Enoni is unexpectedly appropriate, including in Russia - a country where even cultural elites are not yet concerned about the problems of world ecology. These are songs that help survive in vague times that will never end - and do not peer too closely to recognize yourself in them.

* ISIS, ISIS, or IG (“Islamic State”) is a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation.

Photo: Tim Knox/East News, AFP/East News, YouTube.com