The spellbinding singer returns with an album of warm, empathic folk-soul – plus a screaming lemur – to salute LGBTQ+ trailblazers, Lou Reed and more. She explains why we must forgive our enemies if we are ever to make change
In the summer of 1992, Anohni kissed the hand of Marsha P Johnson. Then 21, the British-born singer had moved to New York to study experimental theatre at New York University and was beginning to piece together her chosen family. “I quite idealised her,” Anohni says today of Johnson, the renowned activist who fought in the 1969 Stonewall uprising against anti-LGBTQ+ policing in New York, and spent her life at the vanguard of queer and transgender liberation. “A lot of her innovations were unprecedented.”
Six days after Anohni met her, Johnson’s body was found floating in New York’s Hudson river in circumstances that remain mysterious. “That period of weeks changed the direction of my life,” Anohni says. Since then, Johnson has been something of a spiritual guide: Anohni named her band the Johnsons in tribute, and on her debut album, 2000’s Antony and the Johnsons, exalted Marsha on the chamber rock elegy River of Sorrow. “No precious liar or well-wisher / Can return the love that was stolen,” she lamented.
Continue reading...by Owen Myers via Electronic music | The Guardian
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