Anohni and the Johnsons – My Back was a Bridge for You to Cross (Rough Trade, 2023)

“It’s time to feel what’s really happening” is what you can find written on the inside cover of Anohni’s last album. Produced by Jimmy Hogarth – James Blunt, Duffy, Amy Winehouse – and with the features of a fully defined soul or r’n’b record – with the notable exception of the noisy Hendrixian guitars of Go Ahead – this new album, the first in seven years and the first published by Rough Trade, is possibly the transgender people’s What’s Going On.

If Marvin Gaye with his materpiece in 1971 gave voice to a generation of African Americans who were coping with the Vietnam War, social injustice and the then rising ecological consciousness, this album by Anohni is the transgender version of it all, starting from the image put on the cover, a beautiful and intense portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, one of the very first hystorical transgender activists along with Sylvia Rivera and a few others.

Marsha ‘Pay No Mind’ Johnson was a gender non-conforming activist for her entire life. She was defining herself as ‘drag queen’, and she fought for the rights of the LGBTQIAP+ community. One of the pivotal figures of the famous Stonewall riots in 1969, she subsequently gave life to the STAR, the ‘Street Transvestite, Action Revolutionaries’ association. Openly keen on decriminalising sex work and raising awareness on the problem of AIDS disease, she was found finally dead on the Hudson river in 1992. 

Police labeled her death as suicide, but the investigation opened in 2012 by pressure of the activist Maria Lopez led to a sentence of ‘possible homicide’. Since 2017 you can view a documentary by Victoria Cruz titled The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. Having her potrait as cover for this album is one of the strongest, political act you’ll find by every artist this year.

Anohni, discovered as an artist by Lou Reed and hosted first in his album The Raven (Sire, 2003) with other important guests such as saxophonist Ornette Coleman, rose in popularity thanks to her first albums issued by the label Secretly Canadian such as I’m a Bird Now (2005) and The Crying Light (2009). Lately involved in rediscovering electronic and disco music for such a project as Hopelessness (2016), her new passage to classical soul music shows us a mature and reliable artist. 

It Must Change can be taken as a call to arms as the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece, with its determined rhythm and the voice that spreads the wings of a confrontational but sympathetic singing. Go Ahead is reminiscent of Hendrix’ Star Spangled Banner version at Woodstock, another invitation to the good fight, while Sliver of Ice, the album first single, is a classical, touchy torch song – the political and the private, they said in those days.

Can’t sees electric guitars again at the forefront, with a sympathetic orchestration in the background, with Anohny and her voice just in the middle of it all and a nice horn section becoming preeminent with the progressing of the song, all completed by a nice clarinet solo intertwined in the song’s structure. Scapegoat is possibly the emotional center of the album, a song about people being hated and victimised for no personal reasons but only because they’re born as such, better said because of patriarchy rules in the end. 

Cymbals baste a fragile rhythm while electric guitars give life to a frail and subsequenlty hymnodic melody. Being a scapegoat can be liberating for many people misusing you. It’s My Fault is the prosecution, emotionally speaking, and it talks about when you feel guilty for being harrassed or hit even not phisically by the strokes of life, as it were what you deserve, or maybe it’s only about when you feel guilty for the end of a relationship. Maybe both things. Guitar mimicks the vocal inflections here. Rest is another slow and long, touchy ballad, full of an epic tinge.

There Wasn’ Enough is another arpeggioed guitar and voice (there are two different voice layers superimposed the one to the other) ballad about the end of a relationship, with the invitation to ‘move forward into gray’, while Why I Am Alive Now? is a melody for piano, with the guitar creating a gentle rhythm over the hinted percussions and Anohni’s voice complaining about the harshness of the world both from a romantic and a political point of view.

You Be Free is finally, after the orchestrations reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s album, the last ballad, in which Anohni poses her life as a bridge for other people to cross and live a freer life. In a moment in which history seem to become excluded in our lives for an eternal present, mutuated by commercials and the social networks, Anohni in a way has, as African Americans like James Baldwin and other minorities’ intellectuals like Paul B. Preciado, the sensation of being part of a community and a well determined history. And that’s one of the reason we love her and her beautiful music.