Antony Hegarty and the gender-jammers of 2010
Antony Hegarty at the piano. Phot by foteropanico via flickr.
11:20 am Aug. 31, 2010
What an odd half-decade it’s been at the intersection of third-wave Warholianism and vocal-pop gender trouble.
In 2010, specimens like Ke$ha and Katy Perry straddle the upper reaches of our charts with one-note braggadocio and sledgehammer double-entendre about their nether regions, no matter—in the typically autistic onanism of the perplexed alpha-minus male—how few listeners care or how many retch. Cracked ingénues born, fatally, before the Berlin Wall or Manuel Noriega went down, they jostle for whatever neonate mindspace goes uncolonized by the class of Justin Bieber, the teen idol from Canada and YouTube whose perverse sexlessness has stretched wholesome marketability toward the sinister indeterminacy of, say, Cathy Rigby as Peter Pan. Meanwhile Girls, a San Francisco quintet of shaggy boys, provided the sweetest, most persuasive guitar anthem of the last twelve months in “Lust for Life,” which begins with the ironic cant “Oh I wish I had a boyfriend.” Type “Lady Gaga has” into a Google search field and its fourth and fifth suggestions will be, respectively, “a wiener” and “balls.”
The world’s caught up to Antony Hegarty, we might say, or he’s become obsolete, or both. Five years ago, when men were men and women were breathy, desperate coquettes—2005’s second-bestselling LP was 50 Cents’ Massacre; its bestselling was Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi—the remarkable second album from Hegarty’s band Antony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now, was something like the most subversive thing to be found on a second-generation iPod Mini (pink). Featuring original Superstar Candy Darling on its cover, posed in full kabuki pallor and laid up dying of cancer, Bird imbued drag signification with the liberating majesty and ennobling tragedy that had rarely, if ever, filtered through so unalloyed to a mainstream audience.
“One day I’ll grow up,” insisted its defining chorus, “I’ll be a beautiful woman / One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful girl / But for today I am a child, for today I am a boy.”
Crescendoing to the pathos of one piano chord, thundered repeatedly, only the truly daft could have gone on regarding the metamorphoses mournfully willed and wished for as basically genital. First and most obviously instantiated as the boy who wants to be a woman, the longed-for corporeal and affective transubstantiation became, by the end of the album, a girl literally taking flight: “And the bird girls go to heaven / I’m a bird girl / And the bird girls can fly.”
If they turned mid-decade heads sharpest with the outr— solemnity of the subject matter, Antony and the Johnsons’ formal transgression was, in fact, unabashed classicism; with RAM-intensive digital experimentation the new middle-of-the-road, their clarion piano melodies and unfussy, slightly gauzy production aesthetic appealed directly to the guildhall of old-fashioned songcraft. I Am a Bird Now drafted for guest vocals pop purists otherwise as varied, generationally and sonically, as Lou Reed, Boy George, and Rufus Wainwright. Since his breakthrough, Hegarty has returned the favor to all three, and contributed to memorable tracks by, among others, the neo-disco outfit Hercules and Love Affair and iconic, Icelandic demigoddess Bjöaut;rk. The latter, no stranger to the transcendental potency of laryngeal eccentricity, is said to have thought Antony a black woman on first listen, in the postbellum gothic tradition of Nina Simone and the American south. (Born in England, Hegarty, 39, has actually been a white New Yorker since 1990.) The racial uncanniness, on top of the psychosexual, make the Johnsons an odd and oddly bankable force in these years of solids melting into air, and bubbles popping into ether—October 2008 saw the Times of London publish an incongruously geisty Bjöaut;rk op-ed on her country’s sinking into the Atlantic; a few months later Antony and Johnsons follow-up The Crying Light, a semi-concept record about ecological systems collapse, hit number one on the E.U. album charts.
HEGARTY WILL RETURN THIS FALL with the full-length Swanlights. Ahead of that release comes Thank You For Your Love, a five-track E.P. which rather effortlessly reaffirms his status among the most plainly arresting vocalists working today, boy or bird or girl. Here, his instrument achieves soaring flights of virtuosity, but is also cognizant of proportion and scale—and the sense that Hegarty’s not rendering every note at its (and his) most beautiful counts as significant artistic growth in this down market of pop one-upmanship. The title track (which is the only one that’ll be on Swanlights) and “You Are The Treasure” quickly establish the purity and righteousness of this new reticence: at their best, Antony and Johnsons do nothing less than emancipate melisma from the likes of Mimi. Where Mariah and her ilk have used—and inspired popular discussion of—the technique as a means of stretching simple monosyllables to fit outsized egos, Antony’s weaves and warbles are about complicating the lyrics with texture and doubt, tonal as well as emotional depth. In this he shares a project (and often similar results) with the singer–harpist Joanna Newsom, and both have become progressively stranger and more ambitious over recent years as their voices have grown (almost) familiar.
Unfortunately the literal semantics—that is, the words—for the first time fail Hegarty’s delivery.
“Thank You For Your Love” is, for much of its four minutes, simply the title repeated over piano and, eventually, the horns that signal the closest the Johnsons ever get to up-tempo. Not that this is unexciting, exactly—the old cliché about it being worthwhile to pay to see Bjöaut;rk, or Yoko Ono, or Nina Simone, read the telephone book applies here. But the perfect confluence of medium and message and messenger heard on I Am A Bird Now— the ambiguities of human embodiment and longing, wondered over by a voice, and a singer, that sounds like a third sex (or the original)—appears to have been sui generis and unrepeatable, at least insomuch all those feelings were bound up with the shock of the new.
No longer new, I have no doubt that Antony and the Johnsons will, as they did with The Crying Light, give Swanlights the conceptual interest to go with the formal—the E.P. being, after all, less the space for grand statements than experiments, even stunts. Indeed, the lasting draws on Thank Your For Your Love are sure to be its two covers (by now, standards really): Dylan’s “Pressing On” and Lennon’s “Imagine.” What Hegarty does with the latter well-trodden tune—name another song in the repertoire of Nas, Diana Ross, and Avril Lavigne—is particularly inventive: the verses are almost slurred, a half-breath behind the beat, and all the better to nail the chorus. This too is a sign of growth on the hammiest of songs in a time of ham-fisted, panting productions about girl birds, if not quite bird girls: understatement.
