Anohni Talks Protest-Minded Pop, Identity Politics, Oscar Boycott
We talked six years ago about how it was difficult for you to tour the world knowing what air travel is doing to the environment. The song “4 Degrees” addresses that internal struggle.
That song is coming from a bunch of different angles at once. There’s this jubilant music, then these really cryptic, intense lyrics. It’s disarming. It’s about the conflict between my aspirations and my behavior. A big theme for me has been “What’s really happening?” In order for me to even begin to have a conversation about whether we can change our trajectory as a species to avert an apocalyptic future, I have to start being honest with myself. With this album there’s a lot of looking outward, but I’m trying to look inward just as intensely.
Listeners may assume that “Obama” is simply an attack on the president, but is it also about you grappling with how you’ve been complicit in his foreign policy?
Oh, make no mistake, I’m very critical of aspects of his foreign policy, which I find repulsive and inhumane – inhuman, almost. The drone bombing campaign of the last eight years has been, to me, an atrocity. For him to campaign on this platform of transparency, with the promise of closing Guantanamo and wanting to restore America’s moral standing in the West – it’s a deception. Everyone that George Bush saw fit to imprison and torture Obama has executed from the sky. Anyone put in Guantanamo Bay in the last few years has been put to death, as has anyone near them – including children, wives. All you have to do is kill a child’s family unjustly, and you can guarantee hundreds of years of repercussions. Look at the American history of slavery. Can you say that hundreds of year later that has been eased? That pain has not yet been eased.
“Everyone that George Bush saw fit to imprison and torture Obama has executed from the sky.”
Yes, I’m ashamed of my participation as a taxpayer in American drone bombing. But having said that, the last line of the song is “Like children we believed.” Obama was given a Nobel Peace Prize within a month or so of taking office. The world cried and lay at his feet. I mean, in retrospect, it was very naive to think he was going to…
Save us all?
Yeah, that he was going to be a savior figure, when he ended up being a compromiser – the opposite of a revolutionary, which is what a lot of people were hoping they’d elected. He ended up trying to work within the system to do what he could. That would all be fine and well if we had time left. But we don’t have any time left. It’s like the climate conference in Paris. An agreement not to raise the temperature by two degrees is a triumph, when the two degrees Celsius rise in global temperature guarantees a kind of apocalypse, at least for the rest of nature. Maybe we can find some way to continue to exist in a world that’s two degrees hotter, but much of nature and biodiversity won’t be able to.