I Am Very Happy, So Please Hit Me: Antony and the Johnsons

Posted by: zac | From: January 10, 2005

In spite of (or perhaps because of) my chosen profession, I consider myself something of a nervous writer. As with anything else I do, I feel a certain weight--that of all history, I mean--with nearly everything I put to paper. And never have I felt so nervous in GBoAT as I do here, now, with Antony and the Johnsons.

I can't really explain it, I guess--it's some sloshy assortment of my absence from GBoAT, my growing excitement for the music, the volume of press dude has already received, and my generally overwhelming affection for Antony as an idea, an icon, and a mystery. Or maybe it's just 'cuz I'm getting lazy. At any rate, I'm gonna keep this light for my sake, and presumably for yours as well.

Let's see... where to begin? Biographically, I suppose. After a few years performing with ragtag experimental performance group Blacklips in the early 90s, Antony began performing songs solo at the after hours cabarets of New York's Pyramid Club--a Performance Art fellowship from N.Y.F.A. followed, along with the formation the Johnsons, and the recording of a self-titled record in 2000 (or 1998, according to Secretly Canadian--can't really find a conclusive answer) for Durtro, the label run by the dude from Current 93. The same year, Antony made an appearance in Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory, and soon became something of a name to be dropped amongst the New York elite. Within a couple of years, Antony is recording and touring with Lou (fucking) Reed (at Laurie Anderson's suggestion, one assumes)--and singing "Candy Says" in place of Doug Yule for Reed's entire European tour. Reed even interviews Antony in Index. In 2004, Secretly Canadian re-issues the Antony and the Johnsons record, the band tours Europe with CoCoRosie, hits up the Whitney Biennial (in a collaboration with Charles Atlas), and records a new record with guest spots by Reed and Boy George. For Secretly Canadian. Seriously.

"So," you ask, "what's the big deal, anyway?" This is where things get a little difficult for me to verbalize. To begin with, Antony sings like Nina Simone. Not in a David-Sedaris-does-Billy-Holiday sort of way, either. In a "holy shit, is this a man or a woman?" kind of way. In a "this is not a stout 30-something white man" kind of way. In a "what did he just say about being in love with a corpse?" kind of way.

Which leads us to part two of this pale illumination--the subject matter. the songs of Antony and the Johnsons are mainly just functional arrangements of piano, strings, and guitar--hearkening back to the Berlin-era schmaltz of Lou Reed's finest solo moments. But as Antony's trilling vibrato and twisting articulation swirls and swells--it's his mournful, masochistic portraits of love and loss that really makes the whole bit work. Ridiculously dramatic, the stories equate love with physical abuse, devotion with dismemberment, sentiment with scars--and in the mounting violence and death, one can hardly help but be moved... be it to tears on turns of stomach. "He Hit Me And It Felt Like a Kiss"? Why, yes!

Part three: Antony continues, in tribute and tradition, the inflated vision of NYC hedonism of the Warhol 60s and of 70s glam conceptualism in just the way that I've been yearning for since my early obsessions with both movements--with an artful seriousness that defies the half-assed, transparent glam/drag revivalists. it's not about making a record that sounds like some shitty Elton John club anthem, or camping your band up all Hedwig--it's about caring enough to do your idols some goddamn justice. the obsessively androgynous Antony mirrors the tragic quality of Warhol's exploited drag superstars like Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis--married with Lou Reed's heady Bowie-through-Street Hassle-era brilliance (who, incidentally, talked a great deal of terrible shit about Candy Darling on that live album he recorded after she died). It's like a strangely apt summation of my super bloated obsessions with the era, all rolled into a brilliant, independent contemporary caricature.

And they just might be the Greatest Band of All Time.

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