The one thing that is in my mind tonight regarding sound, though, and about which I feel compelled to write is the music I recently discovered to my great delight of Antony and The Johnsons. The quiet and mournful "I am a Bird Now" and "The Crying Light", as well as the powerful first album "Antony and the Johnsons", is some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard during the course of my 62 years involved in music as my own life-force. I never listen to contemporary bands anymore, not since the 1970's, and have little experience at all with alternative music except for Sigur Ròs. Antony's music is celestial and mournful, yet filled with an eternal power in a way that puts me in contact with my Queer collective unconscious, the collective unconscious of despair and death and even a certain hopelessness. The grief in "I am a Bird Now" and "The Crying Light" is palpable, and makes me think of the Death Years in the AIDS Wars, the genocide of the 1980's and 1990's in Amerika. "River of Sorrow" from the first album makes me feel again the death of my lover Christopher with whom I walked in New York along that same "black river.....between the piers", the Hudson, where we watched that final Summer sunset sitting on those same piers in 1983, the last time I saw Chris alive. I have my own "river of sorrow, river of time", and it flows with both death and life, but certainly the quantity of death is sometimes overwhelming. In "Rapture", Antony sings of falling, of watching his friends falling in silence like leaves to the ground, just like his "mama" and "papa" whose fall is taking "quite some time". I watched my Brothers, all my friends, and even those who were not my friends, falling silently to the ground in death during the genocide. Even in the screaming and noise of the final pain in the hospital death rooms, in the end it was always fully silent, "like leaves falling in silence to the ground". We all fell, myself included, some to die and some to still live on, but we all fell to the ground just the same, and Antony helps me live with AIDS and uncertain life through the power of his Queer knowledge of what it means to fall, but what it means to fall in a perpetual tombeau, a perpetual memorial to triumph over death. "Is this the Rapture?", he asks plaintively, over and over again growing bigger with each repetition of the question. There is a pervasive pathos throughout this perfect, passionate paean to our Queer history, Queer culture, a Queer knowledge of death that throws us into its power and performance. He ends this hymn to life-in-falling with the beginning and ending lines of the Lord's Prayer. It is a most eloquent and appropriate statement of faith in eternal hope.
In his music and poetry, Antony appears to know our Queer history of love and life, of tears and death. In "The Atrocities" he sings of our history in the never ending Queer blood bath, and of God's tears over "the atrocities of our story", over "the atrocities of history". God weeps great big tears of grief over the atrocities done to us, God's own people, and Antony tells us that we must "eat our fill" of God's tears. The piece is not violent by any means, but rather soft, sad, and then filled with quietly forceful disbelief in the extent of the atrocities near the end, although it ends ultimately in spiritual peace, the same peace that is brought by the "one Dove that came from the other side" in the song "One Dove". The dove offers us mercy. Antony's music and poetry offer us that same peace, that same mercy.
In "Cripple and the Starfish" he sings of sex and of his darkness that is a particularly Queer darkness. He is unafraid to be completely vulnerable, opening his truth to us his listeners as he confesses his sex with beautiful "Mr. Muscle", probably a hustler, who engages Antony's masochism, as Antony the "cripple" is willing, in his need to be loved, to cut off a finger for this unnamed sex-Man in order to prove Antony's own love after screaming that he "completely loves you" because it "will grow back like a starfish" to continue to be cut off and continue to grow back. He tells us that he "always wanted love to be hurtful, to be filled with pain and bruises", but even in the violence of the "forcing, bursting, stingy thingy" of Mr. Muscle, who is, in fact, bored with Antony's masochism and looking at his watch to see the time, the cripple begs to feel the "ripple" of gentle love. In his happiness in the sex ("happy bleedy, happy bruisy"), he wants to be hurt, punched, bruised, begging to the hustler to "please hit me, please hurt me" because he is "so very very happy." He begs to bleed. This is not a darkness nor a shadow that is pathological, but one that is, for Antony, as it is for me in my own experience in SM, filled with the life of re-generation as he triumphantly repeats his words and victorious music about the "starfish" and constant generative re-birth that he experiences in his masochism. This time, however, he sings not of his finger that will grown back, but he himself in his fullness that will "grow back like a starfish." Even in the subtle violence of the beginning, in the menacing tone as his "jaw dropped to the ground" at the shock of painful penetration, Antony's voice warms and sweetens, as does the music, as he sings "smile, smile" in a gushing, rushing joy. This is an utterly Queer cry of self-disclosure that no straight poet/musician would ever dare attempt. In the victory at the end, as the starfish triumphs, Antony tells us that SM, including my own, need not be a pathology, but a Way to life.
Antony is, for me, a hero of emotional triumph and self-knowledge, courage, self-awareness and self-love, especially in his "dark shadows that swallow". He loves the sound and image of the word "swallow" and uses it throughout the poetry of all three albums. His songs are often of darkness and shadows, but "darkness of the shadows that glow", shadows and darkness that are filled with light and life. There is paradox throughout Antony's work. He knows that the shadow is a vital force for all of us, but certainly for Queermen whose shadows are bound up with our human need to be in powerful sexual love relationships with other Men. We cannot grow in ourselves, we cannot become bigger without our shadow. There is, in this overwhelming "darkness and shadow", a lovely femininity to Antony's music, to his poetry and his musical architecture. Yet he can never be mistaken for a woman when he is singing, even in his high sweet registers, which are ethereal and sublime, but always powerful and rich in their unique masculinity. In its exquisite beauty Antony's voice is thoroughly androgynous. He is absolutely a Man who is indeed feminine. This is utterly Queer music, and Queer poetry.....Queer art, created by a Queer musician/poet. The blend of the masculine and feminine is delicious.
And yet, even though the pervasive melancholy is so palpable, we are thrown into a feeling of life and mostly hope as he sings of light in the darkness and shadows and always wanting to be taken into that light. The difference between the music of Antony and The Johnsons and Sigur Ròs, another alternative band, is that the latter not only presents us with melancholy and sadness, it also with a sense and power of the Warrior Lover, of Achilles and Patroclus, of Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, of the Amazon Women. When I listen to this latter music, I am pulled into my Queer rage, not just my Queer shadow, Queer grief and hope. I feel the Queer Warrior in me. I am no longer just the hopeless mover within shadows and darkness and fire, but the mover in grief who is filled with the power of the survivor. With Antony, I sit mostly in melancholy and softness, even while filled with his and my own particular power. It is the softness of the of the "flowers that grow on the corpses" of the death camps of Hitler's Third Reich. It is the softness of the flower that in "[his] mother's power [he] chose from a garden." Soft power. What could be more Queer than that?
Sometimes, I cannot decide which one of the bands I prefer. Perhaps there is no need to decide. Perhaps I can listen to each as I need to, and float in the arms of the Queer God/dess as S/He carries me into my collective unconscious of lives lost, of burnings, of impalings, of hangings, of the drawings and the quarterings, of the boots and the racks, of the violent experiments, rapes and beatings in Nazi concentration camps (Antony's "Hitler in My Heart"), of the internal drowning in one's own lung fluid from Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia, of the agonizing death from the purple lesions of Kaposi's Sarcoma in the lining of the lungs, of the diseases of sheep, and of the various Lymphomas all from AIDS during the genocide. I can also float on the arms of the Queer God/dess as S/He carries me into the lives of the Warrior Lovers of ancient times that grew into the community of compassion for the dying during the Death Years where self was sacrificed on the altar of Love, Man for Man, translated from the gymnasiums of ancient Greece where Men were taught to Love Men with honor, respect, sex, kindness, and a powerful masculinity that was built from the great poets, playwrights, and philosophers, a masculinity that was both powerfully male and also imbued with the feminine of the Goddess. This was our community of compassion during that horrible time of the 1980's and 1990's. What I learned in our Holocaust was that death is both masculine and feminine, that the fight for life is a thoroughly masculine thing, while the surrender at the end can be soft and thoroughly feminine. Death, fully experienced, is, after all, the ultimate Queer experience. It is of this that Antony sings in "Rapture".
So, this is the Queer aesthetic that we receive as a gift from Antony and The Johnsons. One need not be Gay to be Queer, although it is certainly preferable. The musicians of Sigur Ròs may not be Gay, but they are certainly Queer. Antony, however, is most definitely Gay, as his passionate love song to Aeon attests. I assume from the imagery and metaphor as well as the incredibly the tight sound of the band that his musicians are Gay as well. If not, they are certainly Queer without a doubt. I know a few straight Men who embody the Divine Feminine in their lives and who are, therefore, Queer, and I also know a lot of Gaymen who are not really Queer at all, because they are so thoroughly masculine without any trace of the feminine, that all Queerness leaves them. They are caught in the dark masculine. Such, however, is the stuff of another posting. This one is all about the mystery and power of music and poetry that is at once sublime and Earth-bound, light and dark, soft and hard, hot and cold, thick and thin, consonant and dissonant, wet and dry, minor and major, triadic and quartal, triple and duple, feminine and masculine, yin and yang. This post is about music and poetry that is thoroughly Queer, made by musicians who are thoroughly Queer, and will serve as a definitive introduction to my blog that will also be thoroughly Queer.
love your blogs
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