Anohni - I Will Survive
In June, Facebook offered me 200,000$ to license an old live version (2001) of me singing “I Will Survive” for an advertisement that represented Facebook as an advocate for small businesses. Although I really could have used the money, I said no because I didn't want to be complicit in Facebook’s hosting of fake news which might enable the re-election of Donald Trump. They wrote back saying that they were placating other participants' concerns by making donations to their charities of choice, in addition to paying them. I woke up the next morning and realized this isn't even advertising; this is politics, and i don't even know how deep this water is. This company Droga5 worked with Obama and Google and others. I had to walk away.
A month later I saw the ad. Facebook had hired another singer to emulate my version of the song. It was a nauseating feeling.
We all know that Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon and others now seem to be destroying our lives, our minds, our jobs, our cultures, and our societies' ability to govern themselves.
We as artists were the first ones to be led to the stall to begin feeding, and being drained by, companies including Apple and Facebook.
And now as artists, we should be the first to leave. We must show that it is possible to live without Instagram, without Facebook, without Google and Amazon. We must endeavor to rebuild our lives and our communities, our private conversations, in ways that don't rely on manipulative infrastructures and interfaces provided by the world’s richest corporations.
After the Facebook debacle, I felt compelled to complete my studio version of “I Will Survive”. It was the first song I ever sang in nightclubs in NYC when I was 20 years old. I sang it hundreds of times. In those days I sang it thinking of Marsha P. Johnson and the underground queer community struggling to survive in the face of AIDS. Now it seems to me like an anthem for the future of life on earth.
Obviously, Youtube is owned by Google. I haven't closed all my accounts. But I want to talk to you about this; I want to be a part of this conversation.
I watched the Republican National Convention last week. It’s becoming harder to put into words the dread that many of us feel.
What’s really happening? Toxic levels of corruption and collusion are devouring the US. Christian extremists want to turn the country into a religious state straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.
After bombarding us with media campaigns pressuring us not to wear masks in March and April, the US now accounts for 22% of all Covid-19 deaths worldwide. I personally know three New Yorkers who died in April, I believe as a result of this official guidance.
Trump has stoked racist police violence in the US to even more atrocious heights. Scaring voters with fake tales of impending anarchy and “dark shadows”, he then promises that if re-elected he will crush BLM protesters and “restore law and order”. Is he getting this stuff from Steve Bannon or Mein Kampf? Probably both.
Trump is hosting federal executions in the countdown to the election as another prong of his racist, fake “law and order” platform. Last Wednesday, the US government defied Navajo tribal sovereignty and executed Lezmond Mitchell, injecting him with a massive quantity of pentobarbital in a death chamber in Indiana.
Behind this curtain of carefully orchestrated chaos, the network of corporate lobbyists that form the core of the GOP pillage the US Treasury and dismantle scores of environmental regulations, driving the country and the world even more hopelessly into global boiling and mass extinction.
Australian-born Rupert Murdoch blares his obscene propaganda into American homes, hypnotising viewers with lies, rage and fear-mongering. Meanwhile, 40,000 square miles of Australian wilderness burned last summer, killing over a billion animals. More than half of the Great Barrier Reef has collapsed in the last five years due to rapidly increasing ocean temperatures. The same kinds of awful, permanent losses are engulfing nature on every continent.
For many people, economic suffering looms while Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Apple and others expand their global footprints, sucking dry local economies. Some of the CEOs pour the wealth of the world into colonial space programs. They fantasise that they might finally shed their dependence upon Mother Earth and become the heroic creators and patent-holders of life on Mars.
Unlike the Koch brothers, who paid for the malevolent spread of climate change denial, today’s tech billionaires scent themselves with a pheromone of liberal philanthropy while monetising the dismantling of checks and balances that once helped to protect us. They take meetings with Trump, provide him with the viral platforms he needs to retain the presidency, advertise themselves as having done the opposite, and then hedge their bets in private. Huge swaths of California’s ancient redwood forests continue to burn around the perimeter of Silicon Valley.
Incessant, nihilistic assaults on truth, empathy and the biosphere ensure that life on earth will become much, much worse.
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump’s team described him as the first presidential candidate since Harry Truman with “the guts” to “drop the bomb”. Trump stood there, grinning with pride, and a wave of nausea spread through me. I had the same feeling a few months ago, when I heard Trump utter the words “the Chinese virus”.
What waits for us on the other side of this is a world undone by endless cataclysm and aching with senseless loss.
The sound of this track, RNC 2020, is pretty rough. The loop is from a concert I did at a club in New York City in my early 20s. So that’s me screaming in the past … for the present.
Can you visualize a different path forward? We all have to focus on this now, with everything we’ve got.