“We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
– Barack Obama
The core of ANOHNI’s recent, gorgeous/grievous album Hopelessness is an intimacy beyond intimacy, spewing all the pain and hatred accumulated by a lifetime of trauma under capitalism back out into the world. It’s maybe one of ANOHNI’s greatest gifts as a performer that she manages to make the greatest, most far-reaching global issues seem private, making the political personal in an intensely direct way. This feeling gets distilled powerfully in the new video for “Crisis”: simplified to just the song’s music, lyrics, the face of Storm Lever looking back at us, both drawing in the viewer and holding them accountable.
Further words from ANOHNI:
De-escalation cannot occur until we truly account for what the United
States has done.
I wanted to model what that might look like on a personal level as an
American citizen.
There is an unspoken sense that the atrocities our country has committed in
the Middle East are too grave to really acknowledge or account for.
And yet for peace to really take hold, there is no other road forward.
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