Antony and the Johnsons and my lousy personality.

I don’t know if this is a legitimate complaint, but I’m really troubled and tired by Antony and the Johnsons.

To get it over with, I should acknowledge that Antony Hegarty is a godly singer. His sincere, faltering falsetto is pure, and it avoids any sense of the accidentally parodic. And I enjoy his band’s sense of appearance, their sweetly dirty name (recalling both Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the Smiths) and their striking cover stars.

In addition, part of my dislike of the group is purely dislike of their style. Meandering, minimalist torch songs with surreal content are just not my business, and the mix doesn’t allow you to hide from the lyrics.

But from here we come to my grievance: impersonation, the idea of a New York-dwelling Englishman impersonating a transsexual, or a woman, or a dead woman, or a 1940s starlet, or Billie Holiday, or your favorite comparison. As I perhaps too-tartly said last week, I’m increasingly out of patience with male pop singers impersonating women. They take our things and play around in them, and get reputations for being wonderfully subversive for doing so, and yet when has a woman ever broken through by making the same (correct, if usually oversimplified) points about the mutability of gender and the ecstasy of being a boy-girl?

Please don’t talk to me about Patti Smith, because I have spent my whole life – I mean, because Patti Smith has remained a cult figure; there’s no need to talk to me about Courtney Love, at some point an ingenious mocker of automatic femininity, and now a universal figure of fun. I’m asking about actual worldly success.

As for the reasons why that grievance does not make me feel too good:

1. I would likely change my mind if I knew Hegarty was “legitimately” transsexual or genderqueer in his own right – which causes me some anxiety, as I’m always deeply bothered by people who demand that performers “come out” and admit to a specific identity in order to be taken seriously. (Maybe I wouldn’t, though, because my complaint is that Hegarty’s songs do seem to assert a single and highly specific identity as a significant portion of their actual point.)

2. I know at the bottom of my soul that there are lots of situations like Hegarty’s, and I don’t complain because I like their music more. (I might name someone they’re still trying to make go to rehab, for one example.)

As an aside, I’m much more pleasantly annoyed by reviews of Hegarty (and Joanna Newsom before him) that tend to mention how you have to be especially tolerant, introspective and open-minded to enjoy this kind of music. You probably do, but that only makes you virtuous, not good. Congratulations on having a well-formed personality. When combined with taste, that can aspire to predicting almost nothing about your actual decency, so there’s no need to congratulate yourself just yet, O Critic.

Addendum, 3/12: Marsha P. Johnson, of course, is the actual source of the name. I was alerted to this today, which is, I think, another indication that I am simply not the activist, trans-historically-conversant listener Antony is going for. Gender struggles are actually quite important to me but I haven’t done the reading.