ON FEBRUARY 12, 2011, 8:00AM
At Your Funeral: Antony and the Johnsons – “Hope There’s Someone”
The task of choosing the musical backdrop for one’s final send-off is a daunting one. Many questions present themselves: Why further burden such an emotionally weighty occasion? Would making light of the situation go over poorly? Do you play something familiar that’s likely to move everyone in attendance, or attempt to work in a hidden gem/personal favorite? Of course, all of those concerns hardly matter in comparison to much more pressing ones. For instance, what could possibly be a fitting way to cap off a human being’s time on Earth?
The answer, for me, is, and has been ever since I heard it for the very first time, Antony and the Johnsons’ “Hope There’s Someone”, off of their indelible second album, I Am a Bird Now. To say that death permeates the 2005 Mercury Prize-winning album, which features the likes of Lou Reed, Devendra Banhart and Boy George, would be a major understatement; The album cover features a morose-looking old photo of actress/Warhol Superstar Candy Darling on her deathbed, and all of the tracks speak to death or loss in some way. Surprisingly, I Am a Bird Now is certainly not a sad album. Instead of wallowing into the sort of black-clad misery that many pieces of art on the topic of death seem to fall into, I Am a Bird Now seeks to reconcile with death, expressing a certain joy in the freedom that comes with it, via key themes of hope and freedom.
The Incubator 