Drone Bomb Me
A worthwhile pursuit caught in the sights of the inert warhead of a R9X missile
Perfect crystals exploding into smaller perfect crystals. That’s what the beginning of Anohni’s “Drone Bomb Me” has always sounded like. It’s an illogical, almost arbitrary image that’s similar to the not-quite-metaphysical comparisons that hang together half-established in the song’s opening lyrics:
Love, drone bomb me
Blow me from the mountains
And into the sea
Blow me from the side of the mountain
Blow my head off
Explode my crystal guts
Lay my purple on the grass[.]
The conceit is so simple yet so loaded — getting drone-bombed, literally, with the lightly exoticized rural environment (mountains, sea); the obvious sexual connotation; and the simultaneously arbitrary and precise nature of which intended target gets the treatment. We’re in Pakistan, we’re in Syria. Maybe the southern Philippines. We’re in Vatican Shadow territory, the churning violences of the postcolonial and Islamic worlds distilled into the coldness of Western techno.
Except of course nothing Anohni sings could really be described as cold, I guess? The singer (speaker?) next admits,
I have a glint in my eye
I think I want to die
I want to die
I want to be the apple of your eye[.]
I recently read Joyce Carol Oates’ novella Black Water (1992), a pretty direct treatment of the Chappaquiddick incident. Whatever you think of Oates, or the churning scandalous ridiculousness of the Kennedys (unfortunately still a thing!), the similarities with “Drone Bomb Me” are hard to miss. Anohni ends the song,
My blood, my blood
(Choose me)
My blood
(Choose me)
Choose me tonight
Choose me
Let me be the one
The one that you choose tonight
Choose me
Tonight
Tonight[.]
I think the song’s brevity is part of what makes it work — in addition to those crystal flashes at the beginning, it peters out pretty quickly into that desperate plea to be chosen.
Kelly Kelleher, the novella’s version of Mary Jo Kopechne, is trapped in a repeating, almost-never-ending drowning in the car The Senator, the book’s Ted Kennedy, drives into Poucha Pond and promptly flees. Bubbling up through the water circa 1992 is also the perpetually rehashing trend of astrology:
She was the one, the one he’d chosen. The one in the speeding car. The passenger.
Scorpio don’t be shy, poor silly Scorpio your stars are WILDLY romantic now. Demand YOUR wishes. YOUR desires for once.
So she did, she had and would. She was the one.
Desire, aggression, fate; I guess throwing these things together is still hot for a lot of people. I don’t know.
But I think “Drone Bomb Me” is better. It’s similarly anticlimactic, much like Hopelessness is already a bit dated or even grating with its Obama-disappointed-us complaints. (How would Anohni rank Obama’s presidency against that of either Trump or Biden, I wonder?) But it also doesn’t bother with any Kennedy, instead crystallizing the violence, envy, and horror that come with the sputtering but still hegemonic American empire — in personal longing and in the exoticized geography of the global south. It begs for death; it begs for something to beg for. It also has Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never? Working on the same track? I’m thinking about apples and oranges, about the increasing speed with which pretty much anything goes out of date. Whatever. I’ll take “Drone Bomb Me” over anything more about Chappaquiddick.