Drone Bomb Me

2016
Hopelessness


Two days after the Obama administration killed 150 Somali people in a drone attack, ANOHNI released “Drone Bomb Me,” the second single off HOPELESSNESS. It’s a coincidence that could have aligned on many other weeks: U.S. drone warfare has steadily expanded in the last decade, operating in relative secrecy that has only recently been challenged by artists and journalists in projects such as The Intercept’s Drone Papers, Addie Wagenknect’s “Drone Painting,” and Laura Poitras’ Astro Noise. “Drone Bomb Me” joins these ranks, written from the perspective of a girl seeking death after her family was killed in a drone attack.
As with “4 Degrees,” which personified the hypocrisy behind climate change, ANOHNI is not letting anyone off the hook. “Blow me from the mountain and into the sea,” she croons over a major synth drop. Her voice, and the production by Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, are both darkly seductive, implicating the listener as they trace the war all the way home to the body. Writing in the language of unrequited love with pleas like “I want to be the apple of your eye” and “let me be the one that you choose tonight,” ANOHNI turns the abstracted, faceless nature of drone warfare into something chillingly intimate.
pitchfork.com



“Drone Bomb Me” is the second single from Anohni’s new album “HOPELESSNESS.” This track is a direct response to drone warfare and terrorism. To use her words, “It’s a love song from the perspective of a girl in Afghanistan, say a 9-year-old girl whose family’s been killed by a drone bomb,…She is kind of looking up at the sky and she’s gotten herself to a place where she just wants to be killed by a drone bomb too.”