For the last three and a half decades, Red Hot, the non-profit production company started in 1989 by Leigh Blake and John Carlin, has been putting out music compilation and video projects addressing the losses and devastation of the HIV/AIDS crisis and to raise awareness for the treatment and prevention of the disease. The organization has used music and art as tools for creating connections between music lovers and the marginalized communities Red Hot strives to represent. Their newest compilation, TRAИƧA: A Spiritual Journey Celebrating Trans People, pushes this mission forward even further by creating space for queer and trans artists and their allies to celebrate the power of community and solidarity for the most oppressed groups in our society.
Dreamed up by Dust Reid and Massima Bell as a direct response the rise in anti-trans rhetoric and policy of the last several years and fomented by SOPHIE’s tragic death in 2021, TRAИƧA features the work of over 100 artists and musicians across many genres, disciplines, and levels of experience, including Anohni, Adrianne Lenker, Moses Sumney, and Laura Jane Grace along with Sade, André 3000, and Sharon Van Etten, among others. Speaking with Emma Specter in Vogue, Bell said about the hopes for the project:
“I definitely want it to get to trans people who oftentimes don’t get the love that we need to. I think it’s powerful to know that this is in the world, and that there are all these incredible musicians who are like, yes, we love you and we want to support you, and you are beautiful and magical. I want parents of trans kids, people who don’t have paths charted out for them on how to love their trans child, to see things like Sade just fully expressing this unconditional love for her child. […] This record is roughly half and half trans and nonbinary voices and cisgender voices, and I hope this project can cement them in some kind of canon. I think trans artists and all artists who are marginalized in different ways can be kind of tossed aside or not given our due, and I want this to be something that is a space that centers them and makes them feel wanted and adored.”
Solidifying these intentions, Reid and Bell designed TRAИƧA as not just a compilation album but a collaboration album. The majority of the tracks on the compilation feature the talents of more than one artist, emphasizing the necessity of community and togetherness in creating art and standing up against oppressive forces. The album is separated into eight chapters (or discs): “Womb of the Soul,” “Survival,” “Dark Night,” “Awakening,” “Grief,” “Acceptance,” “Liberation,” and “Reinvention.”. Listening to TRAИƧA feels like being witness to an incredibly thrilling and emotional sonic story perfectly crafted to make its listeners feel tethered to the music, the artists, and to the album’s goal of working as an act of artistic protest against the way trans people are being scapegoated and dehumanized in our world.
Without giving into sorrow, fear, or nihilism, the tracks on TRAИƧA honor the beauty and pain of existing and of building something worth living for together through a multitude of genres, expressions, and experiments. There are many new and original tracks on the album like Sade’s “Young Lion,” an overwhelmingly moving piano-driven apology track addressed to her trans son; André 3000’s 26-minute long abstract experimental jazz track called “Something Is Happening and I May Not Fully Understand But I’m Happy to Stand for the Understanding;” and a glittering, fresh composition of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s “Ever New” featuring some wonderfully-matched vocals by Sam Smith. Lightning Bug’s fuzzy, guitar-heavy “Please Tell Me;” Soft Rōnin and Frankie Cosmos’s twee-tinged uptempo “Rumblin’;” SPARKLE DIVISION and Pepper Mashay’s funky disco banger “I Feel Free;” Kara Jackson, Ahya Simone, and Dirty Projectors’s harp-forward soft R&B “My Name;” Adrianne Lenker’s understated acoustic country-folk “Feel Better;” and CLARITY and Clairo’s syncopated folk/electronica mash-up “Many Ways” are some of the highlights of the original compositions produced for the album, but honestly, there is something for nearly everyone.
These exclusive tracks make up a large portion of the compilation, but TRAИƧA also gives us the gift of some of the best contemporary LGBTQ artists covering tracks by Prince, Kate Bush, Sinead O’Connor, Sylvester, Belle & Sebastian, Caetano Veloso, Cocteau Twins, and Low, among others. Although the original tracks on the album certainly make TRAИƧA precious and groundbreaking on their own, I find the covers to be extremely critical and exceedingly affecting to the overall impact. Like the rest of the tracks, the covers on each chapter are thematically parallel to the chapter’s title and to the rest of the tracks in that section. Many of the covers produced and performed by the LGBTQ artists on TRAИƧA were originally created by cishet artists, which gives listeners the opportunity to hear interesting, genre- and meaning-bending takes on these tracks while advancing the project’s mission to use music as a tool of connectivity and community-building. The best covers on TRAИƧA — like the Julien Baker-led take on Belle & Sebastian’s “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying,” Hand Habits and Bill Callahan’s take on Kate Bush’s “Deeper Understanding,” and Laurn Auder and Wendy & Lisa’s take on Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” — manage to transform these songs into something entirely different by imbuing them with radical new perspectives on the songs’ meanings as well as innovative instrumental compositions.
The sheer volume of songs on TRAИƧA in addition to the exploratory nature of the project as a whole means there’s bound to be a few less powerful tracks on the album. But when you sit and listen to the album all the way through the first few times, it feels as if even those have a necessary and important role to play here. The compilation never loses momentum, always moving forward and building more propulsion. Moving through the project’s eight chapters, the unbelievably talented artists featured on this compilation take us by the hands and launch us into this grand celebration and examination of the power we have when we stand up for one another and work together to put beautiful and meaningful work into the world despite the many obstacles and oppositions working against us. In this precarious and nerve-wracking moment in American history, TRAИƧA reminds us that we owe it to ourselves and each other to never back down from a fight.
