Various Artists : Transa
Conveying emotion, searching for community and positive reinforcement, establishing environments for collaboration, connecting through shared experience—there are few better tools than music for the construction and promotion of empathy and its component parts. And there are few better, more consistent constructors of empathy through music than Red Hot Organization, who have used it for more than three decades to press issues related to HIV/AIDS care and awareness worldwide. Their projects have been huge in terms of talent (Red Hot + Blue), cultural relevance (No Alternative), critical acclaim (Red Hot + Fela), and size (Dark Was the Night), and their newest compilation called Transa (stylized as TRAИƧA) is legitimately big on all of these fronts.
Despite multiple titular connections to Brazilian culture—”transa” is both Portuguese slang for making love and the title of a 1972 Caetano Veloso album—this compilation’s thematic goal is far more broad than Red Hot + Rio. Transa is loosely organized into eight chapters meant to represent stages of growth leading to a joyful existence regardless of gender expression, emphasizing the universal in universal love. With trans rights on a lot of people’s minds, and spurred on by electronic musician SOPHIE’s shocking accidental death in 2021, Red Hot brought together more than 100 musicians to celebrate that community across nearly four dozen songs and four hours. The tracklist features a wide array of trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer performers and their allies, occasionally solo but most often in collaboration.
This is a protest record that, instead of resorting to dread or righteous anger, trends soft and introspective. There’s spoken-word experimentalism like “STAR,” Ana Roxanne and Nsámbu Za Suékama’s ethereal interpolation of the poem “Lavender Balloon” by drag queen activist Marsha P. Johnson. There’s bedroom electronica in many forms including “I Feel Free,” a trap/R&B hybrid from William Basinski’s Sparkle Division and house diva Pepper MaShay. Pensive rock and jazz numbers rumble throughout: Arthur Baker and Pharoah Sanders on the smooth “Love Hymn,” Teddy Geiger and Yaeji’s sludgy “Pink Ponies,” and top-of-fold headline “Young Lion,” Sade Adu’s first new music in 14 years, a devastating piano- and drum-driven apology to her trans son.
Transa is meant to be a grand artistic statement, so there’s not a lot here that’s going to read as radio-friendly or a so-called hit. There are definitely contenders in the jangling twee of “Rumblin’” from Soft Rōnin and Frankie Cosmos, Laura Jane Grace’s storming all-star version of Wayne County’s “Surrender Your Gender,” and the funky Clarity/Clairo track “Many Ways.” But contrast that with the compilation’s challenging fourth chapter, “Awakening.” Including some of its longest, most abstract works, its creative spirit is anchored by “Something Is Happening and I May Not Fully Understand But I’m Happy to Stand for the Understanding,” a 26-minute-long suggestion that André 3000’s recent stylistic transformation isn’t in the name of jazz, but Krautrock. If you get that track, you probably get Transa.
New works dominate this collection but there are also intriguing covers from across LGBTQIA2S canon, considering explicitly queer artists as well as others held up as kings and queens by the culture. Devendra Banhart, Blake Mills and Beverly Glenn-Copeland help kick things off by bringing both a torch-song feel and guitar squeal to Veloso’s “You Don’t Know Me,” while Glenn-Copeland’s own composition “Ever New” gets reinterpreted at the end of the album with Sam Smith. In between, Transa performers tackle Kate Bush, Prince, SOPHIE and more. Ezra Furman and Sharon Van Etten’s work on Sinead O’Connor’s “Feel So Different” and the Moses Sumney-led take on Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” are particular standouts, the latter choosing to build up to a climax rather than perch on the kind of emotional plateau maintained by the original.
With its breadth and depth, chances are nobody’s going to fall over themselves over every single cut. That being said, Transa is an altogether pleasant-sounding release, as comforting and communal as a long, slow morning at your nearest coffeehouse. And maybe that’s what the world, trans and otherwise, needs more of right now: to detach and dissociate, to feel centered and unbothered.
Label: Red Hot Organization
Year: 2024
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