In a purple catsuit and spiky celestial headpiece, Nona Hendryx beckoned, with a wave. “I’m inside the tree!” she called. “In the forest of the ancestors.”
It was not the real Hendryx but her digital avatar, giving a tour of a new virtual reality project. Still, there is little distance between the flesh-and-blood Hendryx — the musician, artist and futurist, who has been forging her own way for over a half-century — and the slinky cyborg on winged feet who was scampering through a turquoise and fuchsia dreamscape on a recent Friday. They both inhabit a world of their own creation, signaling urgently for everyone to catch up.
The soundtrack for this V.R. journey was Hendryx’s 1983 electro jam “Transformation” — “Change your mind/Change your skin,” the lyrics go — because, she said, “I’ve constantly evolved and transformed over time.”
With each metamorphosis, Hendryx has spun into an even more singular cultural presence. She is not just the throaty alto who had an enduring hit with “Lady Marmalade” as part of the 1970s trio Labelle. She is also a teacher, curator, designer and technologist — a vanguard creator. In fact, she blithely told me, she never wanted to be a singer at all.
“It happened, and I’m thankful that I’m pretty good at it,” she said, downplaying a career that took her from ’60s girl groups to the pioneering soul and R&B of the ’70s, then to her solo act in the ’80s, an ahead-of-its-time amalgam of art rock, funk, no wave and electronica that put her in league with technology-forward artists like Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson.
Music still drives her. But now, she said, “I’m much more interested in making that, rather than performing and presenting it.”
Swathed in black and silver, the earthly Hendryx was sitting in a work space on the Upper West Side, forceful yet serene. Her baseball cap read “No Pressure.” A brand name? No, she said. “A philosophy. It is actually how I live.”
In a V.R. headset, she deftly manipulated controllers and offered design directives for “The Dream Machine Experience,” her hugely ambitious multimedia project. A commission by Lincoln Center that will take over its campus from June 12 to 30, it encompasses A.I., augmented and virtual reality; a digitally collaged garden by the painter Mickalene Thomas; and performances — real and virtual — by artists including Hendryx, Anderson and George Clinton.
Her hope is it will liberate the concert from the stage — “to bring that liveliness, interactiveness, immediacy, wherever I want to be,” she said. Walking through her “forest of ancestors,” a family tree of her influences, is like musical time travel.
Hendryx, who will turn 80 this fall, is a living link between the origins of 20th-century rock and pop (reared on gospel and blues, she was pals with the Rolling Stones and made a cameo in the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” movie) and the 21st-century sounds streaming out of laptops and into virtual spheres. Young composers do most of the coding, but Hendryx wanted get under the hood, too, so she took up programming in her early 70s.
“What I want people to understand,” she said, “is that this is not technology that is separate from us. It is yet another extension of us.”
She is “a genius” and “one of the best songwriters in the world,” according to Patti LaBelle, her onetime bandmate and friend of over 60 years. What was evident from almost the first moment they met, in Hendryx’s senior year of high school, was that Hendryx was not going to be content merely being onstage, behind a mic.
“She doesn’t have an ordinary mind — she’s so far advanced in everything she’s doing,” LaBelle said in a phone interview. “She’s not afraid to take chances. She’s always inventing things and thinking of different ways of doing things.”
But especially as a Black woman, Hendryx has also been “very underestimated, unsung and underrated,” she added. “She’s not noticed, and that bothers me. That’s why I praise her every chance I get. People are missing a whole lot if they don’t know about Nona Hendryx.”
This summer, audiences may get the chance: In addition to her first-of-its-kind, mostly free project for Lincoln Center, she had a residency at Symphony Space, where she recently performed a tribute to Betty Davis, the uninhibited funk singer and wife of Miles Davis. In August, Hendryx will celebrate the semicentennial of “Lady Marmalade” with a concert at the Fisher Center at Bard College.
She once called the song, a No. 1 hit in 1975, “catchy, corny and commercial,” but loved the way it united the Black, gay, disco and funk audiences Labelle was drawing, with its glam look and far-reaching lyrics. “It really did bring people together,” she told me, “because it’s very difficult for you to hate when you’re dancing.”
The group knew “Marmalade” — written by the songwriter-producers Bob Krewe and Kenny Nolan — was a winner during its recording, with Allen Toussaint in his New Orleans studio, LaBelle said, even though she had no idea what its now-famous chorus “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” meant. “We thought it was just a fun song,” LaBelle said, “then finding out it was about a hooker! But she has to make her money too. So we kept singing.”
By then, Hendryx had taken an interest in the logistics of recording, and migrated to the engineer’s side of the booth — almost unheard-of for a female artist, or any woman, in that era. Roberta Grace, an assistant engineer on that session, was a rare exception, later teaching Hendryx how to solder wires for her own board. “I wasn’t happy with the sound” on “Lady Marmalade,” Hendryx recalled, and because she and the band pushed, it was mixed again.
The trio had no more chart-toppers, though, and Hendryx, who had been their main songwriter, stepped out on her own. She never quite achieved the same level of public acclaim, even as she earned critical attention and a wider artistic circle of downtown rockers, along with a Grammy nomination in 1985, for “Rock This House,” recorded with Keith Richards.
Hendryx was quick to join the Black Rock Coalition, a nonprofit founded to counter racism in the industry, and raised money for H.I.V./AIDS and L.G.B.T. causes. Publicly out early — “It’s an open book,” she told The Advocate in 2001, of her sexuality — she has been in a relationship with Vicki Wickham, a British producer and Labelle’s manager, since 1971. They’ve lived in a rent-stabilized Upper West Side apartment, with one room as Hendryx’s gear-filled studio, for more than 40 years.
“She’s been very comfortable in her own skin,” said the tennis star Billie Jean King, a friend for about that long. “She doesn’t go, ‘Oh, well, is this good for my image?’ She’s very authentic. It comes from the center of her being.”
Hendryx releases music only sporadically. “I really, truly know that fame is fleeting,” she said. “And actually, money is fleeting, right? So my joy is in the doing.”
And her doing is often wildly imaginative, like the multi-sensory homage to Sun Ra that she organized at the Met Museum’s Temple of Dendur on Leap Day in 2020.
Clinton, the 82-year-old Parliament-Funkadelic frontman, is her longtime brethren: He did her hair in the ’60s, when he was still a New Jersey barber. A few years ago, after a show, they danced on tables in Ibiza. “A lot of musicians our age are not relevant at this stage in our life, but she’s been able to stay in touch,” he said, because she was experimenting from the jump. “You do that with a risk of not being normal or top of the pop charts,” he added, in a phone interview between tour stops. “But you last much longer.”
At the Betty Davis tribute, in a white blouse with twirling, floor-length sleeves, a skintight holographic silver suit, pompadoured ponytail and big-eyed butterfly glasses, Hendryx looked like she beamed in from a planet only inhabited by Prince (whom she also collaborated with). She frequently ceded the spotlight to her background vocalists, but when she came forward, she killed: Bringing out a falsetto and a growl, she performed almost an entire song in a deep crouch at the foot of the stage, then twerked from atop the drums.
Women in the audience were agog. “I think she does balance work,” one said afterward. “If I squatted like that, I couldn’t get up. I’m going to work on it, though. It’s not too late!”
Shanta Thake, the chief artistic officer of Lincoln Center, who has worked with Hendryx for close to two decades around New York, said her energy level is unparalleled.
“Total rock star,” she said, “in the way that you see Mick Jagger, and you think, how is he still doing this?”
But that onstage stamina and charisma, “she brings that to everything,” Thake said. “She brings it into her emails, into the way that she brings these ideas. The commitment that she has to literally everything she does, I think I’ve never seen in another person.”
Hendryx credits her longevity, and her endurance, in part to her upbringing. “My mother opened her first restaurant,” a soul food spot, “at 73,” she said.
She grew up in Trenton, N.J., one of seven siblings; her mother had a cleaning service, and her father worked on railroads and as an electrician. (Jimi Hendrix is a distant cousin.) “I was a take-apart kid,” she said, with an older brother who encouraged her. Once — only once — they disassembled the TV.
Her tech savvy inspires across generations, and mediums. Thomas, the visual artist, recalled traversing Art Basel in Miami with her last year, and noticing something following them: “Nona’s like, ‘Oh, I have my own drone. It’s recording.’”
Working with Hendryx expanded her ideas about what’s creatively possible, she added. “That is opening up my mind to learn to not be afraid of these new things, because I’m watching her.”
“The Dream Machine Experience,” with V.R. and A.R. by the Australian designer Sutu, and some of Hendryx’s other projects have their roots in her role, starting in 2011, as an artist ambassador at the Berklee College of Music.
When Hendryx arrived, the electronic production and design department had zero female professors — or students. Now, said Michelle Darling, a sound designer who became the department’s first-ever female chair last year, there are a half-dozen women faculty members and many students who were drawn by Hendryx’s example. “She’s been so empowering for all of them,” Darling said.
Everyone I spoke to about Hendryx talked about her as an unrivaled connector and community builder, amplifying people’s strengths. She was an Afrofuturist before she had the name for it, she said, laughing. Now, “I consider myself more of a human futurist,” she explained: A perspective “that doesn’t encompass everyone is not a future.”
She hired Berklee students to work on “Dream Machine,” and added programming by and for young people at Lincoln Center. She was most excited about the pathway she built for all the kinetic, energetic Betty Davis types, as she described them, who have been “told to turn it down, because your frequency is too high.”
“My engagement with young women — young women of color, specifically — is to transfer what it is that I hold, into others,” she said, “so that if they have the vision, they can see it.”
Our “Dream Machine” tour ended with a performance by the Cyboracle, a larger-than-life character Hendryx invented. It’s her — via motion-capture recording — in a silver suit, orange lipstick and platform boots, doing many of the same moves I’d seen her rock onstage. Inside the V.R., Hendryx’s avatar paused to watch, a Nona-loop in digital perpetuity. I peeked beneath the headset, and saw her grinning in amazement.
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