Alone Again: Ani DiFranco Solo
By Dean Bonzani
7.18.04
Ani DiFranco has come full circle.
The compact aggro-folkie has returned to her one-woman/one-guitar approach after many years and albums of bands and collaborations, with the January release of her latest work, “Educated Guess.” Her twenty-first album on her own Righteous Babe Records, Educated Guess marks the first time since 1991’s “Not So Soft” that DiFranco has presented material so stripped down to the bone and up under your nose.
While many of her fans have hailed her forays into hip-hop, jazz-folk-fusion, and various band formats, there are those who will enthusiastically embrace DiFranco’s newest work for its intimacy, unabashed artistry, and point-blank frankness.
Older, wiser, and more jaded than when she emerged with her first self-release in 1990, DiFranco dismisses the troops and retires to her tent for some (apparently) much-needed regrouping, recharging, and reflection. The result is Educated Guess.
Not content to simply revert to a solo act for her latest phase, DiFranco wrote, performed all of the instruments on, sang lead and harmony vocals on, recorded, and mixed the album. Her photos grace the inside of the CD cover and enclosed booklet, and her white-out and sharpie art are interspersed between lyrics and poems, including two poems not available elsewhere. Like her 2003 release, “Evolve,” which won a Grammy for Best Recording Package (imagine Andy Goldsworthy doing a photo shoot at a moth farm), she doesn’t skimp on the wrapping. The CD’s packaging is as ambitiously personal, weird, and beautiful as the sounds captured in light on the disc. If the inner booklet were quintupled in size, it would make a splendid coffee table book with its uptown-graphics look, Picasso-like sketches and coffeehouse verse.
Which makes the current version of the squirrel-statured folk firestorm that is Ani DiFranco even more of a one-woman multimedia phenomenon than when she first invented herself more than fourteen years ago.
A native of Buffalo, New York, she sang and played guitar as a teenager, eventually moving to New York City, where she performed her original material in coffeehouses and bars, the latter’s noisy environs forcing her to take a no-holds-barred approach to finger picking, to this day giving onlookers the sense that she’s beating the living snot out of her cherished Alvarez guitars. She also developed a vocal style that swings viciously from hushed velour murmurs to shrill simian yipping, originally intended as much to raise her voice above the clinking of pint glasses as to convey the textures of a lyrical subtext. (Ani fans love her vocal gymnastics— so much power, range, and suppleness packed into such a diminutive frame— while her more porpois-ine, nasal moments are unbearable to some.) Blooding herself on the New York folk scene, she lived the artist’s life, selling her tapes from the trunk of her car, playing everywhere possible, and writing constantly. Her fan base grew steadily, and she gave herself tirelessly to her craft, and to those who were eager to receive it. Put off by the male-dominated music industry, she was inspired to start her own record label as a means to control her own financial and artistic destinies.
As she puts it: "As a feminist, as a political person, my reason for not signing a record deal with any of the major labels is simple. It's so much more important to not perpetuate the system and buy into that whole dynamic of commercial, homogenized art. Starting the business in Buffalo, that was a deliberate decision to reinvest in my community." (http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusicArtistsD/difranco_ani.html)
On November 5th, 1997, DiFranco wrote an open letter to Ms. magazine’s editor, Marcia Ann Gillespie, in response to a blurb in their Oct./Nov. 1997 issue, in which Ani’s financial successes were noted in an obtuse fashion. Now posted on the RBR website, the letter sums up DiFranco’s outlook on the music business, her music, and why she does what she does, perhaps better than any interview or article ever could. Of typically DiFranco length, here’s a choice cut from her screed.
“...I choose relative statistical mediocrity over fame and fortune because I have a bigger purpose in mind,” She writes. “Imagine how strange it must be for a girl who has spent 10 years fighting as hard as she could against the lure of the corporate carrot and the almighty forces of capital, only to be eventually recognized by the power structure as a business pioneer.
I have indeed sold enough records to open a small office on the half-abandoned main street in the dilapidated urban center of my hometown, Buffalo, N.Y. I am able to hire 15 or so folks to run and constantly reinvent the place while I drive around and play music for people. I am able to give stimulating business to local printers and manufacturers and to employ the services of independent distributors, promoters, booking agents and publicists. I was able to quit my day job and devote myself to what I love.
And yes, we are enjoying modest profits these days, affording us the opportunity to reinvest in innumerable political and artistic endeavors. RBR is no Warner Bros. But it is a going concern, and for me, it is a vehicle for redefining the relationship between art and commerce in my own life. It is a record company which is the product not just of my own imagination, but that of my friend and manager Scot Fisher and of all the people who work there. People who incorporate and coordinate politics, art and media every day into a people-friendly, sub-corporate, woman-informed, queer-happy small business that puts music before rock stardom and ideology before profit.
And me. I'm just a folksinger, not an entrepreneur. My hope is that my music and poetry will be enjoyable and/or meaningful to someone, somewhere, not that I maximize my profit margins. It was 15 years and 11 albums getting to this place of notoriety and, if anything, I think I was happier way back when. Not that I regret any of my decisions, mind you. I'm glad I didn't sign on to the corporate army. I mourn the commodification and homogenization of music by the music industry, and I fear the manufacture of consent by the corporately-controlled media. Last thing I want to do is feed the machine.”
These days, her own homespun machine is doing just fine, thanks. A cornucopia of Ani shwag can be purchased from the RBR website, along with an extensive collection of musical works by DiFranco and the stable of artists that RBR represents, including the hyperlucid Dan Bern. Keychains, stickers, fleece pants, caps, patches, magnets, mugs, songbooks, posters— even boxer shorts emblazoned with the “all powerful Amazon” Righteous Babe Records logo. It could be said that the site is an electronic vending machine full of tempting treats for a select segment of our consumer culture to feast upon. (A special slice of our consumer culture held in rapt adoration for their anti-consumer culture heroine, that is. You gotta dig the irony here.)
So where has the journey from the dank, grimy bars and java holes of N.Y.C. to selling out major venues like Carnegie Hall left our tiny songstress?
The answer to that burning question is to be found in Educated Guess.
Its 14 tracks of minimally accompanied guitar/vocal and spoken word pieces are an almost uncomfortably close up view into DiFranco’s current state of heart/mind. Using her lyrical gift to the fullest, she evokes imagery as vivid as a skinned knee’s crimson, generously dumping her dilemmas in the listener’s lap. Separated from her husband of six years, engineer/goatperson Andrew Gilchrist, she sings in “Swim”:
i let you surround me
i let you drown me
out with your din
and then I learned how to swim
Which may or may not be about her heterosexual former life partner and still good friend. Aniologists have picked up the not-so-subtle references to her relationship problems in previous albums, and it looks as though her latest offering may be full of the pangs of disgruntlement. Take “Bodily,” for instance:
i focus on the quiet now
and occasionally i’ll fall asleep somehow
and emptiness has its solace
in that there’s nothing left to take
Whether it’s walking off into solitude, or raging in epic-length poetry at the vileness of the government’s policies and their resulting carnage, DiFranco, as always, has plenty to say. This time, though, it’s all her. She layers her voice in cascading harmonies, some of them so jarring as to force a listener to readjust their notions of “folk”— setting the dial for “jazz” will only result in static, so don’t bother— sometimes sounding as if someone’s singing in an adjacent room, with only a faint melody to guide their harmonizing. At other times, it’s as if a long-dead sister were transmitting in the background on a broken antique tube radio. Sometimes sounding like Rikki Lee Jones, and occasionally sounding like a small dog being dragged forcibly up a flight of steps, DiFranco’s use of the studio is as impressive as her use of the guitar. She invites accident, making the most of room sound and electronic felicity. Forced by intentional limitations (insisting on a White Stripesian 8-track maximum), she digs hard into her own musculature, spanking her six-string like an unhinged nun, pounding out Michael Hedges-like riffs with low funky baselines and topping them off with gorgeous arpeggios and fragile harmonic sweeps. She then spices the mix with treated guitar reminiscent of Adrian Belew and David Torn— disjointed and floating, and ultimately compelling in its oddness.
Musically, DiFranco is still plowing fresh rows of novelty, folding her hard-won engineering and newfound recording skills into her creative mix. While instantly recognizable as hers, the sound she achieves on Educated Guess is definitely one you can’t just walk up to the counter and order. Sensitive to the expectations of her fan base, and ever eager to sidestep those expectations, she’s made an album that brings her career home, chucking an entire mini-era of collaboration and genre cross breeding in favor of a shacked-up, what-do- I-want-to-hear approach. Educated Guess is a consolation, a world-weary protest, a finger in the chest, a late night gripe session, a twin-speak conversation. It’s a long, slow licking of running sores in a crowded room. And while her intensity never peaks at the level of artillery-caliber tunes like “Gravel,” “Napoleon,” and “Untouchable Face,” and the man-slamming is wearing a might thin (“Origami,” sports the endearing lines, “i know men are delicate creatures who need women to unfold them”), the new album will satisfy the faithful and puzzle and delight new listeners.
Performing unaccompanied on tour, Ani DiFranco is a guitar wielding tsunami. Hers is an electrifying presence as she rips her truth from her bosom and gives 300% of it to her audience. In her fervor, she sometimes walks the micro fine line between righteous and self-righteous babe, but the sheer force of her charisma, coupled with her incredible passion and devotion to her art wash away anything less than the absolute perfection demanded of her by so many. And with her latest outing, she delights in changing the equation of that perfection to suit her tastes.
Even carnivorous non-feminists will nod their heads to the beat.
Ani DiFranco at Ardrey Auditorium (?), Sat., July 31 st.
©2005 by Dean Bonzani, All Rights Reserved