Explain what you hate about Ani DiFranco.

"Folky Drivel" would be a great name for a record label. Better than "Righteous Babe", at any rate.

Now where did I put that "A Mighty Wind" DVD?

Although maybe she's hot. Is she?

Incidentally, the irony of Sasha's complaint is that Ani's old (and not especially numerous) feminist rants were always funnier and more involving than the more generalised Mike Moore style anti-military/industrial complex stuff that she does now (though in her defence "Your Next Bold Move" - which I disliked initially for the aforementioned reasons - utilises its inter-connected metaphoric imagery superbly)

http://www.righteousbaberecords.com/images/m_chunkmagnets.jpg

Haha Revelling/Reckoning was my introduction to Ani! And it's ironic given what's generally considered to be her biggest flaw (self-editing) that her double album is the only consistently brilliant LP I've heard of hers. Dilate comes close, but nothing else.

Yeah what's also weird is that all the Ani fans seem to rate To The Teeth and Evolve - neither of which really struck a chord w/ me bar a few fantastic songs on the former - and dislike Revelling/Reckoning.

Here's what I wrote on R/R when I got into it.

"So What" might be one of my favourite Ani songs... lyrically amazing, and I love the distant jazz clarinet circling her.

"So What" *is* great - the 3 drinks/2 drinks bit in the chorus, or "but nothing comes at first/and little comes at all/and when inspiration finally hits you/it barely even breaks your fall". Likewise I love the line in "Rock Paper Scissors": "Desire drags me right out of myself/like a gas-soaked rope tied to a piece of coal/i'm getting pretty good at looking on the bright side/while the flames rip along the sand and swallow me whole." Or the extended riff in "Marrow" on "a taste of your own medicine". Great stuff! Some of my favourite lyrics ever.

The 3 beers/2 beers line - yes! Also, the munificence of metaphors on "School Night", and the "you were the make-me-mad guy... now I am the bad guy" couplet on "Sick Of Me". R/R is a perfect summer album, actually - the ballads are all languid and warm, and the more upbeat ones are totally sun-kissed. "OK" in particular needs some love!

now i have to find out what alex in nyc looks like.

*cough*FranklinBruno*cough*.

Disapointment awaits ye

Yeah the whole house burning down metaphor thing in "School Night" is amazing. It's almost as if she realised at some point that formulating extended metaphors was her special skill like a strong backhand or something and just spent months and months stretching it and stretching it. Love "OK" too!

Ani is attractive.

The extended metaphor thing also works really well on the more political songs on R/R too - Ani's so much better when she makes her point by twisting and bending language rather than sloganeering. It comes across in the performance too - the way she rhymes on "Tamburitza Lingua" is so offhand and natural, in stark contrast to something like "Serpentine" which is very forced.

I suspect the reason why the political songs on R/R work is that she sounds so tired of didacticism. In a funny way I suspect that September 11 "rejuvenated" a lot of occasionally political musicians like Ani in a manner that was ultimately negative - the perceived urgency of saying something once again took priority over the other two crucial issues: whether something can be said, and, if the answer to that is yes, how it should be said.

"i search your profile for a translation
i study the conversation like a map
'cause i know there is strength
in the differences between us
and i know there is comfort
where we overlap

come here
stand in front of the light
stand still
so i can see your silhouette
i hope
that you have got all night
cause i'm not done looking yet

each one of us
wants a piece of the action
you can hear it in what we say
you can see it in what we do
we negotiate with chaos
for some sense of satisfaction
if you won't give it to me
at least give me a better view

come here
stand in front of the light
stand still
so i can see your silhouette
i hope
that you have got all night
cause i'm not done looking yet

i build each one of my songs out of glass
so you could see me inside them i suppose
or you could just leave the image of me
in the background i guess
and watch your own reflection superimposed

i build each one of my days out of hope
and i give that hope your name
and i don't know you that well
but it don't take much to tell
either you don't have the balls
or you don't feel the same

come here
stand in front of the light
stand still
so i can see your silhouette
i hope
that you have got all night
cause i'm not done looking yet"

I love how each verse introduces a slightly stronger note of doubt and bitterness into what is, musically and in its chorus, a very sweet love song. And again the the use of extended metaphors: the notion of glass houses used to imply both transparency and reflectivness.

It all probably comes across as deeply unimpressive to the non-fan...

Similarly I love the first stanza of "This Bouquet":

"Got a garden of song where I grow all my thoughts
Wish I could harvest one or two for some small talk
Seems like I'm starving for words whenever you're around
Nothing on my tongue, so much in the ground..."

Part of what I've been thinking about was inspired by listening to Imperfectly, which is probably her most didactic album in terms of so many of the songs being almost straightforward statements of her politics etc. (see "In or Out", "Make Them Apologize", "The Waiting Song" etc.) and thinking "okay, so these lyrics are pretty didactic, but I still love them. What's wrong with didactic ultimately?

Like most things when talking about music you can dig deeper here, and say, "okay, so it's not a question of whether something is didactic or not, but whether it gets away with being so." And then you have to work out the ways in which the music is persuasive in making you either accept or look past or even enjoy the didacticism.

I think with Ani, or at least with her early stuff, it's precisely because you can tell that she's drawing no distinction between her personal songs and her political songs (I think I made this point upthread) that the rants lose their lecturing, hectoring quality - she's too personally caught up in what she's singing abou. So when she sings "cos the music business is still run by men/like every business of everything/but I can sing/like a son of a bitch/make 'em twitch around their eyes/make them apologize" it doesn't actually feel that different to elsewhere on the album where she sings, "oh it's good/good to see you again/good to meet your girlfriend/I'll try not to wonder where you are/when you go outside to kiss her/in the front seat of your car."

This becomes less true later on, perhaps "Fuel" was the first political song she did that felt more like propaganda than confession, even though I liked it a lot at the time. Now it reminds me a bit of Michael Franti's "Rock The Nation" or something.

I don't think that this early entanglement of personal and political goes all the way in explaining why Ani's lyrics work for me, but it's a big part of it. Another part of it that, because so much of the politics is expressed through stories or vignettes or very carefully constructed metaphors, you get these very specific and at times quite layered "political" statements - like, the fact that people call "In Or Out" her "lesbian" song seems so off the mark to me, and perhaps even ironic, when it is in fact skewering the possessive chauvinism that straight men and lesbian women feel towards her.

More generally though, I guess a lot of my liking this stuff comes down to getting into Ani when I was 14 and thus almost having a contractual agreement with her music that I'll at least give it a chance to win me over.

is this a joke?
No disrespect intended, it's just a funny agreement from someone whose vocal affect could also be deemed unique in this way.

Her vocals never really bothered me. I think what drew me to her work was a combo of the prose and instrumental precision. Excellent on the acoustic.
And, I really do think she has some great lines, but those, also, can at times be hit or miss. There are certain vulgarities she fits into her verses that make me wonder, why. Just. Why? ("but you can't will yourself happy/you can't will your cunt wet." Really, did she HAVE to? The tune is grating along just fine and then I realize, ehh, I just can't belt along any more.)

"More generally though, I guess a lot of my liking this stuff comes down to getting into Ani when I was 14 and thus almost having a contractual agreement with her music that I'll at least give it a chance to win me over."

I might say this is part of the reason that I genuinely do still enjoy her music. I've been an Ani fan ever since I heard the live track "Gravel," and only an amateur on the guitar, I could not for the life of me figure out how she was playing like that. Maybe it's the curiosity as to if she can continue to impress on that level.

1. Her hair
2. The mispronunciation of her own first name. There are few things more obnoxious than having an Ani fan lecture you about how it's pronounced "Aah-nee", and not Annie.

Most of the negatives about Ani have been cited here; annoying vocal stylings, a lyrical persona bordering on the narcissistic, jam band/world music/fake funk moves, slam-poetry-style wordsmithing, heavy-handed political posturing. What redeems her is strong songwriting and a body of work that's nothing to sneeze at; her first 6-7 albums are pretty consistent. As a non-fan, I think her best is '94's Out of Range, though Living in Clip is the perfect primer/crash course/compilation for that period.

Those who hate her voice should check out the self-titled first album. Stripped-down production, her vocals are straightforward - this was before her goofy melisma went into overdrive. And it's arguable that she never wrote anything as good as the first track, "Both Hands," a perfect little jewel of a song (avoid the pretentiously overblown version on Living In Clip - a portentous sign of the beginning of the end).

The earlier material derived a lot of its crackle from the tension between Ani and her drummer, Andy Stochansky. Clearly it's always been The Ani DiFranco Show, but when Andy left in '98 things declined in intensity. I saw them (w/ Sara Lee on bass) do a version of "Shy" in '97 in Nashville that was so urgently desperate it was frightening. There's always been something a little punky about Ani that separated her (at least in my mind) from Dave Matthews and others of his ilk.

And yeah, she's got a way with words. Here are a few of hers that stuck with me:

In each other's shadows
we grew less and less tall
and eventually our theories
couldn't explain it all
I'm recording our history
now on the bedroom wall
and eventually
the landlord will come
and paint over it all
-Both Hands

I was 11 years old
he was as old as my dad
and he took something from me
I didn't even know that I had
- Letter To A John

One thing I find interesting about Ani DiFranco's career is how it demonstrates the speciousness of the "selling out" concept. Musicians don't sell out as much as they burn out, as inspiration provides diminishing returns over the course of a career. This naturally-occurring process is usually mirrored by an increase in popularity and an affiliation with larger labels that is mistaken for a cause-and-effect relationship. Ani's independence did little to prevent an eventual aesthetic decline. Even my wife, the self-described "Ani nut," finds the post-Little Plastic Castle material slow-going.

this is the pinnacle of eloquence and you hit every annoying notion that represents "Ani-dom" to me!!!
WELL DONE!!!!
and let's face it, it's ALL about the fans near fanatical defense of everything she's ever done that put most people off...as is the case w/ most band, innit?

and hey, i'd know - my ani obsessive phase began my freshman year of high school and ended my freshman year of college, when i replaced her with sleater-kinney and le tigre and the slits and bratmobile for my feminist girlpunk jollies.

but her good stuff (imperfectly, out of range, dilate, to the teeth, parts of little plastic castle) is some of the best, most tough and smart and sensitive songwriting i've ever heard. i've finally come round to liking her again, and i must say, dilate still remains one of the most heartbreaking relationship albums, right up there with "blood on the tracks" and "the meadowlands". i really don't like her warbly ness and weird vocal tics, but when she's just singing - angry or sad - it's very powerful stuff.

and she is an absolutely brilliant guitar player. her fingers must be made of some space age material that never scuffs or anything. seriously.

like someone said in a previous post - she just needs an editor, or at least shouldn't record and release what seems like every single song she ever writes. her last few albums have been depressingly mediocre.

She uses some kind of false press-on fingernails (reinforced w/ glue and/or tape) for picking IIRC.

ended my freshman year of college, when i replaced her with sleater-kinney and le tigre and the slits and bratmobile for my feminist girlpunk jollies.

Also, she seems to be a gateway artist: a bit eccentric while still accessible, but mostly a bag of stems and seeds, hooking nascent music nerds and guiding them towards the uncut stuff. Like Jane's Addiction. Is there a thread on bands like that?

i used to admire the way she approached her career (diy, yadda yadda yadda) until i found out that her parents hired a harvard mba (at a cost of $30k/year) to manage her career when she was starting out.

Not as indestructible as you might think - she had to cancel a tour recently to recover from some nerve damage issues with her hands. One of those "take a break or you'll never play again" things...