Ani DiFranco - Metamorphosis of a Riot Girl

Ani DiFranco is a singer-songwriter from Buffalo, New York, who rose to prominence in the Nineties thanks to her distinctive vocal timbre, capable of ranging from furious invective to moments of intense anguish, and her non-conformist style, which has made her a feminist icon and one of the champions of neo-punk culture. Skilled at carving out a place for herself in the music business without ever "selling her soul", Ani DiFranco caused a scandal by declaring herself bisexual, but has always refused to be pigeonholed.

She was only nine years old when she began performing in Buffalo clubs, where she met Michael Meldrum, a folk singer who organized concerts for Suzanne Vega and Michelle Shocked. Meldrum immediately noticed her talent: "Ani was waiting for her guitar lesson in a Buffalo instrument shop," he recalls, "and I asked her to play something. The girl with braids down to her knees started playing Jethro Tull's 'Wondering Aloud' and W.C. Handy's 'St. Louis Blues'. She had a great voice for someone so small, and you could tell she wasn't just any old guitarist". So, at fifteen, Ani DiFranco decided to try her luck and moved out on her own. Four years later she had already written a hundred original songs, poised between beat poetry and punk fury. A great admirer of Woody Guthrie, she decided to organize a tribute concert in his memory, with guests like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg. And her love of freedom led her to found her own record label, Righteous Babe Records. Her songs profess a militant feminism, with raw, cutting lyrics that touch on themes like violence, rape, abortion and sexism. Musically, her style is the offspring of Delta blues and Appalachian folk, but also of punk and "feminist" rock in the vein of Chrissie Hynde.

Ani DiFranco aligned herself with the "riot grrrl" movement, a radical feminist movement born in the US, whose philosophy finds expression both in her lyrics ("Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right") and in her look (from her haircut to her tattoos and piercings scattered all over her body). At 19 she released her debut album, Ani DiFranco (1990), entirely acoustic and dominated by obsessive percussion, which features two standout tracks: "Out Of Habit" and "Both Hands". A year later came Not So Soft, which confirmed her style but without leaving much of a mark. More interesting was the following Imperfectly (1992), in which her percussive rock gives life to gripping tracks like "In Or Out", "Coming Up" and "Served Faithfully", followed by Puddle Dive and Like I Said, which hint at new directions within folk-rock.

But the album that launched her to international prominence was the next one, Out Of Range (1994), built on hard, jagged tracks like the title track, "Building And Bridges", "Face Up And Sing" and "Diner To The Canon", balanced by more melodic ones, like the piano-driven "You Had Time". A crossing of urban and traditional styles that caused a minor earthquake on the folk-rock scene, revitalizing a nearly spent genre with a rough poetic streak. "I really feel like a child of folk's historical legacy," she says. "Aside from what I listened to, which always led me to dig deeper into traditional American culture, I started out like so many folksingers, in the coffee houses. My path has been that of someone who starts from a well-defined community and then tries to speak to as many people as possible".

The formula was confirmed on subsequent albums, from the more straightforward Not A Pretty Girl (1995) to the bolder Dilate, in which the "riot grrrl" philosophy finds release in fierce tracks like "Untouchable Face", "Superhero" and the folk-rap of "Outta Me Onto You". Afterwards, Ani DiFranco fulfilled a dream of hers: collaborating with Utah Phillips. The result is The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, a spoken-word album in which Phillips recites while the singer-songwriter handles the music. At just 26, Ani DiFranco could already boast a record: over 1,300,000 copies of her albums sold without any support whatsoever from major distribution.

The double live album Living In A Clip is a showcase of her talent as a performer, even more than as a songwriter. Little Plastic Castle, on the other hand, presents the image of a woman less at war with the world and more at ease with herself, moving between the ethnic-Caribbean digressions of the title track and the fever of "Fuel" (channeling the most neurotic side of Patti Smith), anguished vignettes in the style of Alanis Morissette ("As Is" and "Swan Dive") and vocal showmanship ("Two Little Girls"), all the way to the closing jam "Pulse": 14 minutes of free-form spoken word.

Next came a lesser album, Up Up Up Up Up Up (1998), followed by a more intriguing one, To The Teeth, featuring Maceo Parker on sax and flute, in which the ballad form takes over in intense, biting tracks: "Providence" (featuring Prince on vocals), "Swing", "To the Teeth", "Hello Birmingham", "Back Back Back".

A further demonstration of her talent is the double album Revelling/Reckoning (2000), in which her distinctive punk-folk shows itself in intense tracks such as "Ain't That The Way", "Old Old Song" and "What How When Where", confirming DiFranco's skill at moving from the most vehement atmospheres to the most delicate ones. "My latest songs are more reflective," says the Buffalo singer-songwriter, "and they reflect my age. I've realized that shouting against hardships isn't the only way to smooth them over. But I'm not going through a great period right now, I feel steeped in melancholy. I wanted to express a kind of reckoning with myself. Starting with the whole question of so-called militancy, a term I don't like in the abstract, but which makes sense if it means a search for a strong identity".

Her rejection of the music business, however, remains unchanged: "I make an effort to avoid simply trading my songs as commerce. I've had to deal with structures bigger than me, but I've always found the right intermediaries. I don't judge those who choose to release records with a major label: it's just that the attitude behind what I sing and write leads me to try to stay independent. There are things more important than money, especially when money generates a vicious circle that I myself end up powering while standing still. You get exploited almost without realizing it".

Evolve (2002) seals, by DiFranco's own admission, the end of the musical journey that began in 1999 with Up Up Up Up Up Up. A "last tango" under the banner of a chamber folk-rock sketched out by her guitars, Julia Wolfe's keyboards and an eccentric horn section.

DiFranco slips, depending on the moment, into the role of the anguished rebel (the ten dramatic minutes of "Serpentine") or the intimate songwriter ("Welcome To"). Among the tracks, the intense "Icarus" also stands out, along with the rhythm'n'blues of "In The Way" and the sparkling "Here For Now", with bizarre detours into Cuban salsa.

On the following Educated Guess (2004), however, the Buffalo singer-songwriter gets carried away, playing every instrument herself and growing long-winded in her lyrics, increasingly and confusingly crammed with politics and self-analysis. It's a megalomaniac work, in short, in which the American musician didn't just perform and play the entire tracklist, but also took it upon herself to record and mix the album on an old-fashioned reel-to-reel eight-track.

The result is a return to her roots, to a sound that's as bare-bones as can be, dominated by the voice/guitar dualism, barely bolstered by the occasional bassline or Wurlitzer chime. The "intimate ballad" genre thus prevails, reaching its peak in the acoustic intensity of "Animal" and the seductive bossa of "You Each Time", spilling over into the spoken-word outburst of "Grand Canyon". The title track is above all a confirmation of Ani's interpretive gifts, and there's no shortage of changes of pace either, as in the driving "Bliss Like This" and the soul digression of "Rain Check".

The album, however, betrays a substantial poverty on the songwriting front, too often simply perpetuating patterns and themes we've already heard plenty of times before.

But DiFranco hasn't given up her usual prolificacy, and just a year later she's already ready with a new album, Knuckle Down (2005), once again released on Righteous Babe.

It starts off well, with the jarring title track, which recalls the opening of "Not So Soft" (1991): syncopated, nervy guitar, descending arpeggios, nothing like the soft-jazz sophistry that had all too often polluted her more recent output. "Studying Stones" is the intimate ballad, complete with background violin, that has nothing whatsoever new to offer. "Manhole" kicks off elastic, with that peculiar, almost paradoxically delicate touch (usually she wrenches the strings rather than plays them) that DiFranco has on electric guitar. Then comes "Sunday Morning", and it's another dip in quality, just an opaque, intimate folk ballad and nothing more. "Modulation" leans on a skipping rhythm and a chorus that's a bit silly, very pop. "Seeing Eye Dog" brings something fresh, if only for the bluesy bass intro that draws you in before slowing down and then breaking apart... But the sense of deja vu returns with "Lag Time", which goes by smooth and pleasant, and with the spoken-word of "Parameters", a repeated background loop ad libitum, self-referential poetry with lyrics that are, as always, dense, and this time twilit.

And then "Callous", which opens with the same arpeggio used as the backdrop in "Parameters": the dread of having to hear it all over again starts to rise. Instead, you find a small depressive gem, with a whistle and a glockenspiel accompanying you, frozen, through the chorus. "Paradigm" and "Minerva" stay in the same grey, drowsy mood. It closes with "Recoil", which reuses a chord progression already heard on the record (it's "Modulation", just a semitone lower), folding into a slightly dreamy mood.

Ani DiFranco hasn't aged, she's just stayed exactly the same, which is perhaps even worse. More than that: she's lost the anger of the pissed-off folksinger and shut herself away in her post-divorce depressions, writing predictable lyrics, even if always in elegant rhyming couplets.

In 2006 comes a new album, Reprieve, enriched by the presence of a first-rate musician like Todd Sickafoose, who plays a bit of everything (acoustic bass, piano, Wurlitzer, trumpet and pump organ). The bass's contribution is felt from the opening "Hypnotized", where piano and voice converse, building a radiant melodic opening. The following "Subconscious" unfolds over tighter cadences, while it's again the double bass marking out the slow rhythms of "Nicotine", where scattered synth phrases also surface. Synth and bass once more breathe life into the tense spoken delivery of "Millennium Theater", while it's the wah-wah of the guitars that steeps "Half-Assed" in languid moods. And while the title track wraps another spoken piece in trembling guitar arpeggios and jittery bowed bass lines, "Unrequited" returns to the classic ballad format, showing off yet another vibrant vocal performance.

More arranged and "musical" than its predecessor, Reprieve shows, if nothing else, a will to break free from the shoals of a songwriting style that was becoming increasingly self-referential, opening up to a greater richness of tones and instruments.

Two years later, on Red Letter Year (2008), Ani measures her steps very carefully: slight, essential songs, minimalist ornamentation, balanced vocal (and verbal) performances, an informal, relaxed, homely atmosphere (produced by her partner Mike Napolitano) befitting someone who wants to say a lot with little. The pity is that the record never really changes gear, that behind all that softness and delicacy you can sense a whiff of weariness, that most of the tracks sound like low-fidelity overdubs of the past (the chamber folk-jazz of "Red Letter Year", "Landing Gear" and "Star Matter" echoing Reveilling; the world music of "Alla This" echoing Dilate; the blues of "Round A Pole" and the Sugarhill-style funk of "Emancipated Minor" echoing To The Teeth, the lulling synthetic scores of "Smiling Underneath" echoing Reprieve). Only the philharmonic grandeur of "The Atom" (strings, gong, drums) and the solipsistic folk dirge of "Way Tight" (its brilliant guitar technique laid bare by faint echoes of Moog, double-bass snaps and cobwebs of flute) add something substantial to her by-now vast songbook.

Four years later Ani christens her latest work with the title of a famous American protest song born in 1931, Which Side Are You On? (2012). The album comes out right in the middle of the financial/economic crisis, when the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is organizing sit-ins at Zuccotti Park, demonstrations recalling the distant 1960s and the hippie movement.

If in the early '90s DiFranco was a rebellious twenty-something, now she's a forty-something mother watching her life's rhythms change. But what certainly hasn't changed is her drive to fight and take a stand for the causes she believes in, as seen in the title track.

Her ideals also remain firmly rooted, clearly expressed in "Promiscuity", about sexual freedom, or "Amendment", about women's rights such as the choice to have an abortion. In "Life Boat", which opens the album, Ani takes on the persona of a homeless woman to describe post-Katrina New Orleans. Ecological themes surface in "Splinter" and "J", though in the latter the criticism is aimed more strongly at politics and the decay of society. More intimate and personal are "Albacore", "Hearse", "If Yn Not", but above all the closing "Zoo", where global decay and the lack of prospects for the future lead her to ask the question: "What kind of world will we leave our children?"

The meticulous arrangements bring to life a work rich in nuance, with nothing left to chance. Several tracks blend folk, blues and jazz, creating atmospheres that are sometimes intense, sometimes lighter, but without the punk "rage" that had characterized much of her earlier work. The voice-and-guitar moments on "Hearse" and "Zoo" are lovely, as is the distorted guitar on "Life Boat", the moods of "Albacore", and "Amendment", one of the album's best tracks.

Among the various musicians, guests (Anais Mitchell, Ivan and Cyril Neville, Skerik, Galactic, Bonerama, Rebirth Brass Band, Adam Levy) include Pete Seeger, who in 1967 brought his own version of "Which Side Are You On?" to success, now on banjo in Ani's version.

Contributions by Serena V. Manzoli ("Knuckle Down"), Simone Coacci ("Red Letter Year"), Andrea Vincenti ("Which Side Are You On?"), Federico Piccioni ("Binary"), Claudio Lancia ("Revolutionary Love")

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