outh culture is a sham. Oh man. Especially in Britain. The whole pop thing in my country, too. It s just this reverence of youth. The younger you are, the more ignorant, the better in terms of the pop music sphere.
Twenty-six year old Italian-American singer songwriter Ani DiFranco can speak with the voice of experience; here is a woman who was singing and playing in the bars of her hometown of Buffalo, New York at the ripe old age of nine. Having left school at sixteen, she decided to start her own label and, three years later in 1990, Righteous Babe Records was born. Now, despite many offers from the majors, she produces all her own releases, designs the cover sleeve art and selects the artists she wants to work with, including video directors and t-shirt designers. She has her own release schedule and her output inclines towards the prolific. In short, she has the sort of set up every artist dreams of.
I have this aversion to big business, she explains. It s not that everyone who works for corporations is evil or anything. They re just people who, originally, had this love of music and wanted to be involved but they get corrupted. Problem is, it takes a lot of good people to perpetuate a very fucked up system. The music business just lulls us into radio mayonnaise and a really bland kind of life.
Every DiFranco album differs incandescently from its predecessor. Her most recent project but one, The Past Didn t Go Anywhere, with legendary sixty-one year old folk singer Utah Philips, goes that bit further again. The music is DiFranco s, the voice Philips . However, instead of Utah s songs for the vocals, Ani selected the stories the old man tells in between tunes when he plays live.
Utah and I met a bunch of years ago and became immediate friends, she recalls. There s some bizarre kinship between us, though he s some old guy and I m a feisty young chick! We do very similar work. I was always interested in the stories and wanted to do something with them. There was two hundred hours of live recordings spanning twenty years. I didn t have any linking theme. I chose my favourite tales. They capture those real seminal epiphanies he s had in his life the Korean War, having children, being a drunk on the streets.
Ani DiFranco s music covers everything from hip-hop to rock. Yet she still describes herself as a folk singer at heart. The point for her is that Folk has more to do with an attitude than a style of music. It s how you integrate your politics with your music to develop an oppositional stance to the mainstream.
But what about the purists, the ones who view electrification as the beginning of the end of true music?
There s definitely a lot of folk fascists out there who have an exclusive idea of what folk music is, she offers. But, the majority are very welcoming, really nice people to a fault, sometimes. They re also very unpretentious. People like Utah, Odetta, Pete Seeger,Tom Paxton. They ve been very kind to me. They think it s great I m bringing these young kids into the festival audiences who otherwise might not go. So, they re very accepting.
Ani DiFranco says the Righteous Babe label is not about gender or an age or twentysomething feminist expression. She appreciates the energy and dynamic of youth but thinks there s a lot the young can learn if they re humble enough to pay attention to the people, like Utah Philips, who have come before them.
There s so much pomp and attitude by the kids who may or may not be able to play their instruments, know how to perform, or know a fucking thing about the world they re living in, she declares. They just get a pile of money behind them and become rock stars overnight. They have no idea how to use their position to do something meaningful. It can be very disgusting. It s very terrifying for me that I, too, am implicated in that whole game in some way.
Youthful rebellion is a very powerful force, a very great and strong dynamic, qualifies Ani, but it s like, rebelling against what? It s often just strident kids posing with attitude, no purpose and nothing legitimate that they re fighting against.
Away from the politics, Ani DiFranco s love songs are objects of great beauty and truth. In typically honest fashion, they illuminate that world of ambiguity which lurks at the heart of intimacy. There s a tension between the desire to commit yourself fully to someone and the equally powerful force that draws you away.
I was always hyper-independent, suggests this multi-instrumentalist live wire. There were people that I loved very much but it was hard to hold me down. I m one of those people who s always moved a lot. I ve never been part of a context like a group of friends, a lover and a place to live. I pass through. Hence all those songs about Hey, you were really cute but I gotta go!
Then I made Dilate. I fell in love hard. It was huge, big, inescapable. I started writing all these tortured self-absorbed songs about my own emotions. Suddenly, they were so fascinating to me. I felt like I was the Queen Of Pop (laughs). I was thinking about me me me. which I always thought was so ludicrous, like, c mon there s bigger things than your own heartache!
Dilate is, basically, a whole album of songs about falling in love with someone who was otherwise involved, she reveals. It was very tortured. The anger is about how I ve gone through my life feeling very strong and whole. Then someone comes along and makes me weak. I cannot be complete without this person. So I ask myself How could I let this happen? And I sort of react like, Fuck him . It s a very humbling experience to meet someone and love them more than your own independence.
According to Ani the relationship is better now than during the rough period which Dilate records. She jokes that from this time forth she ll be writing happy happy songs. The truth is, however, she s as surprised by anyone at how thing s have developed.
I had no idea that that kind of thing existed, she maintains sincerely. I guess I should have. People talk about it all the time but it was never really real for me. Neither of us are couple kind of people. I don t gravitate towards that kind of state at all. It s very humorous for us that we find ourselves so disgustingly in love.
This new found peace, however, has also wrought changes in her creative juices.
It s an interesting new dynamic for me, she suggests. I never really had anyone to talk to this way. It wasn t that I felt I needed to. I was never longing or lonely. It s just that, now that I do have someone, I don t write as much. Or as furiously. It s the old fucking clichi. You have to suffer to make art.
As Ani DiFranco s career continues to spiral ever upwards she s currently on tour with Bob Dylan most people ponder whether or not she can maintain her integrity and stay outside the greedy clutches of the corporate music monster. Ani, herself, has no doubts.
People have all kinds of strange notions, she responds confidently. They see me on the cover of a magazine in the States and they cry oh look, she sold out! There s so little understood about what it means to be independent. People have no reference for it. They have these vague symbols for the corporate music industry, and for independence, which they always equate with obscurity.
The more well known I become the more people think that I ve left my political ideals behind. But, there s a lot of energy in me and in other people that can be very constructive, she concludes. It s not all about breaking guitars in some sort of faux nod to the punk era. It s about legitimately putting pressure on the superstructure of today s society. n