Ani, You're The One!

Brrrnng. The telephone rings and suddenly this songwriter who's seldom been stuck for words is staring blankly at the receiver. Should she answer and turn her HP interview into a tripartite convention, or should she ignore it in the hope that it will simply go away. Ani DiFranco is a fast learner, and like most Irish people, she ignores it, ostrich-like, in the hope that it'll go away. And suddenly it's no wonder that this woman feels right at home.

Though not exactly a regular visitor here, Ani DiFranco might just as well be one, judging by the reception she gets as soon as she sets foot onstage at the Red Box. She attracts an eclectic mix of earnest late teens, sassy twenty and thirtysomethings, along with a coterie of lesbian followers, many of whom feel it necessary to declare their undying devotion to her at regular 3-minute intervals. DiFranco's moved into the arena circuit in the US of late, which makes her gig in the relatively minuscule Red Box an even greater coup—and boy, does the audience let her know it. At times during her show, she betrays a genuine bemusement at the crowd's reverence for DiFranco, the artist, but in person, she's tickled by the chance to scale down the live show, if only for a while.

"I miss the days of clubs," she offers, with an air of pragmatic regret, "because I think what I do is all about making that contact. In the bigger venues it becomes really challenging to keep it intimate, but it's nice too, to have people who want to hear the music! Be careful what you wish for!"

DiFranco's just released her 12th album, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, (aka Up By 6 SL), and maintains a work rate that'd have most of the rest of us lining up for cardiac surgery. After last year's divine Little Plastic Castle, and her critically-acclaimed collaboration with Utah Phillips on The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, DiFranco's fast making a name for herself as all-around wonderwoman. Producer, writer, singer, polemicist, and most of all, master of her own destiny, DiFranco's boldly gone where even the big earners (U2, TAFKAP, Madonna) have failed to go: and that's straight to the hot seat as founder-owner of her own record company (the exquisitely-titled Righteous Babe), and recipient of the largest proportion of royalties per record of any recording artist. A mighty fine achievement by anyone's standards, and certainly one that's got more than a handful of industry types hot under the collar. Basically, Ani DiFranco calls the shots when it comes to making music, and that's how she intends to do it from here on too.

Her speedy Gonzales work rate is less a source of stress than one of stimulation for DiFranco.

"I feel very privileged to be able to do what I love to do," she grins, "and make it a job. Someone asked me the other day if I was going to slow down or take a vacation, but I get a little loopy on vacations, y'know?

"I feel best when I'm working and I lose a sense of myself when I'm not. Touring all the time helps me to learn what it is that I do. I find that if I take even a few weeks off, my fingers get slower and weaker, my hands cramp and my voice isn't as supple. It's amazing how short a time it takes to lose it! It's exhausting work, but it's also invigorating, so it's kind of give and take that I thrive on."

DiFranco's at her razor-edge best when she sings of the politically-castrated times in which we live. She articulates the economic schizophrenia of the '90s US better than any of her contemporaries, but yet still manages to draw some sustenance from the quirks and foibles of public life back home.

"Y'know the ironic outcome of the whole circus that has been going down in the States," she offers, referring to the Clinton/Lewinsky shenanigans, "is that Clinton's approval rating is higher than any other president since Roosevelt. They love him. Nothing like a sex scandal to make people really relate to a politician for the first time.

"And I have this sneaking suspicion that Hillary might possibly be the first woman president," she enthuses. "People really respect her, so I'm hoping that this might lead to a Democratic swing, that people will get fed up with the vehemence of conservative Republicans and the stupidity, and costly meaningless crusade that they've been on. I'm hoping that it'll at least galvanise the public against them, because ever since Reagan and Bush, America has been under this reign of very conservative Republicanism which has hurt so many people in so many ways."

The cynical opportunism of the political system has left DiFranco with a jaundiced view of what qualifies for political attention (and media coverage) these days.

"You never saw the word homelessness in the paper until after 1980 when Reagan was elected," she notes. "I see this whole war on drugs as basically a thinly veiled disguise for a war on poor people, criminalising drug use and victimising the poor."

Casting her eye around for role models as she was growing up, Ani DiFranco wasn't exactly overburdened for choice. The fact was that she could've counted on the fingers of one hand the number of women who'd had successful careers and had not been screwed by the music industry in the process.

"There wasn't a lot of precedent that I could look to, when trying to invent my own world around me, in terms of not signing a record contract," she recalls, wryly. "What I've done in the music industry: people tend to assume that it has to do with artistic freedom and not wanting somebody to tell me what my album should sound like. But for me it's just much bigger than all of that. It's about not wanting to participate and perpetuate a system which is basically big business, capitalism. Basically, capitalism is fundamentally opposed to the interests of people and art, and there's so much movement towards corporate control in the States. All the restaurants are chains, the music stores are big chains putting small independent stores out of business, and huge corporate entities control radio totally. So the music industry is simply not exempt from that kind of corporate takeover. I just don't see a lot of consciousness about that, about trying to counteract that."

This apathy, which virtually amounts to lobotomised consumers too comfy to rise up against the system, isn't enough to overwhelm DiFranco though. It'd take more than what Martin Amis called the "Moronic Inferno" to steer her off course.

"The thing is, that I belong to a folk singing tradition," she says, "and I'm one of many exceptions in the States. I might be the person who's taken it the furthest, but there's a whole underground community, like Gillian Welch, who was here recently, of politically motivated and aware sub-corporate music. I'm not some genius who came out of nowhere. I was following the example of the community that I came from. So what's happened is that enough people came to my shows and bought my records that I blindsided the industry and they were like: 'how did this happen?!'"

Perhaps the most pressing question now, given her phenomenal success to date, is how to avoid stumbling into that same corporate dungheap that she's so carefully sidestepped up to now. What are the guarantees that Righteous Babe doesn't lie back and metamorphose into Corporate Babe some time in the future?

Ani DiFranco slowly smiles at the vista, one that's evidently not so much appalling, as downright unthinkable.

"I think that, no matter how big you grow, that doesn't mean that your priorities have to change," she insists. "I mean, I think that those big record companies never gave a shit. Columbia Records at its inception was exploiting musicians. All of the rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll artists, many of whom were African-American, were paid a pittance for their recordings, and never owned anything, so they never saw the royalties that they should've. So there's a long history of the record companies exploiting musicians. But if you start with a different perspective, and you retain the core, I think it's going to work out. Righteous Babe records is me and my manager, Scott, who's a very political person and a handful of people who work at the office. And that's it."

In fact, DiFranco's already put her money where her mouth is, courtesy of the financial rewards of her last dozen records.

"I think, if anything, now that we're on a firmer footing, financially," she offers, "we see more opportunities to enact change. This is going to sound wacky, but we're getting involved in death penalty defence work. In the U.S. we still have capital punishment, and the criminal justice system is something that concerns me a lot. We have this culture of imprisonment, building many prisons and locking up so many young people. So what we've decided to do is fund a lawyer, who's working down in Georgia and Alabama, defending death penalty inmates. That's work that my manager Scott used to do, before he became my manager! That might sound like an incongruous thing for a record company to do, but for me, it's all connected, you know."

That's the DiFranco way alright—aspiration and realisation making more comfortable bedfellows than they ever manage to do on the political stage.

Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up is out now on Righteous Babe/Cooking Vinyl.