Ani, Frankly

"Some days the line I walk turns out to be straight
Other days the line tends to deviate
I got no criteria for sex or race
Just wanna hear your voice, I just wanna see your face."
- Ani DiFranco,'In Or Out'

ANI DiFRANCO makes an unlikely icon for our times. If the zeitgeist is defined by superficiality, vacuousness and the cult of celebrity, the Righteous Babe hopelessly out of step.
But is she? Certainly not, judging by the way she was cheered to the rafters of Dublin's Olympia Theatre at the end of her recent gig there. And Dublin is not alone in succumbing to the magic of DiFranco. In her native America, her stature has risen to the point where the coffee house sessions of her early days are now a distant memory, superceded by sell-out shows in arenas from Noo Yawk to San Fran, from the Great Lakes to the Lone Star State.
Pondering this, you might conclude that there's an army out there marching to the beat of a different drum; and that one of its generals is a young, diminutive, leftist, bisexual woman. If our music, media, culture and spirit appear on the point of expiring from what Bob Dylan once referred to as "the disease of conceit," Ani DiFranco is the antidote. Someone's still rocking in the free world.
* * * * *
DiFRANCO WAS brought up in Buffalo, New York ("There's not really any reason to go to Buffalo unless you're on the way to Niagara Falls. It's just an industrial town but, by now, most of the industry has gone," she comments).
She began performing aged 7, her parents split when she was 11 and, four years later, she left home. By the time she was 18, record companies were queueing up to acquire her signature. Instead DiFranco decided to invest $50 in her freedom. That was the price she paid to register her company, Righteous Babe Records, at the City Hall of her home town.
She remains independent to this day, though in 1996 she signed a licensing deal for Europe with the British label Cooking Vinyl. Thus far she has made 15 albums, including two collaborations with Utah Phillips. DiFranco's workrate is hyper-prolific. Her new album, To The Teeth, is her third of 1999!
Early albums like her eponymous debut, Not So Soft and Like I Said were stark, acoustic affairs, before more instrumentation was added for the likes of 1994's Out Of Range. By the time of 1997's double live CD Living In Clip, the richness of DiFranco's musical influences was becoming clear, her earnestness increasingly leavened by wise-cracking show-woman-ship. Latterly, Little Plastic Castle and Up, Up, Up, Up Up, Up have shown her talent in full bloom.
While the music has become more adventurous, DiFranco's lyrics have retained every ounce of their integrity. The political commitment which was apparent in vignettes like 'Letter To A John' ( "I want you to pay me for my beauty/I think it's only right/'Cos I have been paying for it/ All of my life"), still shines clearly.
But, as DiFranco showed as early as Dilate, she wasn't going to make her art a prisoner of anyone's cause célèbre. That 1996 album was almost exclusively about a destructive relationship. The right-on purists who castigated her for making it were simultaneously wasting their breath and missing the point. Ani has always had the capacity to write love songs of deft sensitivity ('The Diner' being a case in point), together with intimate paeans to other equally intense relationships.
To The Teeth continues her development, including songs about subjects as diverse as the odious tactics of anti-abortionists ('Hello, Birmingham') and soul-searching nightime car journeys ('Cloud Blood'). The music, too, swings from the acoustics of the title track to DiFranco's unique brand of jerky, hiccuping soul-roots. It's yet another tour de force, this time featuring no lesser personages than veteran saxman Maceo Parker and long-time Ani-fan, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
That's the background. Right now, your correspondent is sitting backstage at the Olympia. American accents echo down the corridors, and there is talk of a delayed soundcheck, owing to the absence of the singer, who has not been seen since she departed in search of coffee some time ago. Then the door swings open, and a small figure, all tousled hair, piercings and bubbling vitality wanders in. "Hi" she says, hand outstretched. "I'm Ani."

* * * * *
Dublin is the penultimate stop on a European tour which has enabled DiFranco to execute what she laughingly refers to as "my new strategy - being out of the States whenever a new record comes out there. I just don't want to know!"
So how did the Artist end up contributing vocals to To The Teeth, and how come Ani plays guitar on his latest opus?
"I met him last summer when he came to a show I did in Minneapolis. I had the next day off, so he invited me to his studio in Paisley Park. The way he approached me was so funny. He was like, 'Can I, er, em, can I play on your new record?' And I was like, [adopts mock-doubtful voice] 'Oh, let me sit down and think about that . . . OK, I guess so'," DiFranco laughs.
"Then he said, 'Well, that's my back-handed way of asking if you would play on mine. Maybe we could do a little exchange'. And I was just 'Yeah !!'
"I think he's a beautiful person," she continues. "He's a really striking person and a very, very musical person. He's got such capacity to express himself through anything he picks up, and I felt so dwarfed when I was there."
It seems unlikely that Ani DiFranco, with her well-known aversion to the fame game, could be rendered starstruck.
"Well, no, I don't get starstruck," she responds, "'cos I'm really not that enamoured by stardom. In fact, if anything, I almost have a bias against that. But I certainly get overwhelmed by respect for people. I become a blathering idiot around people who I just think are incredible, whether as artists or as human beings."
TAFKAP is one of the few artists who has retained artistic credibility while also enjoying multi-platinum sales. Mostly, though, major 'alternative' artists like DiFranco exist in an entirely different sphere to the formulaic unit-shifters at, say, the MTV Europe platitude-fest.
"I always find it ironic when I get nominated for Grammys or whatever, because I think my world is below the radar of that whole industry," Ani reflects. "MTV is set up to promote a certain kind of music and a certain kind of image, and it's all about the business. Then there's the people who I idolise like Maceo Parker - old school funk, out there touring his ass off, year after year, decade after decade - he's never on MTV, but he just rocks my world.
"There's the world of working musicians and non-corporate music which exists everywhere, and then there's . . .that," she concludes, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
* * * * *
Much media attention has focused on the Righteous Babe phenomenon, and, true enough, DiFranco has been uniquely successful for an artist who has remained so uncompromising. In previous interviews, however, she has pointed out that she should not be seen as an "isolated genius". From her perspective, things have simply taken their natural course, developing organically at a safe distance from the major label production line.
"I couldn't tell you what night of my life I went from being amateur to professional. I played in every bar in Buffalo a million times, and then I decided to move to New York City just to have more bars to play," she says, laughing.
"I suppose when I made my first little cassette tape I found that the cassette could reach further than I could because people would mail it to each other. That's when I started touring, although at the time touring was getting on a Greyhound bus, going to a college maybe a hundred miles away and playing in the cafeteria, y'know?"
Ani has also made reference to the sense of community that existed at the time among NYC's songwriters. Further afield, meanwhile, the likes of Gillian Welch seemed to provide an alternative to the established route to success. Does she still feel that 'the stars are underground'?
"Well, there's so many people who make music independently. I'm sure there's hundreds in this town - local artists who make their own records and sell them at their shows. That's all I was doing. And it's pretty much all I'm still doing. I just happen to have got to a level of sales which is 'impressive' or 'noteworthy' to the major labels. So I've become the example of their worst fears!" she says gleefully.
While numerous acts initially set off on the independent route, many fall by the wayside entirely, while others take the first substantial deal the majors dangle in front of them. Surely as Ani DiFranco's popularity grew she was offered similar inducements?
"Oh yeah."
Was she tempted?
"Absolutely! I'm not some kind of saint or anything. It's a lot of work and I also had to come to terms with a lot of feelings of jealousy. People would be opening my shows one day, and six months later they'd sign their record deal. Then six months after that they'd be on the cover of every magazine and they'd have a hit song on the radio. And I'd still be in the same fucking bar! I'd be thinking, 'What's my problem? Why?!'
"But," she continues, "I always really loved my job, and that is what helped me to have the patience to spend ten years to get here instead of six months."
Presumably many of those who initially overtook DiFranco have now outlived their usefulness to the industry and faded back into obscurity?
"Well, from my perspective it's always funny," she says, "because as each new chick rock star comes along I get compared to them. But every year goes by and it's a different person I'm likened to."
* * * * *
LYRICS ASIDE, To The Teeth represents a further musical development for DiFranco. It is her most realised album to date in terms of achieving an adventurous and coherent sound which embraces both her acoustic roots and more eclectic, raucous influences.
"Now I have a band, which is a completely different bag of doughnuts from playing solo," she offers. "Even when I write a song, I immediately start to translate it to the band. The band has become my instrument as opposed to just the acoustic guitar, so the albums sound different now."
Many solo artists, though, instead of capturing a genuine 'band sound' seem to write acoustic songs and simply stick a band on top.
"Yeah, exactly! And I think I've come through that. I made plenty of recordings of acoustic guitar songs with a band stuck on top, but now I've really got a band together of musicians who I love, and we've started to develop our own language, and that, in turn, has deepened."
Was it difficult to find a group of musicians with whom she felt that degree of empathy?
"Totally. It's like finding a lover . . .and then some !" she laughs. "Find somebody you can spend 24 hours a day with, months at a time, and gel with artistically. Then, also, I feel like I'm constantly changing and constantly learning. In any relationship, the challenge is always to change together or to keep relating together as you grow. It's fucking hard, you know?"

* * * * *
THE TITLE track of the new album is a broadside against the glamorisation of violence in American society, which boasts lines like "Every year now like Christmas/Some boy gets the milkfed suburban blues /Reaches for the available arsenal/And saunters off to make the news." DiFranco's rage builds until she suggests with a combination of irony and bitterness, "Here's what I suggest we do/Open fire on Hollywood/Open fire on MTV/Open fire on NBC / And CBS and ABC."
It's a savage and sad song. Presumably it was written in the wake of the Columbine shooting?
"Yeah. That was just such a startling example of something that happens with more and more frequency in the United States. It has become ridiculous. The whole stereotype of America being this gun-toting, fucking violent place - it's realising itself to such a degree.
"I think the media certainly plays a big part in that - the owners of the TV stations and the movie companies and the record companies that promote gun violence and gun culture to youth are, I think, hugely complicit. And, of course, the NRA - the organisation that makes sure the government supports guns above people at all times," she says forcefully.
Charlton Heston isn't going to feature prominently on the DiFranco Christmas Card list, then. Ani also points out the danger inherent in casual violence becoming an ever-present element of popular culture.
"I think it's so unfortunate when people point the finger at the first, most obvious example, like 'this rap artist', as though it's that poor, disenfranchised man, who grew up in a very violent situation and who is speaking of the violence he is all too well acquainted with, as if it's his fault. Behind him is an army of white guys in suits who choose what they're gonna sell and are making