ani difranco
Ani Difranco photographed by Ned Schenck
the words of ani difranco
You can dangle your carrot but I ain't gonna reach for it, 'cause I need both my hands to play my guitar. No, I don't prefer obscurity. But I'm an idealistic girl and I wouldn't work for you, no matter what you paid. And I may not be able to change the whole fucking world, but I can be the million you never made."
- lyrics from the song "The Million You Never Made," from Not a Pretty Girl
but i'd rather pay my dues to the six people sitting at the bar than to all those men in their business suits who say i''ll take you away from this if you'll just get in the car'
—lyics from the song "The Next Big Thing"
Views on Rebellion/Ideology
The world is completely fucked, as beautiful as it is, and it seems like if you really care about something you want the best for it. If you're not angry about something, then you don't care enough. Because there's so much injustice. Basically, we are given the option in life of staying at home, drawing the curtains and sitting on our couches, complaining about everything; or getting out there and trying to change it. It's one thing to point at something and say 'That sucks.' It's another thing to try to fix it, pick it up and work with it. To be really pissed off and really passionate about things is, to me, just necessary. Just because you're being critical of your government or of your society doesn't mean that it's negative at all. I see all my music - the anger, the love songs, whatever - as coming from a place of respect, and it's that I care so much, I expect more from this world. We can do better.
In a historical perspective, women's politics exist more in terms of human interrelationships, which is what we've been assigned to take care of in society. People look at a chick singing about her abortion or her relationships and think, 'Oh, that's hyperconfessional, personal,' but to me it's all political. It's all related.
Music / Lyrics / Poetry / Art
Folk music is not an acoustic guitar--that's not where the heart of it is. I use the word 'folk' in reference to punk music and rap music. It's an attitude, it's an awareness of one's heritage, and it's a community. It's subcorporate music that gives voice to different communities and their struggle against authority. People my age find folk music very uncool--it's just terribly, terribly uncool. I like music with holes in it, sparse sound, and the challenge of having very few people doing a lot, rather than a lot of people doing just a few things.
Music allows me a means to try and teach myself about my life. I've sort of invented this job for myself where I write these little letters to me that end up as songs. I usually present myself with a problem -- something that happened -- and then I remind myself of what I did and what the result was. Then I suggest what I could have done better so that I won't be such a pathetic fuck and next time rise to the occasion [laughs]. It's a very strange, convoluted, organic process, but by standing up on stage and trying to sing my little casual manifestoes, I'm slowly learning the stuff of what to do during the day.
I don't write with a grand notion of presenting myself with ultimate truths or some crazy shit like that. I often write almost subconsciously. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm writing to tell myself until months later and something I wrote about in my song will happen. I used to think it was spooky. Like, woo, how did I foretell that? But I don't think there's anything remarkable about that. I think that subconsciously we know so much that we're not consciously pondering, and that my subconscious is trying to guide my conscious. I put all my personal experiences into songs and admit them to copious amounts of strangers. So it is very difficult for the poor unfortunate people in my life who see themselves portrayed through my perspective onstage. I know that it takes a very strong person to stick around a chick like me who has such a big mouth.
Look, my songs are just little letters to me-they're like, Okay, this is what happened, this is what you did wrong, this is what you'll do next time. I've never said "I am the truth, I am the way." But a lot of women project onto me the embodiment of their own tansition from girlhood to womanhood-learning to be agressive or just be themeselves. And I think it's good that people take certain issues seriously. But I can't solve the problems of my own life, let alone anyone else's, so taking me seriously is a big mistake. (laughs) I certainly wouldn't."
That whole introspective singer-songwriter thing has been kind of foisted on me. Some people perceive what I do in that way because I write songs through my own experience. But whenever people say, 'Well, your work is very confessional,' I say, 'It's no confessional. I'm not confessing anything. I haven't sinned. These are not my secrets. This is just my life; this is the stuff I've seen, the stuff I did, and what I thought about.' There are different ways of speaking your political perceptions, and it may be [talking about] an event that occurred in your life or an event that occurred in your town... but each is a valid path to a certain realization. I think that what we both do is very much about our small, little epiphanies along the way, moments of connection between things.
I think I'm so aware oftentimes of the musicality of speech and the language, of the rhythms of it, the melodies of the way that we talk. So I hear music in poems, and in songs, of course, there's poetry there. I wish I could say I was telling tall tales, but yeah, I've always written from my experience. It's been a really, really big challenge for me … to write from a much less heroic place than I've written from in the past.
I don't know what it's like for other performers, but I know when I'm playing I'm going a mile a minute. There's so much stimulus, so many little faces to look at, so many little noises to listen to, each one of them triggering something. A lot of survival techniques developed over years playing acoustic guitar in bars are infused in my playing. My playing got more and more aggressive as a way of trying to keep my head above water. Now I just do it 'cause it's fun.
There's Utah Phillips. I don't know if you know who he is... Well, he's kind of somebody that's known in the world of folk music and some political circles, but the big, bad world outside of those small communities don't really know about him. In my mind, he's kind of a national treasure, right on the level with some of the people who are more well-known like Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. But Utah is very much in the folk-singing activist/ anarchist/ trainhopping/ storytelling vein. I had this idea for a long time to make an album of his stories. When he plays, he's a folk singer. He plays songs, but he has a penchant to prattle on and talk and just shoot the shit. In between playing union songs and old folk ballads he would tell the most revelating stories. He has albums of all of his songs, as musicians are wont to do. I just wanted to make an album of him talking and sort of put music to it so it was at least somewhat accessible to, let's say, my audience, so that maybe some of them would sit down and listen to him. He gave me reams and reams of cassette tapes, which was basically his whole career documented on these one-of-a-kind, motley cassettes that people had handed him over the years. I had them all put onto digital audio tape and went from there.
The pop music realm has a huge disrespect for our elders. It's all about worshipping youth. Youth has a lot of energy, and there's a lot of important shit that goes down in youth culture, but I don't think that means you ignore your elders or where you come from. People may constantly want to be inventing the new alternative, which so quickly gets co-opted and turned into just a cookie-cutter formula, with just a slightly more distorted guitar or something, whereas they might be ignoring the fact that they could take the same old tools--an acoustic guitar--and be working in an old, crusty medium like folk music, and do something totally new.
People have been asking me personally, for instance, for a book of poetry for a long time. So I'm thinking of making a book of poetry. But that's still all about little me and what I really want to do soon is make a sort of a documentary film. Those seem like big words to use even. What I want to do is drive around all summer with a couple of other pinch hit drivers and people who know how to run cameras and go to folk festivals. I wanna make a movie about folk music as seen through the lens of folk festivals. I've spent so many years at them. There's this incredible wealth of music that the general public doesn't have any exposure to, period. It's a strange crowd of hippies and beads and they're all out in a field flailing their arms and meanwhile, the music that happens on the stage is all... it's really incredible, folk and roots and world music.
I went to art school for a couple of years but this folk music thing sort of takes over one's whole life and, you know, it's kind of like whenever you become known for being one thing, then I'm Ani D. the chick singer, whatever. So sometimes all our identities become pushed into the background as we, I don't know, grow up and get jobs or something. So painting and also dancing... my first love was dancing, I did that from when I was, I don't know, single-digit until I was twenty in little regional companies. But, so these are the sacrifices that you make to try to work on one thing, say things goodbye. But I still get to... I don't get to dance so much, but I still get to paint when I go home for a few days.
Audience / Perception
I'm a young woman who sings about my life and attempts to empower or inspire myself through my music, other young women get vicariously empowered or inspired by it. At my shows, there's a heavy girl vibe. There's always a feeling of strength and, hopefully, community among women. But what that often translates into is very overbearing, very demanding -- almost carnivorous -- women that come at me. Often the women are much more bold than the men at my shows -- which is an interesting reversal of the whole rock & roll dynamic.
I'm aware of the fact that I'm a symbol when I'm doing my job. I'm not so much a person in my public life. I'm an object for people to project things on. I don't feel like the superhero that sometimes I'm made out to be, but I guess I do feel responsible to other young women, and I do feel fortunate. . . I don't know if fortunate is the right word. I guess I feel like, yeah, there's a pressure there, and I'm up for it. and I'll just try to be as honest as i can and try to hold up under it.
We all need to see ourselves affirmed somewhere in our culture, those of us who aren't on the television or in the history books... We all need to have our identities affirmed in our culture. We all want heroes to inspire us. So I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that. Oftentimes, that becomes distorted because of a lack of something in our own lives. But as a basic premise, it's not a bad thing to have a hero.
In terms of the way people perceive me, the people who know me and know my work, who come to the shows, I feel pretty understood. But then there's a lot of people outside of that who just form opinions based upon media, without ever coming to a show and seeing what it is that they have an opinion about. I could probably stay up every night worrying about that, but I'm not sure what good it would do. I don't see my own work in terms of finger-pointing. People who stereotype me as an angry person come from very far outside of myself and my community…It's funny because, in my experience, the people who bring the most anger, the most rage over injustices, onto the stage, into their work, those are the nicest people. I mean, the people who give a fuck. Honestly, what is said about me in the media is not my greatest concern. That's part of the job; people you don't even know, never ever will know, stating definitively who and what you are, what you are doing and what it means.
I'm appreciative of the people who listen to my music, who get something out of it. But I think it is so much more useful to have a relationship of equals. It scares me to see people wanting me to speak for them, because I can't. I can only speak for myself. I may be an inspiration for someone to go speak for themselves, but that's pretty much all I want to do. That's all I'm willing to do. I don't want to be an icon or a symbol. I'm so human. But sometimes people seem to be very unaware of the actuality of the situation. They don't seem to see a performer on the stage. Instead, they seem to see a direct, personal, intense relationship between me and them. When people invest so much emotionally in somebody's work, it can turn in an instant. It's not a relationship between people. It's just a lot of projection in that kind of situation. So of course it can turn from intense love and admiration to rage.
It's kind of a drag to find that I keep reacting in my work to the reaction to my work. I wish I could just be way above it all, but I'm not. The misconceptions, misinformation, comments and criticisms — all of that I want to respond to. Because I put myself out there so much and then everyone has an opinion. But that's where the dialogue ends.
Probably what hurts the most with my relationship with the media or music critics is the lack of attention to the music. Mostly what people write about is my independence – the "phenomenon" of little me and my audience, and the scene that I'm supposed to have inspired. Oddly enough, the discussion rarely gets to the music or the songwriting. According to the perception of the press, the actual work that I do is incidental. In general, there is certainly a double standard when you're a "woman in rock" or a chick singer. People are always talking about your hair and your lover. It's funny, because the pressure around me is not so much from the media but really from the fans. If I wear something feminine or something that could be construed as sexy or in any way revealing, then that's sort of condemned by the hard-core, you-go-girl contingent. For me, most of the pressure comes from fans to uphold my image as stompy-booted, butch folk-singer chick.
Views on The Record Industry
I'm interested in subcorporate music that comes from a totally opposite impetus than commercial music. I get to make art for a living. Go figure. And I get to travel around and meet a lot of different people and see a lot of different stuff. I try to shut out the rest of it. I try to negotiate what I think is a do-able balance -- between all the bullshit I wish I didn't have to devote so much of my time and energy to, and to the stuff I want to do.
I'm a socialist and an anarchist. I'm kinda straddling the fence there. So I can't bring myself to work for Warner or any such entity. I won't fool myself for a second into thinking that people in the industry even give a shit about music, let alone society; that's totally not the point for them. I've been getting all sort's of offers for a long time, but I just don't find the music industry-- or any huge corporate capitalist system -- very interesting. And the growth of my career might be ultimately stunted by that, but I don't care. I'd rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than to be rich and famous."
I don't think that the music business is some kind of evil empire or anything. I just have an overarching disrespect for business in general, for the forces of capitalism and how they contradict the needs of the people and the interests of art. Here I am, publicly morphing into some kinda Fortune 500-young-entrepreneur-from-hell, and all along I thought I was just a folksinger. It's been a really bitter irony that people attribute some kind of business savvy or even strategy to what I've done with my life, when it was an aversion to business, and the priorities of capital, that made me make the decisions I did along the way. I'm independent because of my anti-corporate genes that are coursing through my blood. I've never known what it is to feel controlled or manipulated by a corporation. People have often assumed that the reason I've remained independent is so I could have total control. The funny thing is that that's basically just a perk for me. Just to look around me now and see the difference in my life and those who are struggling with a (big) record company, it makes me feel like, 'Oh well, it's nice that I get something out of it'.
We have all kinds of discussions about advertising. What if you take out an advertisement in a political periodical that you want to support? Buying an ad in The Advocate or The Nation is a way of giving money to that publication. It's a way of showing your support. I started out with the stance of 'no advertising' because the product should sell itself. It's the fucking socialist in me. You make music; people like it; they'll tell their friends. Why take out an ad? And T-shirts just feed that cult of personality thing. I couldn't afford any help on the road. I was my own roadie, guitar tech, road manager, and driver. You can only do that for so many years at the kind of pace that I was doing it at, and then you start to go nuts. I was given point-blank financial advice from my manager: 'If you make and sell T-shirts, you can afford to have help on the road.' So we had to do it. But not my name; I wasn't going to put my name or face on them. Those are my rules. So I thought I'd just print some poetry on them.
I don't think that making albums and selling them to people is an evil thing. There must be a way of running a business and employing people and making things that are useful. There must be a way of doing that well and with a conscience. I don't need to sell millions of records. I like my job and I don't need to conquer the world to be happy. So, how fast and big can we at Righteous Babe grow and still be able to sit down, hands-on, and think about every step along the way? How can we stay in control of the mechanisms and do the things the way we want to do them? I make a lot more than people on major labels, per unit. One can sell a lot fewer albums and still pay the rent if you don't have some kind of massive corporate overhead to answer to. So Ani says, 'The way to your fortune is independent.' There are people who I've worked with for a lot of years that we try to retain a relationship with, on the basis of principle; to try to grow together. There's a lot of frustration that comes with trying to work with smaller businesses. If you want to go to your corner drug store and get your prescription filled, it's probably going to cost more than if you go to Wal-Mart. But, there is a reason why there is some value in going to the independent corner drug store.
On Fame / Celebrity
There's a thousand shades of white and a thousand shades of black, but the same rule always applies -- smile pretty and watch your back. In the transition from obscure artist to rock star, there are some things that are often lost by people. It's very hard for people to stay — you know, it's the old cliché — in touch with what made them make noise in the first place. Once your life has become this sort of parade, this circus of media manoeuvres and in-store album signings and photo shoots, it's a lot different than when you're just a tortured obsessive person, sitting with your little axe in your room, drinking yourself into a song.. There's not something any more wrong in talking to somebody at Rolling Stone than talking to somebody at Chart or The Podunk Weekly. I think to try to talk to anyone in a genuine manner has got to weigh an ounce at least. I remember the first time that MTV did a news story on me. People were showing up to my shows yelling 'MTV sucks!' Yeah, duhhh. Let's go beyond that. I don't do in-stores. It's such an inherently heinous scenario: sit in a fucking chain record store so you can sign autographs. Autographs are something I've never understood. I've never wanted an autograph and I don't feel that autographs are very useful.
Background / History
The life of a folk singer -- you stay in alot of people's houses, pet a lot of people's cats, and you're gone the next day. You get to look at a lot of vignettes of people's lives, snippets of what their lives are like. You sort of enter into their realm for a few hours the then you're gone. It's sort of like the world as a movie and never quite being a part of it.
I started playing gigs, I guess, when I was 9 years old, and I've been doing it ever since. My friend Mike, who was probably 30 at the time, was a songwriter and a guitar player, and used to play in bars around buffalo. We started sort of hangin out -- he was teaching me these Beatles songs. He started bringing me to his shows, and I played with him. For me, it was just a shitload of fun to be hanging, playing music. For him it was kind of a novelty to have this little girl around singing duets.
Even when I was very young, I didn't have a very tight relationship with my parents. I was very independent, and my family sort of imploded real early on. I was living on my own when I was 15. I think my parents' approval or disapproval ended at, "Is she doing ok?" "Is she out of jail?" "Is she feeding herself?" I think that they thought that as long as those things were answered yes, then that was fine.
For many, many years, simply walking into a guitar store was almost an act of courage, because it was very much a boys' club. They would kinda look you up and down, and say, "Hi, honey, are you here to get something for your boyfriend?" Now you walk into a guitar store and it's full of teenage girls.
~words of ani difranco
sources:
http://lidrock.howstuffworks.com/sp-difranco.htm 1997
http://members.tripod.com/~Dykeland/chart.html
rolling stone magazine by jill hamilton
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/music/reviews/12-01-95/ANI_DIFRANCO.html
http://members.tripod.com/~Dykeland/pitchfork.html
Photography copyright by Ned Schenck
© 2003, Pavement Magazine, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
You can dangle your carrot but I ain't gonna reach for it, 'cause I need both my hands to play my guitar. No, I don't prefer obscurity. But I'm an idealistic girl and I wouldn't work for you, no matter what you paid. And I may not be able to change the whole fucking world, but I can be the million you never made."
- lyrics from the song "The Million You Never Made," from Not a Pretty Girl
but i'd rather pay my dues to the six people sitting at the bar than to all those men in their business suits who say i''ll take you away from this if you'll just get in the car'
—lyics from the song "The Next Big Thing"
Views on Rebellion/Ideology
The world is completely fucked, as beautiful as it is, and it seems like if you really care about something you want the best for it. If you're not angry about something, then you don't care enough. Because there's so much injustice. Basically, we are given the option in life of staying at home, drawing the curtains and sitting on our couches, complaining about everything; or getting out there and trying to change it. It's one thing to point at something and say 'That sucks.' It's another thing to try to fix it, pick it up and work with it. To be really pissed off and really passionate about things is, to me, just necessary. Just because you're being critical of your government or of your society doesn't mean that it's negative at all. I see all my music - the anger, the love songs, whatever - as coming from a place of respect, and it's that I care so much, I expect more from this world. We can do better.
In a historical perspective, women's politics exist more in terms of human interrelationships, which is what we've been assigned to take care of in society. People look at a chick singing about her abortion or her relationships and think, 'Oh, that's hyperconfessional, personal,' but to me it's all political. It's all related.
Music / Lyrics / Poetry / Art
Folk music is not an acoustic guitar--that's not where the heart of it is. I use the word 'folk' in reference to punk music and rap music. It's an attitude, it's an awareness of one's heritage, and it's a community. It's subcorporate music that gives voice to different communities and their struggle against authority. People my age find folk music very uncool--it's just terribly, terribly uncool. I like music with holes in it, sparse sound, and the challenge of having very few people doing a lot, rather than a lot of people doing just a few things.
Music allows me a means to try and teach myself about my life. I've sort of invented this job for myself where I write these little letters to me that end up as songs. I usually present myself with a problem -- something that happened -- and then I remind myself of what I did and what the result was. Then I suggest what I could have done better so that I won't be such a pathetic fuck and next time rise to the occasion [laughs]. It's a very strange, convoluted, organic process, but by standing up on stage and trying to sing my little casual manifestoes, I'm slowly learning the stuff of what to do during the day.
I don't write with a grand notion of presenting myself with ultimate truths or some crazy shit like that. I often write almost subconsciously. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm writing to tell myself until months later and something I wrote about in my song will happen. I used to think it was spooky. Like, woo, how did I foretell that? But I don't think there's anything remarkable about that. I think that subconsciously we know so much that we're not consciously pondering, and that my subconscious is trying to guide my conscious. I put all my personal experiences into songs and admit them to copious amounts of strangers. So it is very difficult for the poor unfortunate people in my life who see themselves portrayed through my perspective onstage. I know that it takes a very strong person to stick around a chick like me who has such a big mouth.
Look, my songs are just little letters to me-they're like, Okay, this is what happened, this is what you did wrong, this is what you'll do next time. I've never said "I am the truth, I am the way." But a lot of women project onto me the embodiment of their own tansition from girlhood to womanhood-learning to be agressive or just be themeselves. And I think it's good that people take certain issues seriously. But I can't solve the problems of my own life, let alone anyone else's, so taking me seriously is a big mistake. (laughs) I certainly wouldn't."
That whole introspective singer-songwriter thing has been kind of foisted on me. Some people perceive what I do in that way because I write songs through my own experience. But whenever people say, 'Well, your work is very confessional,' I say, 'It's no confessional. I'm not confessing anything. I haven't sinned. These are not my secrets. This is just my life; this is the stuff I've seen, the stuff I did, and what I thought about.' There are different ways of speaking your political perceptions, and it may be [talking about] an event that occurred in your life or an event that occurred in your town... but each is a valid path to a certain realization. I think that what we both do is very much about our small, little epiphanies along the way, moments of connection between things.
I think I'm so aware oftentimes of the musicality of speech and the language, of the rhythms of it, the melodies of the way that we talk. So I hear music in poems, and in songs, of course, there's poetry there. I wish I could say I was telling tall tales, but yeah, I've always written from my experience. It's been a really, really big challenge for me … to write from a much less heroic place than I've written from in the past.
I don't know what it's like for other performers, but I know when I'm playing I'm going a mile a minute. There's so much stimulus, so many little faces to look at, so many little noises to listen to, each one of them triggering something. A lot of survival techniques developed over years playing acoustic guitar in bars are infused in my playing. My playing got more and more aggressive as a way of trying to keep my head above water. Now I just do it 'cause it's fun.
There's Utah Phillips. I don't know if you know who he is... Well, he's kind of somebody that's known in the world of folk music and some political circles, but the big, bad world outside of those small communities don't really know about him. In my mind, he's kind of a national treasure, right on the level with some of the people who are more well-known like Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. But Utah is very much in the folk-singing activist/ anarchist/ trainhopping/ storytelling vein. I had this idea for a long time to make an album of his stories. When he plays, he's a folk singer. He plays songs, but he has a penchant to prattle on and talk and just shoot the shit. In between playing union songs and old folk ballads he would tell the most revelating stories. He has albums of all of his songs, as musicians are wont to do. I just wanted to make an album of him talking and sort of put music to it so it was at least somewhat accessible to, let's say, my audience, so that maybe some of them would sit down and listen to him. He gave me reams and reams of cassette tapes, which was basically his whole career documented on these one-of-a-kind, motley cassettes that people had handed him over the years. I had them all put onto digital audio tape and went from there.
The pop music realm has a huge disrespect for our elders. It's all about worshipping youth. Youth has a lot of energy, and there's a lot of important shit that goes down in youth culture, but I don't think that means you ignore your elders or where you come from. People may constantly want to be inventing the new alternative, which so quickly gets co-opted and turned into just a cookie-cutter formula, with just a slightly more distorted guitar or something, whereas they might be ignoring the fact that they could take the same old tools--an acoustic guitar--and be working in an old, crusty medium like folk music, and do something totally new.
People have been asking me personally, for instance, for a book of poetry for a long time. So I'm thinking of making a book of poetry. But that's still all about little me and what I really want to do soon is make a sort of a documentary film. Those seem like big words to use even. What I want to do is drive around all summer with a couple of other pinch hit drivers and people who know how to run cameras and go to folk festivals. I wanna make a movie about folk music as seen through the lens of folk festivals. I've spent so many years at them. There's this incredible wealth of music that the general public doesn't have any exposure to, period. It's a strange crowd of hippies and beads and they're all out in a field flailing their arms and meanwhile, the music that happens on the stage is all... it's really incredible, folk and roots and world music.
I went to art school for a couple of years but this folk music thing sort of takes over one's whole life and, you know, it's kind of like whenever you become known for being one thing, then I'm Ani D. the chick singer, whatever. So sometimes all our identities become pushed into the background as we, I don't know, grow up and get jobs or something. So painting and also dancing... my first love was dancing, I did that from when I was, I don't know, single-digit until I was twenty in little regional companies. But, so these are the sacrifices that you make to try to work on one thing, say things goodbye. But I still get to... I don't get to dance so much, but I still get to paint when I go home for a few days.
Audience / Perception
I'm a young woman who sings about my life and attempts to empower or inspire myself through my music, other young women get vicariously empowered or inspired by it. At my shows, there's a heavy girl vibe. There's always a feeling of strength and, hopefully, community among women. But what that often translates into is very overbearing, very demanding -- almost carnivorous -- women that come at me. Often the women are much more bold than the men at my shows -- which is an interesting reversal of the whole rock & roll dynamic.
I'm aware of the fact that I'm a symbol when I'm doing my job. I'm not so much a person in my public life. I'm an object for people to project things on. I don't feel like the superhero that sometimes I'm made out to be, but I guess I do feel responsible to other young women, and I do feel fortunate. . . I don't know if fortunate is the right word. I guess I feel like, yeah, there's a pressure there, and I'm up for it. and I'll just try to be as honest as i can and try to hold up under it.
We all need to see ourselves affirmed somewhere in our culture, those of us who aren't on the television or in the history books... We all need to have our identities affirmed in our culture. We all want heroes to inspire us. So I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that. Oftentimes, that becomes distorted because of a lack of something in our own lives. But as a basic premise, it's not a bad thing to have a hero.
In terms of the way people perceive me, the people who know me and know my work, who come to the shows, I feel pretty understood. But then there's a lot of people outside of that who just form opinions based upon media, without ever coming to a show and seeing what it is that they have an opinion about. I could probably stay up every night worrying about that, but I'm not sure what good it would do. I don't see my own work in terms of finger-pointing. People who stereotype me as an angry person come from very far outside of myself and my community…It's funny because, in my experience, the people who bring the most anger, the most rage over injustices, onto the stage, into their work, those are the nicest people. I mean, the people who give a fuck. Honestly, what is said about me in the media is not my greatest concern. That's part of the job; people you don't even know, never ever will know, stating definitively who and what you are, what you are doing and what it means.
I'm appreciative of the people who listen to my music, who get something out of it. But I think it is so much more useful to have a relationship of equals. It scares me to see people wanting me to speak for them, because I can't. I can only speak for myself. I may be an inspiration for someone to go speak for themselves, but that's pretty much all I want to do. That's all I'm willing to do. I don't want to be an icon or a symbol. I'm so human. But sometimes people seem to be very unaware of the actuality of the situation. They don't seem to see a performer on the stage. Instead, they seem to see a direct, personal, intense relationship between me and them. When people invest so much emotionally in somebody's work, it can turn in an instant. It's not a relationship between people. It's just a lot of projection in that kind of situation. So of course it can turn from intense love and admiration to rage.
It's kind of a drag to find that I keep reacting in my work to the reaction to my work. I wish I could just be way above it all, but I'm not. The misconceptions, misinformation, comments and criticisms — all of that I want to respond to. Because I put myself out there so much and then everyone has an opinion. But that's where the dialogue ends.
Probably what hurts the most with my relationship with the media or music critics is the lack of attention to the music. Mostly what people write about is my independence – the "phenomenon" of little me and my audience, and the scene that I'm supposed to have inspired. Oddly enough, the discussion rarely gets to the music or the songwriting. According to the perception of the press, the actual work that I do is incidental. In general, there is certainly a double standard when you're a "woman in rock" or a chick singer. People are always talking about your hair and your lover. It's funny, because the pressure around me is not so much from the media but really from the fans. If I wear something feminine or something that could be construed as sexy or in any way revealing, then that's sort of condemned by the hard-core, you-go-girl contingent. For me, most of the pressure comes from fans to uphold my image as stompy-booted, butch folk-singer chick.
Views on The Record Industry
I'm interested in subcorporate music that comes from a totally opposite impetus than commercial music. I get to make art for a living. Go figure. And I get to travel around and meet a lot of different people and see a lot of different stuff. I try to shut out the rest of it. I try to negotiate what I think is a do-able balance -- between all the bullshit I wish I didn't have to devote so much of my time and energy to, and to the stuff I want to do.
I'm a socialist and an anarchist. I'm kinda straddling the fence there. So I can't bring myself to work for Warner or any such entity. I won't fool myself for a second into thinking that people in the industry even give a shit about music, let alone society; that's totally not the point for them. I've been getting all sort's of offers for a long time, but I just don't find the music industry-- or any huge corporate capitalist system -- very interesting. And the growth of my career might be ultimately stunted by that, but I don't care. I'd rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than to be rich and famous."
I don't think that the music business is some kind of evil empire or anything. I just have an overarching disrespect for business in general, for the forces of capitalism and how they contradict the needs of the people and the interests of art. Here I am, publicly morphing into some kinda Fortune 500-young-entrepreneur-from-hell, and all along I thought I was just a folksinger. It's been a really bitter irony that people attribute some kind of business savvy or even strategy to what I've done with my life, when it was an aversion to business, and the priorities of capital, that made me make the decisions I did along the way. I'm independent because of my anti-corporate genes that are coursing through my blood. I've never known what it is to feel controlled or manipulated by a corporation. People have often assumed that the reason I've remained independent is so I could have total control. The funny thing is that that's basically just a perk for me. Just to look around me now and see the difference in my life and those who are struggling with a (big) record company, it makes me feel like, 'Oh well, it's nice that I get something out of it'.
We have all kinds of discussions about advertising. What if you take out an advertisement in a political periodical that you want to support? Buying an ad in The Advocate or The Nation is a way of giving money to that publication. It's a way of showing your support. I started out with the stance of 'no advertising' because the product should sell itself. It's the fucking socialist in me. You make music; people like it; they'll tell their friends. Why take out an ad? And T-shirts just feed that cult of personality thing. I couldn't afford any help on the road. I was my own roadie, guitar tech, road manager, and driver. You can only do that for so many years at the kind of pace that I was doing it at, and then you start to go nuts. I was given point-blank financial advice from my manager: 'If you make and sell T-shirts, you can afford to have help on the road.' So we had to do it. But not my name; I wasn't going to put my name or face on them. Those are my rules. So I thought I'd just print some poetry on them.
I don't think that making albums and selling them to people is an evil thing. There must be a way of running a business and employing people and making things that are useful. There must be a way of doing that well and with a conscience. I don't need to sell millions of records. I like my job and I don't need to conquer the world to be happy. So, how fast and big can we at Righteous Babe grow and still be able to sit down, hands-on, and think about every step along the way? How can we stay in control of the mechanisms and do the things the way we want to do them? I make a lot more than people on major labels, per unit. One can sell a lot fewer albums and still pay the rent if you don't have some kind of massive corporate overhead to answer to. So Ani says, 'The way to your fortune is independent.' There are people who I've worked with for a lot of years that we try to retain a relationship with, on the basis of principle; to try to grow together. There's a lot of frustration that comes with trying to work with smaller businesses. If you want to go to your corner drug store and get your prescription filled, it's probably going to cost more than if you go to Wal-Mart. But, there is a reason why there is some value in going to the independent corner drug store.
On Fame / Celebrity
There's a thousand shades of white and a thousand shades of black, but the same rule always applies -- smile pretty and watch your back. In the transition from obscure artist to rock star, there are some things that are often lost by people. It's very hard for people to stay — you know, it's the old cliché — in touch with what made them make noise in the first place. Once your life has become this sort of parade, this circus of media manoeuvres and in-store album signings and photo shoots, it's a lot different than when you're just a tortured obsessive person, sitting with your little axe in your room, drinking yourself into a song.. There's not something any more wrong in talking to somebody at Rolling Stone than talking to somebody at Chart or The Podunk Weekly. I think to try to talk to anyone in a genuine manner has got to weigh an ounce at least. I remember the first time that MTV did a news story on me. People were showing up to my shows yelling 'MTV sucks!' Yeah, duhhh. Let's go beyond that. I don't do in-stores. It's such an inherently heinous scenario: sit in a fucking chain record store so you can sign autographs. Autographs are something I've never understood. I've never wanted an autograph and I don't feel that autographs are very useful.
Background / History
The life of a folk singer -- you stay in alot of people's houses, pet a lot of people's cats, and you're gone the next day. You get to look at a lot of vignettes of people's lives, snippets of what their lives are like. You sort of enter into their realm for a few hours the then you're gone. It's sort of like the world as a movie and never quite being a part of it.
I started playing gigs, I guess, when I was 9 years old, and I've been doing it ever since. My friend Mike, who was probably 30 at the time, was a songwriter and a guitar player, and used to play in bars around buffalo. We started sort of hangin out -- he was teaching me these Beatles songs. He started bringing me to his shows, and I played with him. For me, it was just a shitload of fun to be hanging, playing music. For him it was kind of a novelty to have this little girl around singing duets.
Even when I was very young, I didn't have a very tight relationship with my parents. I was very independent, and my family sort of imploded real early on. I was living on my own when I was 15. I think my parents' approval or disapproval ended at, "Is she doing ok?" "Is she out of jail?" "Is she feeding herself?" I think that they thought that as long as those things were answered yes, then that was fine.
For many, many years, simply walking into a guitar store was almost an act of courage, because it was very much a boys' club. They would kinda look you up and down, and say, "Hi, honey, are you here to get something for your boyfriend?" Now you walk into a guitar store and it's full of teenage girls.
~words of ani difranco
sources:
http://lidrock.howstuffworks.com/sp-difranco.htm 1997
http://members.tripod.com/~Dykeland/chart.html
rolling stone magazine by jill hamilton
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/music/reviews/12-01-95/ANI_DIFRANCO.html
http://members.tripod.com/~Dykeland/pitchfork.html
Photography copyright by Ned Schenck
© 2003, Pavement Magazine, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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