DiFranco, Ani

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Ani DiFranco

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

Wide Range of Styles and Fans

Played in Bars at Age Nine

Started Her Own Label

Inherently Political

Selected discography

Sources

Punk/folk singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco attained musical heroine status at the age of twenty-five among both fans and critics with her seventh release, Not A Pretty Girl, in 1995. She told Spin’s James Patrick Herman, “People expect my kind of in-your-face approach from a punk, not some chick with an acoustic guitar. I prefer the power that comes with walking on stage with a little piece of wood.. .that’s more punk rock than making a lot of noise.”

Her acoustic performances are part mosh-pit party, part hoedown, and part folk-hootenanny, punctuated with stage dives, broken guitar strings, and lyrics that cover issues like abortion, body image baggage, bi-sexuality, death, and fidelity. DiFranco alternates between a smoldering warmth and an angry explosion of sound, and defies categorization by blending the forth-rightness and anger of punk rock with the simplicity, beauty, and poetry of folk music. She uses press-on nails reinforced with electrical tape when performing to bang-strum on her acoustic guitar, and offers only drummer Andy Stochansky as musical back-up.

Wide Range of Styles and Fans

DiFranco’s fans reveal her widespread appeal as they are as diverse and hard to peg as her style, ranging in age from teenaged girls to the middle-aged, and from alternative rock fans, to folk music and hardcore punk rock enthusiasts.

With a broad emotional palette at her disposal, DiFranco’s vocal range fluctuates between gritty and airy. Rolling Stone’s Fred Goodman describes her as, “A wonder to behold: a spiky-haired volcano…(whose) songs, though mostly about independence and romance…often take unexpected, jarring turns—such as when she recites a poem about an abortion or sings about being felt up in the subway.” She told Out magazine’s Ray Rogers, “I just sing my goofy songs about my goofy little life”, underscoring the fact that she’s her own person and without regard for those who might take offense at her uncensored output.

Played in Bars at Age Nine

DiFranco was born in Buffalo, NY, in 1970, and began playing music at age nine when her parents bought her a Beatles songbook and an acoustic guitar. Within a few years, she was singing “Yesterday” at local coffeehouses with the guidance of a local folk singer. As Rolling Stone’s Evelyn McDonnell put it, “She met a man named Mike, a 30-year-old ’degenerate folk-singer barfly’ at a guitar store in Buffalo, NY. They

For the Record…

Born 1970 Buffalo, NY.

Began playing music at age nine; sang in local coffeehouses starting at age eleven; moved out on her own at age fifteen to pursue a career in music; at the age of eighteen moved to New York City and began touring the country, performing at college campuses, coffeehouses, bars, and music festivals; started Righteous Babe Records music label in Buffalo, NY, in 1990; released first album DiFranco in 1990.

Address: Righteous Babe Records, P.O. Box 95, Endi-cott Station, Buffalo, NY 14205.

began playing together and hanging out with other singer/songwriters, who would come up from New York to play.” DiFranco’s parents were absorbed in their own problems at the time, and DiFranco told McDonnell, “(They) were just happy from the beginning that I was self-sufficient. For me, it was the ideal childhood: complete emancipation.”

In high school, at the age of fifteen, the independent and spirited DiFranco found an apartment of her own in Buffalo and started writing her own songs in order to pursue her already mushrooming career. At the age of eighteen, she moved to New York City and began touring the country in a Volkswagen bug, performing at college campuses, coffeehouses, bars, and music festivals. She explained to Guitar Player’s James Ro-tondi, “(My percussive acoustic technique) evolved out of twelve years of playing in bars, where people are there to pick up somebody and drink themselves into a stupor, not to listen to the chick in the corner with the acoustic.”

Started Her Own Label

When DiFranco reached the point where she wanted to make an album in the late 1980s, the unresponsiveness of music industry executives prompted her to start her own label, Righteous Babe, in 1990. Dedicated to remaining independent, she told Rotondi, “If you want to challenge the system, you don’t go to bed with it.” DiFranco created her audience through a slow build-up of fans over the years and her ascent to fame was slow as she told Billboard’s Roger Deitz, “Righteous Babe Records doesn’t have a big publicity and marketing budget. My marketing and publicity, and the whole reason I have this big audience base, is because of years of playing.” By 1996, she had sold over 200,000 copies of her albums.

Although DiFranco started her own label to retain complete control of her work, she also enjoys the notion that she negotiates how to reach her audience and how to juggle finances. She began by selling tapes as she toured across the country, and although Righteous Babe Records sold over 200,000 records by 1996, DiFranco still devoted three weeks out of every month touring, splitting her week off between Buffalo, New York, where the label is based, and New York City, where she lives. She told McDonnell, “that’s the nature of a career that’s built on toting your butt around the country and playing music for people as opposed to commercial airplay or national TV exposure.”

Inherently Political

Political and moral themes, often of a personal nature, dominate DiFranco’s albums; an example is “The Million You Never Made” on Not A Pretty Girl, which offers the verse, “If you don’t live what you sing about, your mirror is going to find out”. On the same album, DiFranco sings about bisexuality, and the death penalty from the perspective of the condemned. By embracing the most controversial issues of our time, DiFranco hopes to diffuse them, discuss them, and deepen understanding of each topic’s nuances.

DiFranco’s most ardent fans are a possessive group. While performing at a concert in New York City in 1996, MTV News cameras filmed the show while DiFranco’s fans shouted, “MTV sucks!” at the camerapeople. DiFranco toned down the angry outbursts with humor, telling the audience that the camerapeople were from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, there to capture her in her natural environment, and that she would soon be mating with her drummer. As DiFranco’s popularity grows, she’s faced with difficult decisions and growing pains; she’s caught between fans who want her to remain accessible, and her untapped fans, reached only through more exposure. DiFranco told McDonnell, “I believe in…not just making revolutionary music but making it in a way that challenges the system….The possibility of emancipation and control and independence is so much greater now.”