River of songs

Ani DiFranco keeps flowing

by Gary Susman

It's fitting that Ani DiFranco serves as the narrator of the current PBS documentary series River of Song, tracing the diverse musics that are played along the entire length of the Mississippi. DiFranco herself is a river of song, so stylistically versatile that she stymies simplistic genre pigeonholing, and so prolific that she's released a torrent of 12 albums since her 1990 debut.

That even an institution as stodgy and timid as PBS surely knew all this shows just how widely promulgated the DiFranco mythology is. It's been a couple of years since the mainstream awoke to the geometrically increasing popularity of the uncategorizable thrush who had achieved success entirely on her own terms, through hard touring and self-distribution of all her records on her own Righteous Babe label. Magazine cover stories and accusations of selling out followed inevitably, as did an album (last year's Little Plastic Castle, her biggest seller yet) in which she addressed her ambivalence both toward mainstream media recognition that painted her as some angry, bisexual queen of the underground and toward the jealous fan base that treasured an equally reductive and shallow image of her as an acoustic Joan of Arc in combat boots. In truth, for all her experimenting, her flirtation with new looks and musical styles, DiFranco has not changed much over the past decade. She remains on her own winding path, consistent in that she remains a genre unto herself.

So the latest dispatch from Righteous Babe, Up Up Up Up Up Up (doing R.E.M. five better, apparently), makes no great deviations or concessions to the commercial that will startle long-time DiFranco devotees or pander to Ani-come-latelies. In fact, the big draws for newbies will be the same draws of her previous work, her marvelously clear-eyed, plain-spoken lyrics, and her raw, tender voice.

It's that sense of the personal and the confessionally candid that makes DiFranco's songs so resonant. She's a vivid storyteller with an eye for detail, as in "Jukebox" (about a depressed woman who finds solace in drink and old songs), or "Trickle Down," a Springsteen-esque dirge about a dying steel town that the listener can almost smell. She has a laserlike precision with metaphors, as in " 'Tis of Thee," a sharp polemic about the criminalization of poverty and difference, or "Virtue," which opens, "Virtue is relative at best/There's nothing worse than a sunset/When you're driving due west." Often, however, she is simple and direct, as in "Angry Anymore," where the singer acknowledges that though she used to side with her mother against her father, she now understands that both were just "[playing] out the hands that they were dealt." DiFranco delivers these lyrics in a supple voice rich in emotional color, passing from sweetness to anger to resignation to anguish, sometimes (as in "Come Away from It," where the singer tries to coax a lover away from drugs) within a single song.

Showing off those lyrics and that voice to best advantage is DiFranco's austere touring line-up, which is marked by Andy Stochansky's crisp drumming, Jason Mercer's fat upright bass, Julie Wolf's classic-soul organ and electric piano, and DiFranco's own famously percussive strumming. Unfortunately, the arrangements tend toward sameness, with meandering melodies and similar stuttering, loping rhythms that DiFranco probably means to be jazzy but end up making her sound like Edie Brickell.

Even the experimental moments here don't deviate much from formula. The tentative Cajun yodeling on "Angel Food" and the toy "space phone" electronic beeps on "Know Now Then" are typical in their cursoriness. And the 13-minute lite-funk jam "Hat Shaped Hat" that closes the CD may remind listeners of Castle's similarly long hip-hop jam "Pulse." Although the lyrics are uncharacteristically goofy doggerel, "Hat" does muster enough variety (surprising, considering the band's spare tonal palette) to keep from being dull.

Still, there's an awful lot of music on Up . . . , more than an hour's worth, without an hour's worth of ideas. As a one-woman industry, DiFranco has no one but herself to blame for her lack of quality control. One would think that by putting out more concentrated or less frequent releases instead of flooding stores with less than completely inspired product, she could satisfy both the fans and the market.