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Ani DiFranco

35-for-35: 2014 – “Unconditional Love” by Against Me!

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This post is part of my month-long "Blog of Tomorrow" celebration of the launch of Crushing Krisis's Patreon. Learn more or become a Patron today!



I’m not sure that I’m capable of unconditional love, because I don’t believe it really exists.

How can you even define what it means to love someone or something “no matter what?” The variable of “what” in that statement only includes the changes you can conceive of in the present day. It’s a statement that you could love something’s status quo forever, and maybe also anything within a few degrees of difference.

I know this is a silly measuring stick but I always try to define this sort of unwavering commitment via musical fandom. Sixteen years ago this week I lamented that Ani DiFranco websites were shutting down left and right, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would quit her. I was in my sixth year of listening to her, but some of those fans were in their twelfth. At the time, I said:

I don’t expect her to reproduce the same album over and over, and i don’t expect her to stay the same. The people shutting down their website’s now might not have expected her to do either of those things, but i suppose on some level they were hoping she would.

Now I’m in my twentieth year, and Ani’s new albums barely register with me and I no longer see her shows. She’s not too different and I’m not too different, but the two of us have each changed by enough degrees that love has turned into like. I Now I’m just loving the old her, and that’s not love. It’s nostaglia. The new her can’t change that, and I still have affection for her, but it’s not the same love I had before.

I think the same holds true for anything you love – not just always-changing things like musicians or family members, but static things like a song, a board game, or a statue. That’s because one side of that loving equation can change: you. So, even if you love something unconditionally now, you can’t predict all the future conditions.

That’s how Against Me!’s beautiful, rambling, three-chord “Unconditional Love” resonates with me. It’s off of Transgender Dysphoria Blues, the band’s first release since lead singer Laura Jane Grace came out as a transgender woman. That’s a pretty big change in conditions – one that most people don’t account for when they express their unconditional love. It’s a change that finds a lot of people reaching out for the unconditional love they were promised and finding a void in its place.

Laura knows that. She understands the fundamental lie of love. Unconditional love isn’t really about the future, it’s about the present.

35-for-35: 2001 – “Subdivision” by Ani DiFranco

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general_ani-difranco-by-danny-clinch-5

My second-favorite shot of Ani, shot by Danny Clinch.

This post is part of my month-long "Blog of Tomorrow" celebration of the launch of Crushing Krisis's Patreon. Learn more or become a Patron today!



As occasionally problematic and non-intersectional as Ani DiFranco can be, sometimes her willingness to just say stuff makes for compelling, provocative songs.

Case and point: her song “Subdivision” from 2001’s double-album Revelling/Reckoning, which starts with the line “White people are so scared of black people.”

Despite the bombshell opening line, “Subdivision” is not a song exclusively about racial divides, but about Ani’s beloved home town of Buffalo and her beloved country. Her city has seemingly been left behind by a march of modernity. Here, she wonders if that march is just about having the money and privilege to put more space between ourselves and our fears. Maybe if we’re far enough away we no longer have to confront them.

Except: when we’ve forgotten, buried, or sublimated all that we’ve been running away from, how will we know when it is stil driving our biases?

I had a sense of foreboding when I picked “Subdivision” as my song from 2001 as I prepared for this campaign last month. I’d be posting it just 10 days after the election. I wondered how its message would play in a post-election America, the same country we lived in the day before the election but potentially seen through a new lens. What would it say about a world where Hillary Clinton won the election? What about a world where Donald Trump won? Would it be equally true in both?

Now we know the outcome, and I ask that you simply listen and take from it whatever message you hear. That first line will always stand out for me, but in this redefined world it is teaching me something different than it was a few weeks ago.

Subdivision
by Ani DiFranco

White people are so scared of black people
They bulldoze out to the country
And put up houses on little loop-dee-loop streets
And while america gets its heart cut right out of its chest
The Berlin wall still runs down main street
Separating east side from west

And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse
In the boarded-up stores and the broken-down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
Just to prove they got no manners
No mercy and no sense

[Read more…] about 35-for-35: 2001 – “Subdivision” by Ani DiFranco

#MusicMonday: “Gravel” – Ani DiFranco

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Ani DiFranco’s “Gravel” burst from my iPod headphones as I left the house this morning and transported me back to another place and time in my life.

It was 1997, and I was a new Ani DiFranco fan. After borrowing her tapes from my friends Andrea and Nava (yes: TAPES) I snapped up two of her remarkable trio of perfect LPs, Out of Range and Dilate, and waited with bated breath for April 22nd. That was when her new, live, double-CD Living in Clip would be released.

Living in Clip contained a bevy of older songs that were new to me, but one that no one had ever heard before outside of concerts: “Gravel.” It was the third track.


(This live performance is from slightly after the LiC version, but still pretty close in feel.)

While I loved the entire double-CD, it was “Gravel” that I played again and again in wonder. This was long before YouTube and prior to Ani’s major media breakthrough with Little Plastic Castle, so I had never seen a video of her playing guitar. I was already fascinated by the sound of her songs like “Out of Range” and “Shameless.”

How did she make those sounds? I had plenty of friends who played guitar, but none of them made the sounds that came out of “Gravel.” The guitar hopped and skipped, and sometimes barked. How did she do it?

(I would learn her rapid guitar attack emerged from five Nailene brand nails duct-taped to her fingers.)

I played that record into the ground in 1997 – played it so much that both my mother and I had it memorized from front to back. We saw Ani together for the first time that summer, sitting in the rafters of The Mann Music Center, watching her open for Bob Dylan.

“Gravel” also had a more immediate effect. Less than six weeks after I first heard it I begged my mother to buy me an acoustic guitar. I think she was surprised by my sudden vehemence – while I certainly asked for things, they were usually music or books. I didn’t frequently beg for anything, aside from the ability to get online – and I quickly became a whiz at that.

She relented and bought me a guitar. Who knows what she thought I would do with it, but the night we brought it home I learned to play “Dilate” from a guitar tab (a what?), and started to slowly decipher the tab for “Gravel.” By the end of the summer I could play the song all the way through.

That’s where “Gravel” took my brain this morning – fifteen years ago, almost to the week. Half my life – a half completely changed because of my fascination with this single, amazing song.

Thank you, Mr. DiFranco.

WWMD?

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When I’m being overly fussy about anything musical, I have a special mantra I use to get focused. It goes like this:

What would Madonna do?

That’s “WWMD?” for short.

Madonna, 1982, from the 9/09 issue of Italian Vanity Fair.Last night I was not feeling musical. I was tired. My right arm felt flabby, and wasn’t keeping up with the quick, hard strikes on “Regenerate.” My breath-support was wobbly, and not getting me through “Shake It Off.”

I had promised to stop by an open mic, but I wasn’t feeling it.

WWMD?

In 1982, when Mad was still being labeled a one-hit wonder, she told Dick Clark, “I wanna rule the world.”

It was a lofty, laughable goal for a potential one-hit wonder to have in 1982, but she’s come as close to achieving it as any entertaining non-dictator could ever come. Her rule-the-world mission drove her every decision for over a quarter of a century. If you start counting from when she started playing in New York bands, she’s been driven as long as I’ve been alive.

Of course, Madonna is also known as a control freak and a perfectionist – but that didn’t stop her from breaking into clubs as an imperfect singer in the early 80s.

If she stayed home she couldn’t rule the world.

I take that as a lesson – not only from Madonna, but from all of my favorite paradigm-changing artists. From David Bowie to Ani DiFranco to Lady Gaga, what they have in common isn’t their talent and training. Their commonality is wanting it bad. Tenacity.

That’s a clarity of vision I lack. If voice, arm, and body are all tired, I want to pack it in. My songs don’t sound focused. Why play, I ponder, if I’m not at my best?

WMMD? I know what Madonna would do. What about Gaga, or Ani, or my glam idol himself?

David Bowie struck out as a pop star, actually became a one-hit wonder twice – on a novelty single, and again on “Space Oddity” (another novelty single, you could argue). He released two largely-unheard discs before he unearthed Ziggy from his collection of personalities.

WWDBD? He wrote one of his finest discs, Hunky Dory, and when its popular reception was soft he went directly back into the studio to record The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, one of my three favorite albums of all time.

So on those nights where I feel tired, or tuneless, or lazy, what should I do if I truly care about music as much as I claim I do?

WWMD? WWDBD?

Go out and play.

Blog Spotlight: Meish.org

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I’ve decided that as frequently as I can I’d like to highlight a specific blog I love by talking about the blogger and linking to my favorite recent entries. It’s only fitting that I start with the single blog that was at the top of my link list when I launched nine years ago, and continues to be a daily read today:

Meg Pickard’s meish.org.

Meish wasn’t always Meish – it was once Not So Soft. In that capacity I consider it my parent blog, as I created my own specifically to ape what Meg was doing daily.

I’ve read Meg ever since, and she’s never stopped being compelling. She lives in London, was schooled as a sociologist, and spent time abroad conducting ethnographies. She presently works in some capacity for The Guardian.

Meg has a way – as all great bloggers do – of making the common seem very compelling. She also writes wonderful lists (frequently etymological in nature), takes clever and pretty photographs (even with an iPhone), and shares thoughts on social media.

And, as borne out by her original blog name (an Ani reference), Meg has wonderfully eclectic taste in music (and shares some of my OCD organizational qualities).

Some other recent highlights: she tracks the occurrence of “Flying Ant Day” with uncanny accuracy; she ruminates on the concept of time tourism (which I have discussed at length with Rabi); attempts to create a universal theory of measurement; dissects nationalist “visit us” campaigns; makes tables out of old maps; details past packing mishaps; and she bemoans a lack of adjectiveless sandwiches.

And that’s all just in the last year. Meish posts a few times a week, which makes it easy to follow in RSS; more voracious readers will want to subscribe to Meg’s many-times-daily tumblr.

Having met Rabi a long time ago, and Alison more recently, I’d say Meg is probably the blogger I’d most like to meet in real life.

Ani DiFranco, circa 1994.

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An amazing hour-long interview and concert with Ani DiFranco and Andy Stochansky from 1994 – fifteen years ago.

It’s a fantastic time capsule – bald Ani! bushy-haired Andy! enthusing over selling-out a 1200-seat show!

The concert portion is treasure trove of Out of Range songs. For the guitar freaks out there (hi!) it includes crystal clear video of her playing “4th of July,” “Hell Yeah,” “Letter to a John,” and the heretofore unseen “Face Up and Sing” and “How Have You Been.”

Then, later, a drums-only “Every State Line” and fucking “FALLING IS LIKE THIS.” Seriously. I kid you not. And, apparently I’ve been playing it mostly right for the past ten years. Oh, and “Pick Yer Nose,” “In Or Out,” “My IQ,” “Anticipate,” “Not So Soft,” an acappella Bruce Colburn song, and a nearly album-verbatim version of “Out of Range” (disappointingly shot tight from above her guitar).

If you had told me there was a DVD of this two hours ago I would have paid you $50 for it.