Ani DiFranco
Living in Clip (Righteous Babe)
by Jamie Kiffel
I first saw Ani DiFranco perform three years ago at Wellesley College. I was prepared to witness the “female-empowering” trend of the airwaves: tritely man-hating dirges exonerating the naughty-yet-sexy woman. I was surprised when DiFranco spoke to us as equals, shouting unguarded soul-convictions like homing pigeons sent to find their likenesses within us. We were the girls-cum-women she described: the swollen, stained uncertainties left in puberty’s wake and still coated heavily with powder, gloss, and a thin layer of self-esteem. Her message was not sex or sadness or pity. It was honesty, served straight up with hardworking folk rock.
Along the route from ten-year-old coffeehouse entertainer to twentysomething rock goddess, DiFranco has become an icon for the emotionally misplaced and the professionally introverted. Much of this reputation comes from fanatic hours spent analyzing each of her nine studio albums, each of which skillfully lays out her poetic feelings, undressed and transferred directly from DiFranco’s mind to her self-pressed discs. DiFranco in concert is quite different: she alternates between Ani DiFranco the Strongly Expressive and Ani DiFranco who explains apologetically that she knows no more about the meaning of life than you do. Living In Clip, unlike most performers’ live compilations, is an ideal way to get to know DiFranco if you’ve never heard her before, and also a revealing way to discover further dimensions of her if you have never seen her live. She truly performs on this double disc survey of her latest year on tour, delivering an undiluted compound of music that tells exactly what she feels – no more , no less.
What makes this set outstanding is its fullness. It is full of new sounds, as DiFranco and her band experiment with a recording loop on the rarely played “Hide and Seek,” or as she breaks into hoarse, rhythmic breaths and elated shrieks in a full effort to break out what she wants to say in the atavistic “We’re All Gonna Blow,” or as she varies the speed of poetry she has written, creating surprising and revealing rhythms. It is full of effort, as DiFranco audibly suffers during a missed verse, then doubles her energy level and attention to her words to make up for it, or as we hear her guitar reacting sympathetically to her anger, her sadness, and her joyful vocals. It is also full of honesty: DiFranco tells her audiences that she is afraid to say in life what she sings onstage, and she even admits that new songs, such as “Gravel,” are still in the “zygote” stage, and are altered from her usual style because she has recently found love. Most impressively, it is overloaded with dense, emotive lyrics, in which she shows that she is not afraid to bend her own self-image. In “In Or Out,” for instance, she elicits a sea of feminine shrieks with the line, “It’s Mr. DiFranco to you,” while in “I’m No Heroine,” she sings, “You think I wear the pants just because I rarely wear a dress.”
Also anomalous to most live discs is the fact that this is much more than a mere legal bootleg. Because it is recorded from a DAT fed through DiFranco’s microphone, its quality is even throughout, the vocals are unusually crisp, and the audience is only audible in certain instances when it becomes excited enough to be picked up in DiFranco’s mic. This is a thinking person’s recording, constructed with great attention to lyrical detail, and left with the sweaty, scraggly ends showing, proving that Ani DiFranco is constantly driving herself harder to express what she, and an ever-broadening audience, is feeling.
