Word: difranco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...DiFranco Dilate (Righteous Babe Records). Tart, topical songs from this 25-year-old genre-bending singer-guitarist, who blends folk, punk, trip-hop and whatever else strikes her fancy into insurgent and often arrestingly beautiful music. DiFranco hitches these tunes to scathing lyrical and deeply personal takes on romance and gender issues, then releases her records through her own record company...
Artists and audiences are always talking about not selling out, about not buying in, about the eternal struggle to prevent very personal art from becoming just another upc-bearing product put out by yet another megaconglomerate. Everyone talks about it, but folk singer Ani DiFranco walks it. A native of Buffalo, New York, who now lives in New York City's East Village, she is only 25 years old but has already managed to found her own record company (the not altogether ironically titled Righteous Babe Records), to release eight solo records (with total sales of more than...
...which would be just so much familiar sloganeering if DiFranco's music wasn't so scathingly worthwhile. Her earlier albums, which featured songs with only her voice and a scratchy acoustic guitar, had a sort of subterranean urgency, like that of a subway performer rushing to finish a song and earn a few quarters before the train roars into the station. DiFranco's new CD, Dilate, is her best yet--her vocals and guitar work still seethe, but she's added atmospheric touches, such as a trippy hip-hop beat on a cover of the song Amazing Grace. Like Beck...
...DiFranco has been a folk firebrand, dealing with such topics as abortion, capital punishment and sexual identity on past albums. On Dilate she mostly focuses on a single subject: a traumatic romance she's been involved in for about a year. The songs are sardonic, self-flagellating and self-referential; she tears into herself for the affair and then beats herself up for singing about it. "Every pop song on the radio," she croons sarcastically, "Is suddenly speaking to me." Listening to melodramatic love songs is often a guilty pleasure; DiFranco unburdens her listeners of that guilt by taking...
...only a high point in his career and for Unplugged, it was also a noteworthy moment for today's pop. The sound of folk is making a comeback, from the resurgent Tracy Chapman's unexpected Top 10 CD, New Beginning, to the folk-punk punch of Ani DiFranco. In his Unplugged set, the musically eclectic Seal (according to him, his favorite albums right now include Stereolab's involving art-pop CD, Emperor Tomato Ketchup; D*Note's politically aware dance album, Criminal Justice; and Henryk Gorecki's avant-garde classical CD, Symphony No. 3) managed to draw from disparate strains...