[Vladimir]

Ani DiFranco



Ani DiFranco
Биография
США, г. Буффало (шт. Нью-Йорк)

Ани Дифранко родилась 23 сентября 1970 года. К 19-ти годам сочинила более сотни песен. По просьбам друзей записала некоторые из них на аудиокассеты и размножила в количестве 500 экземпляров. Так родился лейбл Righteous Babe. В 1991 году, оседлав собственный «Фольксваген», Ани отправилась в импровизированный тур по стране и завоевала нешуточную популярность у «определенной аудитории». К 1993 году на нее стали обращать внимание мейджоры, но натолкнулись на стену презрения. Тем более что Righteous Babe превратилась в неплохое коммерческое предприятие… Ани продолжала давать свыше двухсот концертов в год и выпускать альбомы, которые становились все лучше и лучше. Not a Pretty Girl (1995) удостоился хвалебных рецензий в The New York Times и других медиа, а Dilate (1996) попал в первую сотню чарта Billboard. Продолжая в том же духе, Ани постепенно дополняла свои фолк-изыскания элементами панка, джаза, фанка и даже латино.
20 января 2007 г. убежденная феминистка стала счастливой матерью девочки по имени Пета Лусия (Petah Lucia).
lastfm.ru

Biography:

Ani DiFranco learned early to live by her wits. As a teenager, she worked her way around Buffalo, NY, folk clubs and relocated to NYC before she turned 20. Two things made her become a folksinger: It was cheap (all the overhead she needed was an acoustic guitar), and it didn't get in the way of her saying her piece. And she had a lot to say -- when she cut her first homemade tape, something to sell at the clubs she played, her guitar wasn't much more than a prop that she assaulted between breaths, but her words were fully formed, deeply personal, and rigorously political, and there were a lot of them. But she wasn't a folkie, and despite her looks, she wasn't a punk, either -- she was a complete, irreducible original.

Her first two albums were just girl with a guitar, and possibly the most arresting piece on them was "Not So Soft," where she laid the guitar down and just spoke her poem. But she already had all the mouth she would ever need, and she exuded enough presence to make you hang on her every word. A few years later, on Like I Said, she returned to those early songs, fleshing them out with newfound musical skills, but the improvement is minor. However, on Imperfectly, she starts working with other musicians, most notably drummer Andy Stochansky. This adds powder to the explosive "What If No One's Watching." But Di-Franco's own musicianship had also made a great leap forward, as on "If It Isn't Her," with just Ani playing quirky guitar and singing, "I have been playing/Too many of them boy-girl games/She says honey you are safe here/This is a girl-girl thing.

The albums that followed -- Puddle Dive, Out of Range, Not a Pretty Girl, Dilate -- are full of sharply observed lyrics and increasingly innovative music; it's a remarkable series of albums. Meanwhile, DiFranco's intense fan base grew large enough to put her self-released albums on the charts, leading to the inevitable two-CD Living in Clip, an extraordinary career summation selected from various concerts with her trio (Stochansky on drums, Sara Lee on bass). The set works both as a greatest-hits and as a performance showcase -- DiFranco's guitar, especially on "Out of Range," has the same urgency and definition that she's long demonstrated with her voice.

The next series of albums might be considered her progressive period: While the lyrics continue to reflect her political concerns, they are less clearly anchored in her personal life (or perhaps her personal life as a record-company exec just isn't interesting enough), but her expanding musical skills often make for compelling listening. Little Plastic Castle starts out with horns and a Latin beat, and winds up with the meditative "Pulse," with Jon Hassell on trumpet. Up Up Up Up Up Up is looser and jazzier, while To the Teeth meanders into rap ("Swing") and ska-punk ("Freakshow") and hard to say what else. The sprawling two-CD Revelling/Reckoning is less successful, its lyrics hiding behind the music instead of jumping out. The second live double, So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter, is a lot more fun, partly because it recycles a familiar songbook under the guise of documenting her new band with all the snazzy horns. But the set also restores some bite to her political songs, especially "Self-Evident," though even there she seems to have outgrown her early, intense fusion of the personal and the political, relegating her political impulses to the more conventional realm of protest songs. Another long protest-song poem, "Serpentine," adds topical relevancy to Evolve, but for once, the fancy music gets the best of the muted messages.

On the other hand, her all-solo move, Educated Guess, contorts her elegant wordplay over a sharply stinging acoustic guitar, then tortures both with birdlike vocal overdubs. The only pleasure here is when she just recites, or just plays.

The two Utah Phillips albums comprise a fascinating side project. The Past Didn't Go Anywhere starts with Phillips saying, "What I do is I collect stories," but then you notice that he's been sampled and looped -- folk music as mix tape. The music is decidedly unfolkie synth drums and New Age guitar, which Phillips talks and lectures and hectors over. Fascinating stories, too, especially the ones about desert-ing from the Korean War and finding pacifism as a 12-step program. And he's observant enough to quote an old geezer on his wife's New Age bookstore: "No matter how New Age you get, old age's gonna kick your ass." Fellow Workers dispenses with the trip-hop for tales of Mother Jones and Joe Hill and some old-fashioned labor struggle sing-alongs. Which just serves to remind us that one of DiFranco's most important innovations has been to build her own record label -- a rare case of a worker who owns the means of production. (TOM HULL)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide

Дискография (только студийные альбомы)

Ani DiFranco (1990)
Not So Soft (1991)
Imperfectly (1992)
Puddle Dive (1993)
Like I Said: Songs 1990-91 (1993)
Out of Range (1994)
Not a Pretty Girl (1995)
Dilate (1996)
The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (with Utah Phillips) (1996)
Little Plastic Castle (1998)
Up Up Up Up Up Up (1999)
Fellow Workers (with Utah Phillips) (1999)
To the Teeth (1999)
Revelling/Reckoning (2001)
Evolve (2003)
Educated Guess (2004)
Knuckle Down (2005)
Reprieve (2006)
Canon (compilation) (2007)
Red Letter Year (2008)