As the 32-year-old tours the country in a return to her roots as a solo singer with an acoustic guitar, her recent live double CD, So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter (Righteous Babe), features the kinetic, musically polymorphous sounds of her now defunct band of the past two years and the growing sophistication of her vocal delivery. The two merge into generally enticing mixtures of jazz, r&b, funk, hip-hop, bossa nova and salsa that recall Gil Scott-Heron's similar 1970s melanges like "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

The album opens with the sound of DiFranco screwing up a guitar lick--an overt nod to her overall project's resolutely homemade nature. Reviving the antique model that served musicians for centuries and the record industry for decades until the 1990s entertainment mega-mergers, DiFranco developed her audience via constant touring; she then graduated to packaging and selling her own product via her own label. (It's worth noting that the last peaks for indie labels were the postwar era, during the rise of blues, rockabilly, r&b, rock and roll, country and soul, and the 1980s, when Reaganites began to dream America back to those glory days.) Like other early-adapting musicians, DiFranco started using her website as a combination marketing springboard/fan chatroom, thus updating the pre-web feedback loop: performers building fan lists so they could mail info about performances and recordings. And she's set up a foundation funneling money to what she describes as "grassroots cultural and political organizations around the country."

Americans still love Horatio Alger, which offers DiFranco her marketing opening into the mainstream--and like Dylan a generation ago, she's savvy enough to use it. Then there are her attitudes and language: She gives her slacker fans an indisputably recognizable voice in her hip sarcasm, cutting put-downs and political alienation, as well as in her nuanced focus on relationships and power. Her audience, mainly college and postcollege women, has grown so large that she routinely nets mainstream-media headlines and big-hall dates despite, and often because of, her outspoken political beliefs and sexual preferences. For Big Media, controversy is raw meat. How far controversial ideas are neutered or proliferated in this process is a conundrum that recalls the arguments about mass culture rampant among postwar public intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald.

What is certain is that DiFranco has come a long way from her early neo-folkie outsider days, when she was scuffling around Buffalo and clubs in other Rustbelt cities with an acoustic guitar, passing the hat and looking for crash pads. And thanks to the way she's built her career, her fans adore her not just for what she says but what she represents to them--which is down-the-line opposition to official America, outsidership in political and personal terms.

Recorded on the band's last tour, So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter showcases DiFranco in the round as an artist, with often stunning singing backed by abstractly conceptual as well as hard-driving music. "Swandive," the opener with her flubs, catches her at her damn-the-torpedoes, Romantic-with-a-capital-R best: "There's got to be more than this boat I'm in/'Cause they can call me crazy if I fail/All the chance that I need/Is one in a million and they can call me brilliant/If I succeed/...I'm gonna do my best to swan dive in the shark-infested waters/I'm gonna pull out my tampon and start splashing round/cause I don't care if they eat me alive/I've got better things here to do than survive...I've got a vision of blue sky and dry land." The bridge's odd-meter horn licks wind and curl around her increasingly elastic phrasing, her palpably maturing confidence, to head back into the verse's rhythmically layered, edgily staccato funk. As she told one interviewer, "I'm slowly learning, as my life whizzes by me, how to sing them [her songs]--maybe in a slightly calmer voice, maybe with a little bit more self-possession."

Most of the songs revamped by this jazzy sextet will be familiar to fans. Take "Letter to a John": A lapdancer's dismissively sarcastic refrain, "I'm gonna take the money I make," unfolds into a hurt and angry admission that she was a molested child, and offhanded observations about how social mores have set back women (and simultaneously imprison men) now more than at any time since the 1950s. The pumping rhythm section and sinuously suggestive horns, the well-paced and spiky dynamics, DiFranco's free and easy rhythmic phrasing that rides across as well as on the beats, all underline her artistic growth. She's learned a lot from Dylan; still, even in her most "poetic" forays she generally forgoes his surrealistic leaps for realism.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.