"In order for all those beautiful f words like feminism and folk music to survive, they have to be dynamic," DiFranco explains over coffee at a hip burrito joint in New York's East Village. "We have to make them fun -- the other f word". Those other f words, a series of consonants and vowels that can set alarms buzzing in people's heads, are loaded with post-hippie cultural baggage that's more burdensome than Federal Communications Commission regulations -- but this 25-eyar-old troubadour is on a mission to reclaim and revive these terms.
If just the utterance of feminism and folk have set off your alarms, DiFranco might surprise you. With her pierced nose and brightly hued hair, she certainly doesn't look like '70s feminist folkie Holly Near. And although DiFranco's songs are acoustic-guitar based and autobiographical in a Joni Mitchell kind of way, DiFranco relates punk's DIY goals directly to folk. "The reason I latched on to this folk thing is, similarly to punk, it's of the people. It's subcorporate music," she says. "The whole problem with folk music with me is, it's so folky. But then I show up at these folk festivals, and everybody's so laid-back, everbody's so unpretentions -- as opposed to when I'm playings at rock festivals, and it's like `I would like to smile at you, but I'm trying to be really cool.'"
DiFranco says she thinks "the idea of having just a piece of wood with some strings on it" is very punk rock: "I like investigating the power of just wood and skin, and not having an amp that I can walk up to and turn up to 11. That's one kind of loud. But there's another kind of loud, which for me is much more of a challenge."
Maybe it's just the coffee speaking, but DiFranco seems to have the enthusiasm and drive one needs for a good challenge. She got turned on to folk at age 9, when she met Mike, a 30-year old "degenerate folk-singer barfly" at a guitar store in Buffalo, N.Y. They began playing together and hanging out with other singer-songwriters, who would come up from New York to play. DiFranco's parents were having problems of their own and "were just happy from the beginning that I was self-sufficient," DiFranco says. "For me it was the ideal childhood: complete emancipation."
That independence has remained crucial to DiFranco. After an early flirtation with a small record label, she decided to form her own company, Righteous Babe. "At first it was theoretical," DiFranco says. "I was just interested in the idea of an artist retaining complete control and really worrying about all that bullshit and not being the cloistered, babied artist who just writes the songs, and meanwhile everybody takes care of the real world for them. I wanted to negotiate all those other issues of, once you make art, how do you get it to people? How do you negotiate finances so that you can make the art in the first place?"
In the early days that meant DiFranco was touring the country in a VW bug, playing coffeehouses, colleges, bars and festivals, selling tapes as she went. Now, Righteous Babe is a serious business that has sold more than 200,000 AniDifranco records. DiFranco still spens three out of four weeks on the road, splitting her downtime between Buffalo, where Righteous Babe is based, and New York, where she moved seven years ago. "That's the nature of a career that's built on toting your butt around the country and playing music for people as opposed to commercial airplay or national TV exposure," she says.
In other words, DiFranco has put her money where her mouth is. On her seven records, DiFranco politicizes and versifies like a modern-day Woody Guthrie, a David attacking the Goliaths of corporate culture. "The Million You Never Made", on Not a Pretty Girl, explains why she turns down the major labels that periodically court her: "If you don't live what you sing about, your mirror is going to find out." Elsewhere on the album she reads a poem about abortion, sings about the "Shy", a seductive invitation to on-the-road trysts, and "Light of Some Kind", in which she explains to her boyfriend why she slept with a girl -- are less overtly political. But by talking about issues abortion and bisexuality, DiFranco makes good on the old maxim that the personal is political.
"If we can bring ourselves to admit to all this shit and then talk about it, I think we're that much better off," DiFranco says.
DiFranco's years of hard work have won her a devoted following that fills small theaters in many cities. As the word on her performances spreads, she's suffering growing pains and facing some tough decisions. At a recent concert in New York, major-label executives circled the theater while MTV News cameras filmed the show. Many DiFranco fans where unhappy about the cameras. "MTV sucks!" they shouted. DiFranco tried to defuse the tension by explaining that the cameramen were actually from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and that they were there to capture the songstress in her native environmemt. "Later, Andy [Stochansky, her drummer] and I will procreate," she joked.
Fame may force DiFranco's fans to be more trusting and less possessive, but her commitment to her political ideals -- and to Righteous Babe -- seems firmly entrenched.
"I believe in that step of not just making revolutionary music but making it in a way that challenges the system," DiFranco says. "Especially in this day and age when the tools for producing and distributing are more and more accessible to the average Joe and Josephine. The possibility of emancipation and control and independence is so much greater now." Long after MTV left the stage, DiFranco played on with Springsteen-like zeal, giving her all to one of her favorite f words: fans.
- Evelyn McDonnell