Seriously. I’ve tried and tried. She’s one of my wife’s favorite artists. She’s a REALLY good guitar player. She a talented vocalist.
You’d think that all this would add up to “awesome” in my book. But listening to Ani DiFranco is like chewing aluminum foil to me. Can’t stand it. I always want to yell at my stereo, and usually end up fast forwarding.
I think it just has something to do with her attitude, and the songs themselves. I always feel like I should be ashamed of being a man for some reason. She always seems to be saying that I’m a misogynist simply because I am the keeper of a penis.
I usually end up rolling my eyes at multiple times in any given song. It seems like she paints with the Vast Brush of Righteous Outrage a lot, and ends up singing things out of pique or indignation that are, well, bullshit. One song tells how she broke down in Louisiana, and some guy who stopped hit on her outrageously, to which she (of course) replied “Fuck you very much.” My first reaction to this verse, and her delivery, is to reply, “This never fucking happened.” It just smells like an imaginary conversation she had with herself, where she got all worked up over an imagined slight, and said, “Well, if that ever happened, this is EXACTLY what I’d say. Ooooh, I WISH some fucking MAN would say that to me.”
In the same song, she also says something about everybody staring at her in the middle of Alabama, and how she doesn’t think they like the way she dresses, etc.
Horseshit. I’m in Alabama, and I know so fucking many women with piercings, tattoos, short/no/mohawked/etc. hair who dress in every possible fashion, it’s not funny. Nobody ever fucking stared at or whispered cattily about Ani DiFranco. Or if they did, it wasn’t because of the way she was dressed. It was because she was acting like an entitled prima donna with a “social justice” chip on her shoulder.
Alternative story, Ani: I met a young couple at a rock show here in Birmingham recently. They had just driven all the way over from a tiny little town on the border of Alabama and Mississippi to see this band. The guy was a quiet, sort of rednecky fellow, dressed conservatively, pretty thick accent, etc. You’d probably hate him on sight.
The girl was from Utah, had never stepped foot in the South before the previous evening. She was pierced, tattooed, and dyed from head to all visible extremities. She had sleeves. She had neck tattoos. The had eyebrow, septum, and lip piercings. They were both extremely sweet and friendly people.
Now get this: the first time she ever stepped foot in Alabama, she was going to meet his parents (by all accounts, typical rural white Alabamians. Religious, fairly conservative, etc.) She was nervous, to say the least. Know what happened?
She was given a whole bunch of hugs, home-cooked food, a comfortable bed, and a generally royal welcome. She said she had a wonderful time. Now, you would probably say that these people are exceptions to the general pig-eyed, ignorant, Republican rural populace of Alabama. I say these people are the norm, and you have a vastly skewed and adolescent perspective of men, Southerners, and sure, even Republicans.
