DiFranco's woman-for-all-seasons appeal has made her a gale-force cult phenomenon, cover star of more magazines than Courtney Love could dare imagine. Her live shows are abuzz with the fervor and unity generally reserved for fundamentalist revivals. Forget about the Spice Girls: on stage, you can barely hear DiFranco for the screams. This is real girl power.

"I remember when the Spice Girls first came to being – I was terrified," the chatty, genuinely funny DiFranco told me from her temporary home in Austin, where she's producing a Woody Guthrie Tribute album. "This commercially-created, vapid unit with their bumper sticker slogans of feminism, sucking all the life out of the movement. But I'm over that. Now I think it's just a phase for 13-year-old girls; it's not as harmful as I thought. The industry is always milking what's happening in pop culture, anyway."

The industry of music is a subject that clearly irritates DiFranco. A true believer in the work ethic, this 28-year-old minstrel set up her own Righteous Babe Records in 1990 to avoid dealing with the suits, yet now she's seen as a stellar music biz mover'n'shaker. As I write, sales of her ten albums are marching towards one-million and rising by the minute. Considering she employs 15 people and receives a sweeter royalty than even Michael Jackson ($4.25 per album as opposed to $2, if you need to know), it's unlikely she'll be selling her soul to a major label any time soon.

Righteous Babe also gives DiFranco an excuse to frequent her old stomping ground, that is, when she's not on the road working on her Frequent Flyer points. "Theoretically I live in Buffalo, my home town, where the Righteous Babe mothership is located," she tells me. "I go there to work at the office, but not very often."

I push her to describe Buffalo to the uninitiated, if she had only a postcard-sized space to fill. "It's a really dilapidated, post-industrialist, East Coast city. A very uncosmopolitan town, kind of like Cleveland or Dayton, Ohio. (Of course people will be flocking there in the future to see the Righteous Babe Records theme park.)

"But Buffalo did have a big influence on me: it's a very no nonsense, unpretentious city. The fact that I just play an acoustic guitar and sing little songs – no pomp or circumstance – could stem from my upbringing there."

DiFranco insists that she's just a simple folksinger whose musical candor and all-round goofiness have transformed her into an accidental icon. But being the poster punk girl for America's angry, literate, green-haired masses tends to obscure the humor and tunefulness inherent in DiFranco's music. Her recent live album, Living In Clip, reverberates with the type of wit and hard-earned wisdom conspicuously absent from the platinum-plus efforts of Jewel and company. And it rocks, too, in a coffeeshop-acoustics kind of way, as DiFranco and her swinging, funky backing duo veer from breathless strums such as "Fire Door," to her own graceful spin on "Amazing Grace," where she shares stage space with Buffalo's very own Symphony Orchestra.

And on her new studio effort, Little Plastic Castle, DiFranco dreams harder, blending hip-hop-spiked grooves with bittersweet mood pieces and frisky, finger-pointing narratives. She throws out astute and often startlingly explicit comments on the trickiness of love and success, while offering acidic asides on the state of America today. "I wonder who's gonna be the next president," she asks at one point, "tweedle dumb or tweedle dumber?"

"People talk about my image, like I come in two dimensions, like lipstick is a sign of my declining mind" - Ani DiFranco

DiFranco also ponders the whys and wherefores of the fame game. "I'm trapped in my glass house," she sings, "while catastrophe awaits me on the lawn." Wise, witty, troubled, and sharper than razor blades, DiFranco's ruminations prove conclusively that there's always a place in the world for a singer-songwriter – especially one with a story in her head and an axe to grind.

"I've been trying to learn how to make records that sound like the songs I write," DiFranco explains. "The live album is much more indigenous. A recording studio is such a strange, awkward situation, totally divorced from the rest of the world. We've been trying to just jam and record in a more casual, natural way.

"You know," she adds, "I spent 26 years being just another Josephine, and during the last two years of my life, things have really changed. Most people who are at the same position as me, success-wise, really wanted it, but it makes me really uncomfortable, the place I've gotten to now.

"But there's still so much about my life I love, it's really good to be able to no longer live from hand to mouth. But I hate being implicated in the whole pop music circus. It's not what I respect. I'm supposed to be playing the rock star, but I refuse to. I'm trying to make some sense of it, though."

Recently, DiFranco had a run-in with Ms. magazine that again turned the public's gaze towards her booming business, and away from her music. When the big-budget glossy included DiFranco amongst their "21 feminists for the 21st century," DiFranco was lauded mainly for her financial acumen ("what, she writes songs, too"?).

In a drop-dead funny, frequently snippy reply – which can be read online – DiFranco makes it clear that she's a folksinger, not a financier. "I choose relative statistical mediocrity over fame and fortune," she fired back, "because I have a bigger purpose in mind. Last thing I want to do is feed the machine." She closes by saying that she hopes her gravestone will read, "songwriter, musicmaker, storyteller, freak," rather than "CEO."

While she may be forever juggling pop and politics, at heart DiFranco's a purist. "I'm really given to the idea of people playing instruments," she explains.

"Last year we were performing at these festivals in Europe, where guys were lugging banks of samplers [musical passages stored in computer memory] and equipment around, plugging it in, dancing around, and then calling it a musical performance. I was feeling really old-fashioned."

Here DiFranco adopts a passable hillbilly twang.

"'I don't know about you, but where I come from we play geeetars,' I was saying to these people. Maybe it's the folksinger in me, but there's something about people creating music with their hands, and not machines, that I truly love."

February 1998

Photo of Ani featured on our March 1998 cover

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