By Beth Winegarner
A ni DiFranco wants you to know one thing about her: labels don't apply. Try and stick one on her and it'll slide right off like the riffs that spill from her trained hands. In case you failed to figure this out from her previous albums (or if you're new to her music), she's titled her newest work Not a Pretty Girl. And that's only the beginning.
Most of the time critics try to get away with calling her acoustic- guitar-driven songs folk, but they're missing the point. Just because DiFranco knows her way around a six-string doesn't mean she can be shoved into a little category and tied up with a satin bow. Her kamikaze lyrics have led others into describing her music as punk, but I'd like to think there's room for her variety of unguarded honesty in all genres of music.
It's not that DiFranco wants to make you uncomfortable, exactly, but she does want to make you think. "Every time I say something they find hard to hear/ They chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear," she explains in the title track. And she deals with a lot of difficult subjects on Not A Pretty Girl: the decision not to keep an unborn child in "Tiptoe," the death penalty in "Crime for Crime," the corporate music world in "The Million You Never Made" and the growing gap between the upper and lower classes in "Coming Up."
She also manages to toss in her two cents' worth about relationships without belittling either gender, a trick of maturity from which some of her peers could learn a thing or two. "Let's not ask what next or how or why/ I am leaving in the morning, so let's not be shy," she sings in "Shy," playing the game of who-hits-on-who-first. She is more wistful in "Hour Follows Hour," giving closure to a relationship: "Maybe we are both good people who have done some bad things... I hope in the end we can laugh and say it was all worth it."
As if it weren't enough that DiFranco is a clever lyricist, her guitar playing runs circles around most of the musicians who are currently diddling their way up the pop charts. I'm not sure there are names for all the tricks she can do, but the truth of the matter is, they're not tricks. They're a part of the storytelling process, each instrumental melody dancing rings around DiFranco's vocals and the drums and vocals of her musical partner Andy Stochansky. The spasmic strumming in "Light of Some Kind" seems arhythmic at first, but serves to intensify the nervousness of the song's subject, being caught in a lie. The harmonics in "Coming Up" are reminiscent of the noises an elevator makesthe elevator which separates the streetperson from the CEO in his top-floor penthouse.
It is for these reasons (her talent and clever way of avoiding definition) that DiFranco has been courted by major labels of every persuasion. And it is likely that for those same reasons she has stayed with her own independent label, Righteous Babe Records. "I can be the million that you never made," she reminds those who would attempt to stamp a label on her and mold her into something "more marketable." In "32 Flavors" she offers another take on herself: "And god help you if you are a phoenix and you dare to rise up from the ash/ A thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy while you were just flying past." DiFranco turns her own life and pain into something beautiful, difficult, and honest. All she wants you to do is listen.
This article was originally published in Addicted to Noise.