Falling Out of Love

As you know from my well-documented post on how I listen, I select a different playlist as my soundtrack every week. Last week, the playlist was all of my Ani Difranco music. As I have intimated before, Ani Difranco was the first artist whose music and fan community I become completely engrossed with. In high school, I very much believed that fluency with Ani's work was required to be the best lesbian, and the best citizen, I could be.

Wow. My first week of listening to almost nothing but Ani in about six or seven years, and I was floored at how heavy-handed everything seemed. Surely it wasn't so much like this in high school, was it? Songs that defined me seem so utterly shallow now that I don't even want to tell you which ones they were.

Most bands and artists that I've started listening to less either became progressively worse (Old 97's) or simply less interesting to me (Ryan Adams), but I've always been able to look upon their previous work fondly. While most 'break-ups' with previous band 'crushes' ended amicably, I'm quite nearly resentful toward Ani as I return to her music.

I guess I was hoping for something a little more Annie Hall and a little less "You're So Vain". A few of her songs still get me – Welcome To, Fire Door and Both Hands – but so many of the songs I thought were anthems lack nuance and any sense of what I feel to be authentic emotion. Even "Shroud," my favorite off of 2007's Repreive, is appealing to me purely from a musical sense; the lyrics are simply another testament to her own personal enlightenment.

I'm not saying that Ani is disingenuous, but her words seem so carefully chosen that even love songs are more sermon and less diary. The political songs say just the right thing to appropriate the right demographic, and the self-righteous songs are laced with just enough humiliation to create an aura of humility.

More so than anything else, I was filled with the realization that these songs have always been this melodramatic and self-absorbed, and if anything, I would wager that that's exactly what drew me to her. She was the one who was going to be herself, and fuck it if you didn't like it! Well, I was going to be myself, and fuck it if you didn't like it! Unfortunately, all of that outrage (like all teen angst) was hopelessly misdirected at understanding parents and a world that welcomed me for who I was.

And so too has Ani found an overwhelming acceptance, and in fact marketability, based on this anger and self-righteousness. A visit to righteousbabe.com shows us all of the Ani goods for sale these days. I haven’t visited in a while, but the last I checked, the baby clothes and the trucker hats were enough to keep me away for good. When did DIY become a branding initiative? She even went so far as to produce, package and sell her own ‘bootlegs.’

The anger that Ani's music births and represents seems directed more toward our awareness of our own privilege and apathy than the topic at hand. ‘Tis of Thee’ doesn’t make us angry because America doesn’t care about the race, poverty and drug wars, it makes us angry because we don’t care that America doesn’t care about race, poverty or drug wars. It’s just easier to think of it the first way, and remind yourself that the Ani Difranco t-shirt you own is a political statement and not the product of fanaticism.

So why is it that I feel so angry about falling out of love with Ani Difranco? I suppose it's because the Old 97’s and Ryan Adams never tried to get much past sex, drugs, rock and roll and love. Perhaps I resent Ani because she didn’t need to sell t-shirts or bootlegs to make her music heard; perhaps I resent Ani because the political messages she worked so hard to cultivate are no better written than the commercials they are trying to usurp. Or perhaps I’m just kind of embarrassed for realizing I’ve been had.

Ani Difranco - Angry Anymore