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

Plugged In and Strung Out

As a part of my introduction to blogging, I purposely amped up the amount of ‘tracking’ applications I use on the Internet. I am now using Digg, Hype Machine, and Last.fm, and I have to say I feel even more out of it than when I started. Though I understand the purpose of these applications from a more removed perspective, I can’t help but feel that I am creating an artificial representation of my media consumption by using these sites.

Last.fm, for instance, is able to ‘scrobble’ the music that I listen to on my iTunes, on my computer. The application cannot scrobble my iPod tracks, what I play in my car, or how much I listen to NPR. Even iTunes’ ‘Most Recently Played’ application cannot log tracks I listen to multiple times, and so no one really knows how much I listened to “Drivin’ on 9” in the past 24 hours, that The Woods is in my car, and I listen to ‘Morning Edition’ for about 20 minutes each day.

Hype Machine has the uncanny ability to accurately reflect that I have specifically searched for and selected the ‘heart’ icon for specific tracks posted on blogs. This means I like the tracks. Isn’t that why I searched for them in the first place? While I can browse through the most popular blog posts and also view what my friends ‘heart,’ I’ve found that the site really just provides you answers to questions you already knew.

Digg allows me to share favorite news stories and web features with family, friends, and intimate strangers with whom I share the site. I have been digging articles aplenty these past few weeks, but mostly from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Salon.com, places everyone knows I visit anyway. Further, Digg is not able to distinguish from articles you ‘digg’ versus articles you ‘abhor’,’ but simply wish to highlight for the horror of it all. While I can expect my family and friends (none of whom who monitor my activities on Digg) to distinguish the two, unsuspecting strangers on the web have no clue that I really think that Huckabee talking to God is a load of horseshit. For the record, I do.

So what I can’t figure out about these sites is if they are intended to track the regression or your habits, or help you to expand by emulating what other peoples’ trends are indicating? Because if I am reading/listening/digging/scrobbling the same things everyday, and you start reading/listening to what I’m Digging/scrobbling, then as far as I can tell you’re just making my bad habits yours, and we really aren’t getting anywhere in the name of progress. If you find that I’ve selected 20 Sleater-Kinney songs on Hype Machine and already knew I liked Sleater-Kinney, that all you really get out of it as an observer is that I still have a swift trigger finger.

In my album cue this week was Ani Difranco’s Not So Soft, an album I played the heck out of in high school. Though it’s been on my iTunes since I bought this computer in 2005, I apparently haven’t played a track from this album since then. It just didn’t seem right to me that none of that history is reflected in any of the applications I use.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that these sites are completely useless, and I do enjoy seeing what my friends like. I just thought that the whole point of all of this was to expand our horizons. and reflect our tastes If anything, my introduction to these sites has limited my exposure to certain music/news/cultural events, if only because I feel inclined to ‘pad’ my early use to create a foundation composed of my interest. (Not to mention the duality of rejecting ‘Big Brother’ surveillance in favor of self-selected surveillance – I suppose it’s not evil so long as you can manipulate it to present a better version of yourself.)

And you know what? That’s exactly what I don’t like about the sites – it is so hard to project an accurate image of how I use the Internet/listen to music daily. While these tools are easy to manipulate, I find it incredibly frustrating that I can’t manipulate them to tell the truth. So why do you use these sites? What do you personally gain from digging articles and scrobbling your music? Who has turned you on to what based on these tracking sites, and have you found your tastes to change since tuning in to tracking?