Words Are Enough: Ani Difranco

A famous singer once said that when words can't express what you're is trying to say, the only thing you can do is sing. Although song lyrics are speech in the traditional sense, they are greater than the linguistic sum of their parts. They are more than words, Extreme might say.

Lyrics look funny on the page because they are at once simpler and more heightened than prose. And unlike prose, the metaphor is still the weapon of choice for lyricists. The power of the metaphor is often ignored in pop music, mostly because lyricists use it like a blunt object to club the listener to a quick semiotic death. Take 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" chorus:

I take you to the candy shop / I'll let you lick the lollipop / Go 'head girl, don't you stop / Keep goin 'til you hit the spot (whoa)

No questions asked. In the context of these sorts of unambiguous, flat-footed lyrical poundings, consider the fine chisel with which Ani Difranco crafts her songs. Difranco's career is not as stratospheric as it should be because she has been pigeon-holed into a whiny-lesbian-rock category, which undervalues her songwriting greatly. Admittedly, this writer received her first Ani album from her lesbian best friend in high school after her first major break-up. And yet Difranco deserves better company; the likes of Tom Waits, Patti Smith and even Lou Reed, with their punk influences and folk lyrical qualities make better comparisons. All these rockers have musical balls unequaled in rock, but also wield the metaphor like a — well, like a master sculptor. In "Shy," Difranco sings:

The butter melts out of habit / the toast isn't even warm / the waitress and the man in the plaid shirt / play out a scene they've played / so many times before / I am watching the sun stumble home in the morning / from a bar on the east side of town / and the coffee is just water dressed in brown

By anthropomorphizing the objects around her, she lends a deeply sad quality to what must have been a normal morning in a diner. Like any good poet, she zooms in to focus on the things we mortals pass over without consideration. Here the toast and butter sound more like an old and frigid couple than a morning meal, while the old frigid couple (the waitress and the man) sound more like actors than humans.

Difranco also (and probably more famously) captures humanity's highs and lows — although unlike her critics say, she does so with a quality of abandon that turns self-pity into a sort of celebration: fuck it, we're alive. In "Falling Is Like This," she sings:Feels like reckless driving when we're talking / it's fun while it lasts, and it's faster than walking / but no one's going to sympathize when we crash / they'll say "you hit what you head for, you get what you ask" / and we'll say we didn't know, we didn't even try / one minute there was road beneath us, the next just sky

Falling in love with the wrong guy or gal is well-trodden lyrical territory. But Difranco wields the automobile metaphor so well it could either be a love song or a snippet from The Fast and the Furious. The recklessness of fast cars and the recklessness of love is a very American correlation, and in this kind of American pastoral songwriting, Difranco recalls Utah Phillips and Bob Dylan. In much of her writing she takes the hard images of urban living — buildings, concrete, heat, trains, smells, strangers — and weaves them into surprisingly soft fabric.

All this, and not one mention of Ani Difranco's virtuosic guitar playing. As the famous singer said, singing is not talking. Lyrics are half of the story — the other half is a great musical sensibility that jumps between folk-folk and rock-rock without any problem. But Difranco stands out in that her lyrics survive on the page as well as they do on her lips.

— Aemilia Scott (aemilia at flakmag dot com)