ani difranco: ¿which side are you on?
¿Which Side Are You On?
After a year blotted with political unrest and civil violence, in both the East and West, voices of protest have piped up in all quarters, from hip hop to folk. It seems timely, then, for veteran protest singer Ani DiFranco to make her return. ¿Which Side Are You On? is the folk icon and activist heroine’s seventeenth studio album, and comes after an unprecedented (for DiFranco) three-year gap in releases.
Its predecessor, Red Letter Year, found DiFranco glazed with the happiness and awe of newfound motherhood, the flame of her more revolutionary gaze turned to low-burn as domestic contentment took over. DiFranco may have settled the hearth enough to come back to the frontline with ¿Which Side Are You On?, but the artist who returns here is a changed one. “I’ve become more peaceful,” she sings on ‘Unworry’, “no more fighting”. And while that’s not strictly true of the album as a whole – the fight is still there, simply transformed and largely shorn of the agitated strumming and urgent, hearty meters of her bolder works – there’s a definite sense of her continued mellowing with age and experience.
The lengthy gap between albums gave DiFranco plenty of time to tinker with these songs, with recording sessions done piecemeal throughout 2010/11 in a Transamerican patchwork of locations with two slightly different versions of her touring band. Assisted by co-producer Mike Napolitano (her husband), DiFranco has coaxed and tempered those songs that seemed a little heavy handed and blunt during early live outings into firmer, more vivid works, with fusions of soft jazz and lite funk, pianos and horns flavouring her knuckle-wrap folk warmly.
DiFranco’s feminist reworking of the titular protest anthem – made famous by Pete Seeger almost fifty years ago and featuring the ninety-two year old himself on banjo – sounds far punchier here, with extra pedal juice, marching drums and vocals from Hudson Valley-based children’s chorus The Rivertown Kids and a brass band formed of students from The Roots Of Music, a music education program for at-risk middle-school students in DiFranco’s adopted home of New Orleans. It’s a little clunky lyrically, and far too long at six-and-a-half minutes, but it’s full of guts and makes for a rousing foot tapper in an album of otherwise moderate tempos.
There’s no doubt that ¿Which Side Are You On? is a multifaceted release, lurching as it does from the political ire of the stomping title track and the clanking, too-long pro-choice diatribe of ‘Amendment’ to examinations of quietly fierce, bittersweet love on standout tracks ‘Albacore’ and ‘Hearse’, but it rolls along the middle lane, cleared of the pace and volatile romance that fuelled her earlier albums. The witty older woman in the laidback, cheerfully worn-groove guitar salute to monogamy of ‘Promiscuity’ measures just how far DiFranco has come from the tense polygamous stand-offs of younger songs like Not A Pretty Girl’s ‘Light Of Some Kind’.
Indeed, age and aging are at the heart of ¿Which Side Are You On?. ”If you’re not getting happier as you get older, then you’re fucking up,” DiFranco declares on ‘If Yr Not’, a wry answer to the marijuana-on-the-porch meditation of ‘J’. And though her ability to navigate the personal/political into bright, radical guitar poems hasn’t entirely vacated, there’s an air of valediction on the hushed, stripped-back end song ‘Zoo’. It’s difficult to hear DiFranco, who’s been a voice of strength for so many and inspired so much personal freedom and revolution through her music, to admit with a sigh, “All that bird shit and pettiness makes the world feel insane / and I just feel drained.” Fatigue and something like defeat fill the song, as DiFranco folds her hopes quietly into the swaddling of the next generation for change. “Pour your love into your children / till there’s nothing left to say.”
[Righteous Babe; January 16, 2012]
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