Ani DiFranco

There are a great many reasons to admire Ani DiFranco. She has a strong voice and a great
sense of humor. She has done more than any other woman today to revise the folk
tradition, bringing in a punk aesthetic and an alterna-chick confessional style (she can sling
a fuck better than the best of them), as well as dashes of hip-hop and electric funk. She
knows how to put together a bitchin' ensemble (and I don't just mean band). An... More >

Here's hoping she gets used to fame, a theme the coolest new-famous are now canny enough to sidestep or caricature. But DiFranco doesn't have much use for ordinary standards of cool, which is one reason she's new-famous, and for the nonce, she can do no wrong. Always underlying her bull-session eloquence, a hook no matter the message, is the supple, seductive, self-amused musicality that puts her records across. A typical touch here is her choice of world-jazz-ambient trumpeter Jon Hassell to decorate the 14-minute spoken-word finale "Pulse": "you crawled into my bed/like some sort of giant insect/and I found myself spellbound/at the sight of you there/beautiful and grotesque/and all the rest of that bug stuff." "That bug stuff"--who else would dare it? (Grade: A-)