infamy is ours (and lots of links)
Sunday 6 April 2008 | 5 cookies in the jar
Supposedly taking part in the Great Interview Experiment (by interviewing Jen on the Edge, which we haven’t yet—bad Un, no infamy) means we also got interviewed ourselves, by the redoubtable Chris O’Rourke of cdcstudios.com; and you can read it…here. (Be sure you check out some of his brainy posts too, like the 5 Must-Have Wordpress Plugins and 5 Ways to make Gmail Work for You!) And for lazy as well as faithless readers, I excerpt the part which surprised me most—as in, I had no idea I had this much stuff to say! You’d think half-a-dozen years of blogging might have cued me on that one; but no.
I notice you listen to Ani DiFranco. Do you remember how you discovered her music?
Weirdly enough I just told this story to the Brujo. I had acquired, somehow, a paper catalog to a music store called Ladyslipper Music. This was in, like, 1989, loooong before teh Interwebs. It had this hippie-looking purple watercolor painting on the front and was filled with “women’s music”—the real deal, like Cris Williamson and Holly Near and Ferron and artists to whom mostly no one listens anymore, mostly because they were mostly terrible. I could never afford to order anything, though; those were the Lost Years and I made $5 an hour at the bookstore. Actually maybe that’s where I got the catalog—the guys in the record half of the store were always giving me freebies and posters and stuff.
Anyway I would pore over the fairly elaborate descriptions of the recordings for HOURS. And they had I think two tapes by this shaven-headed big-eyed girl—Ani really was a girl then, maybe 16 or 17 herself. But what really drew me to them wasn’t her pictures but the reviews of the music as being completely ferocious and unprecedented. I was really into the Indigo Girls at that time *shudder* and was teaching myself to play every single Suzanne Vega song on guitar, but I also loved Sinéad O’Connor and was CRAZY about Melissa Etheridge. I could only fingerpick but I was frustrated with how sweet and tiny that sounded, and I desperately wanted to know how to make a big loud sound, but without strumming.
So when I was at the Women’s College in 1993 and Ani finally played Amherst, my girlfriend kimba and I went immediately to hear her—I seem to remember paying with a roll of laundry quarters, which of course you couldn’t do now. And I remember that she opened with “Fourth of July,” I was standing about ten feet away, we were *surrounded* with entranced guitar guys, and I was like, “Uh-huh. Yes please. That.”
So in a period of a few years I went to a dozen of her shows, talked to her at summer folk festival camps, learned scores of songs, etc. In the late nineties I quit going to live shows because I couldn’t handle her audiences any more—either their size or their attitudes—around the same time that Ani herself started writing songs about her frustration with audience, oddly. Conversely, I have never heard Tori Amos live, ever, though I dream about meeting with her and talking to her and playing for her all the time—almost on a weekly basis; her persona has long been an inner mentor to me, completely unknown to her.
Hanging out the laundry yesterday I was thinking about why Ani and why Tori. I used to be fond of mangling Eliot’s bromide about Shakespeare and Dante, claiming that Tori and Ani divide the world between them—there is no third. (I didn’t discover Joni Mitchell until very late, for some reason.) They cover different territory within me and within many listeners—just think of their nicknames: The Little Folksinger and the Queen of the Fairies. Tori spaces herself all over that numinous inner landscape which is at times nonsensical and at other times insane; her lyrics aren’t representational, and very literal hearers find them bewildering. It probably sounds moronic, but listening to Tori taught me how to read Dickinson. She is often a language poet, if you’ll let me get away with that, while Ani is very much a formalist. Ani favors those 3- and 4-line stanzas, very square song structures, repetition with significant variations, and has that trademark politicized realism, with a kind of fearless, bawdy Chaucerian humor.
But I think the real reason why their music has spoken to me so richly and accompanied me through so much is for the very simple fact that they’re both a few years older than I am. And through the reality of how long it takes to write songs, record them, distribute them….I wind up hearing lyrics and music that directly address what I’m going through, in a sometimes uncanny way. So they had abortions/miscarriages/girlfriends/bad breakups/divorces/parental separations/reevaluations of work/artistic crises etc. in roughly the same timeframes as I did.
Having, basically, immensely talented big sisters has been invaluable in the sense of predecessors, or permission-givers. (”I can SAY that?! I can MAKE that kind of move?!”) And obviously sometimes it’s depressing/paralyzing, too, the way it can be when you have really cool older siblings—when you’re saddled with any anxiety of influence.
I feel it is only fair to add that while I diss the Indigo Girls, I did have a technically useful dream in which Emily Saliers took me to a guitar store, handed me a capo and said, “You’re going to need one of these” (and she was right, as I found out after guitar classes with Jaimé Morton and David Wilcox, who also got me to understand and incorporate the whole crucial concept of alternate tunings). And I also left out the inestimable influence of Steady On and Shawn Colvin’s singularly percussive style (for my birthday in 1991, my DC housemates Philip and Roberta took me to hear Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter at the Birchmere, a show that changed all of our wee musical lives)—hugely influential in terms of discovering other ways to make sounds on the guitar. And then Dar’s lyrics—and my whole weird and very short adventure as part of a songwriting group in Western Mass, with her and Jaimé and Richard Shindell….
But that was all in another lifetime.
Tonight the Brujo and I have been hanging out watching youtube videos and pretending it’s 1994 and that we have VH1. I remember staying up all night in my Northampton house, nauseated from my stomach ulcer and sick with love for the fled Parisienne, doing bong hits with Juana and Steph and watching Tori’s blurry-fairy video for “Silent All These Years” and the swimming baby in Nirvana’s “Come As You Are.” Ce soir, after taking in everything from Soul Coughing’s “Super Bon Bon” (you gotta take the elevator to the mezzanine chump) and Radiohead’s “Creep” (oh Johnny—your angelic flatpicking contrasted with your satanic tangled feedback) and Al Yankovich’s heartless parody of an impossibly, beautifully alive Kurt in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (and I don’t know / what I’m saying….), we finally concluded our glut with Annie Lennox, kd lang, Kate Bush, and a truly disturbing cover of the same Nirvana song by, yes, Paul Anka. Which I invite you to watch as well, in the spirit of saying to loved ones: “Ew, this tastes funny—here, you try it!”
5 cookies in the jar
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Any thoughts/feedback on Lisa Germano or Liz Phair (the original one, not the newish version)??
Lisa Germano: creeeeeeeepy beautiful!
Yes, and what of Emiliana Torrini and Keren Ann and CocoRosie and Joanna Newsom and Josephine Foster and all the new goddesses of song?
I don’t know Mss. Germano nor (can you believe it?!) Phair. I mean, I don’t know their work.
The new goddesses! We love them. Anyway Joanna Newsom and Emiliana Torrini (whom I first heard, probably like many, only because she sang “Gollum’s Song” for The Two Towers and I was all,— Björk, is that you?).
And REGINA SPEKTOR and the Azure Ray chick whose name I’m spacing.
Keren Ann and CocoRosie, I know a teeny tiny bit—but who is Josephine Foster? When will school END, I clearly need to hit up 3 million of my closest soulseex friends for some new music—
i was similarly reminiscing about my own discovery of ani around the same time as this entry. a coincidence….
i’ve never had the opportunity to see her live though!!!
and p.s. what about deb talan??