THE FIERCEST FOLKIE

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Artists and audiences are always talking about not selling out, about not buying in, about the eternal struggle to prevent very personal art from becoming just another upc-bearing product put out by yet another megaconglomerate. Everyone talks about it, but folk singer Ani DiFranco walks it. A native of Buffalo, New York, who now lives in New York City's East Village, she is only 25 years old but has already managed to found her own record company (the not altogether ironically titled Righteous Babe Records), to release eight solo records (with total sales of more than 300,000) and, over the course of six years or so, to resist the entreaties of all the major-label suits who have sent letters, faxes and E-mail her way in their efforts to sign her. DiFranco says her label "started out as kind of a joke," but she now believes "the interests of big businesses are just fundamentally contradictory to the interests of art and people."

All of which would be just so much familiar sloganeering if DiFranco's music wasn't so scathingly worthwhile. Her earlier albums, which featured songs with only her voice and a scratchy acoustic guitar, had a sort of subterranean urgency, like that of a subway performer rushing to finish a song and earn a few quarters before the train roars into the station. DiFranco's new CD, Dilate, is her best yet--her vocals and guitar work still seethe, but she's added atmospheric touches, such as a trippy hip-hop beat on a cover of the song Amazing Grace. Like Beck, the singer-songwriter whose single Loser was a surprise best seller two years ago, and whose exceptional new CD, Odelay, will be out June 18, DiFranco makes folk relevant and fresh by incorporating other genres.

DiFranco has been a folk firebrand, dealing with such topics as abortion, capital punishment and sexual identity on past albums. On Dilate she mostly focuses on a single subject: a traumatic romance she's been involved in for about a year. The songs are sardonic, self-flagellating and self-referential; she tears into herself for the affair and then beats herself up for singing about it. "Every pop song on the radio," she croons sarcastically, "Is suddenly speaking to me." Listening to melodramatic love songs is often a guilty pleasure; DiFranco unburdens her listeners of that guilt by taking it on herself.

--By Christopher John Farley