Maxigumee

My sister used to think that she liked Ani Difranco. I think it was because she was little and that was all I listened to back then. When we got tickets to see Ani Difranco in concert when I was in the sixth grade, my sister thought it was the coolest thing on earth. I think that was because it was the first concert she had ever been to and some of her other friends were going, too. However, people change as they get older, and my sister was disillusioned about her actual feelings towards Ani Difranco.

Let me just say that I am a huge Ani Difranco fan. I didn’t even know who she was or what on earth she was singing about when we first started listening to her. And you might not believe this, but for like a year or so, I thought she was black. I’m not even kidding. I think it’s because of the way she looks on the cover of her album Little Plastic Castle: incredibly tan. I was very surprised to see, when I was flipping through a pamphlet of upcoming events for a local theater, to see that Ani Difranco was not only not black, but very, very, very white.

I first got into her when my father started working with her manager, Scot Fisher, in his preservation group. They aren’t on as good of terms now, hence not getting free tickets and backstage passes to shows, but I’m still a fan. I overheard a conversation my parents were having about one of their first meetings with Scot and they were talking about how he is Ani’s manager. Well, we went out and we bought a cassette tape of the Little Plastic Castle album and we’d listen to it all the time in the car. Of course, I had no idea really what any of her songs were about and didn’t really know until I actually sat down to listen to some of them after I got her album To The Teeth in the sixth grade.

At that time in my life, I was very, well, pseudo-political-punk-rockish and I felt incredibly cool about listening to somebody that nobody else listened to, even more because she talked about important issues in her music. It was not before long that I had an entire shrine in my room devoted to Ani Difranco and a subway sized poster on the other wall. Seriously, there was a sign above it that said, “Max’s Ani Difranco Shrine.” It was basically printed out pictures of her albums and of her.

I’m not nearly as obsessive now, but I’m still a pretty big fan. I still keep up on her new albums and purchase them about once a year. Except for, perhaps, Educated Guess, which, personally, I don’t believe is her best. But now I’ve gone off topic. What I want to talk about is my sister’s complete hate for Ani Difranco. And I guess many of my friends’ hate for Ani Difranco.

I guess they just don’t get it, really. I can understand that her style of music doesn’t really suit some people. After all, you really do need to focus on the lyrics to enjoy the music. It’s not the kind of upbeat can’t-understand-what-they’re-saying-but-it-doesn’t-matter type music that my sister enjoys. I still don’t get it, though, when people plug their ears and moan in pain whenever I put Ani Difranco on. My sister does a very exaggerated imitation of what Ani Difranco sounds like to her. I try to tell her that Ani doesn’t really sound like that and that the sound she is basing hers on is highly exaggerated and based more on Ani’s live performances. But even though it really annoys me when people just DON’T UNDERSTAND Ani Difranco at all, my sister just recorded the funniest thing ever, which I must share with everybody.

Yesterday night, while painting the washroom, she came up to me and said that Ani Difranco was coming out with a new album. “Max! You have to listen to this! It’s soooooo good,” she said. I knew it was probably a joke, and I asked her if it was. She simply led me into her room and played this.