As her band warms up the stage, DiFranco says to a member in the audience, “You named your son after me? I’ll try not to fuck it up and make you regret that in any way.”
Playing songs from her multitude of albums, she chats, charms and entertains a sold-out house of adoring, predominately female fans. In the first half of the concert she breaks a guitar string almost every song, giving her acoustic playing a bit of an awkward twang.
But when the strings warm to her fingers she becomes electric, mixing bluesy politics with deep lyrical insight into the female psyche. Her crowd-rousing song “Not a Pretty Girl” sheds light on perhaps the often annoying way in which men seek to be the hero in a relationship, relegating their female counterparts to mere damsels in distress or helpless cats in trees.
“I am not a pretty girl,” DiFranco tells us. “That is not what I do. I ain’t no damsel in distress, and I don’t need to be rescued.”
Like the best of DiFranco’s music, the song then stretches beyond male/female politics to politics in general: “I am not an angry girl, but it seems like I’ve got everyone fooled. Every time I say something they find hard to hear, they chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear.”
Grade: B+
Ani DiFranco: Live at Babeville is currently available.
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