Ani DiFranco's "Little Plastic Castle"
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Feb. 13, 1998) -- It is only February, but it's hard to imagine that a more important or spectacular album will be released in 1998 than Ani DiFranco's "Little Plastic Castle," which is due out Tuesday, Feb. 17, in stores.

"Little Plastic Castle," the 10th album on her own Righteous Babe label, is by far DiFranco's best studio effort yet -- the most successful recorded representation of the singer-songwriter's complex, multi-faceted personality.

In live performance DiFranco -- who appears at the Mullins Center at UMass-Amherst on April 4 and the Palace Theatre in Albany on April 10 -- is brimming with equal parts humor, irony, sexuality and righteous rage, often all at the same time.

These very human qualities can be difficult if next to impossible to get across in the relatively lifeless form of a studio recording, which is why last year's 2-CD live set, "Living In Clip," was greeted so warmly by DiFranco fans.

While DiFranco's previous studio recordings were all compelling works -- essential milestones in the career of the most intriguing and powerful artist of the decade -- they fell somewhat short of telling DiFranco's complete story, the one familiar to those who have seen her in concert.

The self-produced "Little Plastic Castle" fully captures DiFranco in all her nakedly contradictory ambivalence. In a prepared statement released by her press office, DiFranco talks about how the songs on "Little Plastic Castle" are about "trying to retain my own humanity in the face of the reductionism of the media, or of fans sort of turning me into a symbol or an icon or whatever, a role model...."

On the title track, DiFranco says much the same thing in mischievously humorous fashion tinged with sarcasm: "I wish they could see us now in leather bras and rubber shorts/Like some ridiculous new team uniform for some ridiculous new sport/Quick someone call the girl police and file a report." DiFranco's deft ability to undermine self-important critics both to her left and her right is nothing short of dazzling.

Whereas her last studio effort, "Dilate" (1996), experimented with dense, industrial textures and hip-hop-style samples, her new album is more of a summary effort, favoring more conventional acoustic folk-rock arrangements while inching them forward into previously unexplored territories.

The album opens quietly with a solo acoustic guitar being picked and strummed, before DiFranco chimes in on vocals, setting the scene for the title track. Three verses into the song, the rhythm section kicks in along with a horn section, propelling the song forward atop a ska-inflected funk beat "Fuel," the album's second cut, is one of several "spoken-word" tracks on the album. The term "spoken-word" is used loosely here, because DiFranco's spoken-word raps contain more natural rhythm and music than most pop hits. Atop a steady, folk-funk groove, her Beat- like cadences swing with the finesse of a jazz singer, juxtaposing images of a subterranean slave cemetery in Manhattan against scenes of contemporary pop commodification. Along the way, DiFranco acknowledges the influence of Bob Dylan ("You can go your way and I can go my way," "How does it make you feel?"), with whom she toured last August and September, including a show at Tanglewood.

"Little Plastic Castle" is chock full of instant DiFranco classics, such as "Gravel," which first appeared on "Living In Clip," an intimate tete-a-tete with a lover or friend called "As Is," and "Loom," which indicts a fellow performer for always taking without giving.

"Deep Dish" is a ska-soaked, dark slice of nightlife, while "Pixie" is another dark, devastating look at contemporary pop culture and DiFranco's response to it. Digging progressively deeper into her psyche, "Swan Dive" is a nightmarish fantasy in which "I've built my own empire out of car tires and chicken wire/And now I'm queen of my own compost heap and I'm getting used to the smell."

With so much focus over the years on DiFranco as an independent phenomenon -- as the first do-it-yourself, million-selling recording artist -- not enough ink has been spilled on her prowess as a singer, guitarist, arranger and producer. DiFranco is a dynamic musician and compelling vocalist, able to purr insinuatingly one moment and wail like a banshee the next without missing a beat. Her longstanding drummer, Andy Stochansky, and her new bassist, Jason Mercer, are uncannily sympathetic and swinging.

While the concerns of "Little Plastic Castle" as a whole are varied, they are unified by recurring motifs and imagery. The cover art superimposes DiFranco's face onto the body of a goldfish, and DiFranco milks the apt metaphor for all it is worth. Mirrors, dark sunglasses, glass houses and little birds reappear in several songs.

While it would be overstating the case to call "Little Plastic Castle" a concept album about DiFranco's newfound celebrity -- just last week she was in Time Magazine and later this month DiFranco is up for a Grammy Award, both unprecedented achievements for a non- corporate artist -- the subject is frequently addressed and from various points of view. Part of DiFranco's artistry is her ability to mine her own, unique experience for the universal parallels in her listeners' lives. Thus, issues of identity, self-image and, of course, human relationships are the real text and subtext of most of her songs.

In an odd way, in its willingness to address issues directly and in eschewing trendy post-modernist shtick in favor of old-fashioned confessional- and protest-folk, "Little Plastic Castle" is almost reactionary. While the sound is utterly contemporary, the songs themselves gain strength by functioning within the folk tradition predating Joni Mitchell and Dylan, going back in time to folk-protest heroes like Woody Guthrie and Utah Phillips.

"Little Plastic Castle" ends with "Pulse," a 14-minute, mostly ambient track that begins with a spoken-word, anti-love love poem and ends with an ambient instrumental section featuring an eight-minute trumpet solo by avant-garde musician Jon Hassell (Brian Eno, LaMonte Young, Talking Heads).

The last person to end an album with a song of such length, of course, was Bob Dylan, whose "Highlands," on last fall's "Time Out of Mind," clocked in at about 16 minutes. With her own outsized voice, personality and talent, and her similar streak of unrepentant independence and integrity, DiFranco is clearly on a course to match that of Dylan's.

"Little Plastic Castle" finally captures DiFranco in all her glorious artistry and moods. It may well be her "Blonde on Blonde" -- another landmark album that concluded with an unusually long love song -- and as that album did for Dylan in the '60s, so does DiFranco's "Little Plastic Castle" establish her once and for all as the most important popular-music artist of the decade.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Feb. 13, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]