Righteous Babe Ani DiFranco spins circles around the record industry’s rules for success. Upon the release of “Revelling /Reckoning,” Curve spoke with the rabble-rouser about the winds of political change and also got an emotional weather forecast on her 3.5-year marriage to “Goat Boy,” her sound engineer.

Ani DiFranco has made a name for herself by bucking the industry standard. Ten years ago, she was a self-described “badger, poking her head out of the underground folksinger scene and selling tapes out of her car.” Today, through relentless touring and a Herculean work ethic, she has sold more than 3 million records on her own Righteous Babe Records label and stands as an icon of independence. Although the recording-industry giants have been pursuing her for years, DiFranco adamantly refuses their offers and charts her career with values like personal integrity rather than fame and fortune.

Ironically, it’s a plan that’s paid off handsomely — DiFranco reportedly makes about $2 more per record sold than industry superstars receive from their royalties. More than that, she’s won the admiration of thousands of fans who respond to her dynamic performances as much as to her mythic success.

Ani found an early core fan base with lesbians who identified with her feminist themes and snippets of songs that spoke of her love affairs with women. But try to label her — bisexual, perhaps? — and she’ll sling the “F” word back at you — folksinger, that is. Still, some lesbian fans were dismayed when Ani wed a guy, Andrew Gilchrist, her sound engineer. Earlier this year, Righteous Babe Records released Ani’s 13th solo release, a double-album gumbo of rock-pop-folk-jazz called “Revelling/Reckoning.” Curve caught up with her at the Zurich, Switzerland, stop on her European tour.

Do your European audiences differ from your American fans?
They eat a lot more cheese over here! [Laughs.] Being a songwriter, language is one of the preeminent tools I use in my art. To perform for non-English-speakers is kind of sporting for me to try to communicate as much as I want to, as I’m used to. On the flip side, sometimes I come to Europe and I feel a lot more heard than I do in the United States, which is odd, given the language barriers. I think it’s the luxury of escaping the media stereotype that follows me around and makes people assume things about me that here I’m just sort of free of.

What is your media stereotype?
I think it has a lot to do with the sort of ghettoization of feminism, you know? Just — women’s experience. Because I write from my identity as a woman, the mainstream media has a way of marginalizing that, of saying, “Oh, that’s a chick thing.” Suddenly, it becomes a story or perspective that has relevance only to 13-year-old girls — that kind of double standard where women’s experience isn’t considered as universal or political with a capital “P.” You know, suddenly I’m just writing confessional chick songs. I find that the audience, maybe in Europe for instance, to be more diverse, because maybe the media isn’t telling them this is fucking “girl power” or whatever.

When you tour outside the United States, do you find people who are familiar with your work look to you as a voice of what’s really happening in America?
I think being one step culturally removed contributes to the fact that people are less threatened, because it’s someone speaking from another culture, criticizing another society. … It hasn’t got any funner to be the Ugly American since the last fucking-quote-unquote “election,” which I actually prefer to call a coup. Man, when that whole fucking circus went down with the kind of ordaining of our new king, Baby George, I could just feel what it would be like to travel around Europe this month as sort of a representative of the ridiculous.

Did you participate in any counter-inauguration demonstrations?
Well, I was gonna. Every year on Inauguration Day, Gloria Steinem organizes a benefit for Voters for Choice and Reproductive Freedom, but for some reason, people were not agreeing to do it this year, and then it got postponed. I was very saddened by that. I think it would have been a great year to be really loud about that in Washington on Inauguration Day.

From November 11 on, I think if I were an Internet person at all I would have been on it saying, “I don’t accept George Bush as my president, do you?” I was thinking that we should petition the media not to call it an election at all, which it isn’t, but to call it The Coup.

But you did participate in a rally in New York for Ralph Nader before the election. Do you support Nader?
I was asked to do the rally, and originally I decided against doing it. I felt very strongly about voting against Bush as a national priority. I had this stance of supporting Nader and Winona [LaDuke] everywhere but the swing states, and making sure that Gore got into the White House first and then trying to get the 5 percent for the Greens and get them on the ballot for future elections and start the process of expanding our two-party system, or one-party system, as Ralph would say. Then Ralph called me up! Yeah, he fucking called me up and it’s fucking Ralph Nader and he’s done so much work, so much dynamic political work that has made real changes in people’s lives. I was like, “OK, Ralph. I’ll come.” So I went and I made my little argument and then, the worst of all worlds happened in the election. … I’ve actually contacted Ralph since the election and said, “Where are you? Now is the time where the work starts.”

What would that look like to you?
I don’t know, but I feel very desperate to begin talking about that with people and to try and formulate some kind of idea for political solidarity. For me, what I think we need are connections. We need to connect all of the women who are working for women’s issues and women’s rights and environmentalists and all of the people who are working around race relations and queer politics and labor movements. I think we need to consolidate our power. We need to find the common ground between us and form a strong political party that can have some sort of place in this stranglehold of conservatism that is our government now.

You’ve been outspoken about the power structure behind record companies and what you call a “complete vertical integration and corporate control over the music industry,” from the merging of big labels who drop all their little artists all the way down to who owns the radio stations, billboards, and promotional companies that control touring and venues. The lyrics of “Your Next Bold Move” suggest you see this model of power consolidation reflected in government as well:

“The mighty multinationals
Have monopolized the oxygen
So it’s as easy as breathing
For us all to participate
But you’ve got the hard cough
of a chain smoker
And you’re at the arctic circle playing strip poker
And it’s getting colder and colder
Every time you lose”

Are you talking about how the tobacco, oil and logging industries control the government?
I was talking with a friend about the historical trajectory of the balance between church and state. This used to be a very hot topic, when the church was all-powerful, and people had these ideals of political systems of democracy, of being free from the hierarchies and political systems of the church, and I think that was a very relevant debate. Now, multinational corporations are our church. I think in order to have democracy of any kind, we need to extricate the forces of capital from running governments. Our government is really the number-one offender in terms of letting capitalism govern its policies and its priorities. Until we attack that fundamental union, or control of politics, by business people, we’re going be so far from justice.

What’s your media diet? Where do you get your news sources?
Touring is a little insulated that way. Especially in Europe. We travel venue to venue on a bus, where we live in our little rolling, jostling pod with each other all night long. We’re in a venue and we have very little access to print media, let alone any TV or whatever. We kind of exist in a somewhat blissful bubble. It’s really nice to be on tour and to be escaping the winds of popular culture. You get back home and you get in your car and turn on the radio and you haven’t heard of a single band playing as it turns over and over month after month. Yeah, you do get a little out of touch with political events. I find myself talking to my manager Scot almost every day, saying, “What’s going on?” They drop a USA Today outside our hotel rooms every four or five days when we have a hotel, but that doesn’t say anything in it.

Funny you mentioned that — the front page of USA Today asks the Oklahoma bombing victims’ families if they will attend Timothy McVeigh’s execution. One woman said she will attend, since McVeigh is white and of a middle-class background, had a million-dollar defense, and is as guilty as his leg is long. I know that you appeared with Angela Davis and MeShell Ndegéocello at a Critical Resistance benefit against prisons and that you are against the death penalty — what do you think about that?
Interesting. At least she brought up a couple of very salient points; that’s a lot to ask for in the media these days, which is so blanketedly accepting and supportive of capital punishment. To me, it’s always so sad when you compound wrongness with more wrongness. I remember when there was an abortion doctor shot in his house in Buffalo, Dr. Slepian. The newspapers were saturated for days in Buffalo with the wife of Dr. Slepian calling for capital punishment once they found the killer. It saddened me so much that the media will turn so quickly to supporting the ideas of capital punishment when really there are so many more useful things to talk about around tragedies like the Oklahoma bombing. I personally feel that killing is not a good idea, whether it’s done by an individual or a government, and I think especially if it’s done by a government. If you were a strung-out individual who’s had a lifetime of desperation and violence and you’re standing at a convenience store trying to get a couple hundred bucks, I don’t even think you have nearly the amount of accountability that a rich and powerful government does. You don’t have nearly the amount of privilege and power and ability to create violence. I think that it’s such a tricky one, too. It’s so popular to be tough on crime in our violent world. Of course, for me, “tough on crime” is more like taking the guns out of every home and not compounding violent crime with more killing.

In your new song “Subdivision,” you write:

“I’m wondering what will it take
For my country to rise
First we admit our mistakes
And then we open our eyes
Or nature succumbs to one last dumb decision
And america the beautiful
Is just one big subdivision”

What mistakes would you like to see America admit?
That song is another sort of ode to my hometown, to Buffalo. It’s about segregation, racial segregation and the forces of racism in our society, in our physical landscape, even. Buffalo has been architecturally decimated. The white people have fled the urban center and the tax districts have been structured so that the affluent areas benefit themselves and the struggling areas get kind of redlined. It’s true of so many American cities now. I think it’s a problem that is so deep and affects us in so many ways, like in terms of the architecture and the beautiful old buildings being torn down because they’re empty and boarded up and burning. It hurts everyone in society, racism and segregation. It goes back so deep.

Back when we had official segregation — you know, the whole “separate but equal” — when that was coming to criticism and it was brought to the Supreme Court, the constitutionality of it, the court decided to attack the “separate” part. I think it was a bit of a political compromise at the time. It was a little too ambitious to attack the “equal” part. But I think it’s an interesting thing to contemplate. What if we had said, “All right, well, separate is unfair. You can’t have the white fountain and the black fountain any more,” and then, “You guys figure it out.” What if we had attacked the “equal”? What if we had said, “You can’t have huge economic disparity between white people and black people. You can’t have poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods,” and then seen if the “separate” thing didn’t just work itself out?

In “Garden of Simple,” what’s the “bacteria” you refer to?

“Science chases money
And money chases its tail
And the best minds of my generation
Can’t make bail
But the bacteria are coming to take us down
That’s my prediction
It’s the answer to this culture
Of the quick fix prescription”

We are, literally, a culture of the quick-fix prescription. It’s incredible how something so small, like bacteria, is so powerful. Through the process of making money, through the medical association and whatnot, basically we are encouraging the strengthening of bacteria and the ultimate sort of biological crisis of mankind’s overpopulation and manipulation of genetics and science just for reasons of profit. But I think there are a lot of analogies therein. People ask me all the time, can one person make a difference, do you think that, you know, blah blah blah? A fucking microscopic bacteria amoeba can make a huge difference! So my answer is always “Yes.” I read some African proverb that says something like, “If you don’t think that one person can make a difference, try spending the night in a room with a mosquito.”

In your song “School Night,” which seems to be a tale of fidelity, are you saying that you do believe in marriage?

“So I
I’m going home
To please the one I so love pleasing
And I don’t expect
He’ll have much sympathy for my grieving
But I guess that this is the price
That we pay for the privilege
Of living for even a day
In a world with so many things
Worth believing in”

Well, you know, I’ve been committed to another Homo sapiens now for like, fuck, three and a half years, and it’s kicking my ass. I had no idea. On the one side, I had no idea the amount of struggle, just the pain and turmoil that I was signing up for. And on the other side, I had no idea the level of deepening that I could experience with another person. You know, when you really try and love someone through the most adverse of circumstances and you really try and find a way of mutual respect and openness in the face of such terrifying truths and experiences — I know I’m being vague, but fuck! It’s really very beautiful and very terrifying, so yeah, I guess my new records certainly have had a lot to do with my experience struggling with the idea that I can be in love with more than one person in more than one way and try to figure out how to deal with that.

When you married, was there a perceived shift in your lesbian audience?
I suspect that it was somewhat more perceived than real. I heard a lot about how my getting hitched was some sort of big betrayal. People ask me a lot about it, but my actual life experience was not that. I get up on stage every night and there are these people down in front with signs that say, “Congratulations!” or little cards that say, “We’re happy for you that you’re happy.” Probably a lot of them from women, a lot of them from dykes! I think there may have been a small percentage of people from the dyke community, maybe, who felt threatened or disappointed by that. By somebody not being a “good dyke.” But I really think it’s a small percentage. I think any woman who truly knows, who understands, and who embraces the idea of freedom for women, of women becoming themselves, of women being able to love who they want to, who they do, anybody who truly understands that concept would not stand up and criticize somebody else for falling in love. So, I really didn’t experience that as much as I heard about it.

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