Ani DiFranco: Revelling Reckoning : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Like Prince, another highly motivated renegade, Ani DiFranco demands much of herself and her fans. Uncompromising and emotionally charged, Revelling/Reckoning is a dizzying double-disc, twenty-nine-track ziggurat. The first disc, Revelling, is more outward-focused and band-oriented, judiciously incorporating funk and jazz elements. Reckoning is more introspective and spare, featuring DiFranco's prickly finger-picking. Cool, lilting horns decorate "What How When Where (Why Who)," an audacious collage of urban R&B vocals, abstract guitar licks, cool-jazz horns and New Orleans parade rhythms. DiFranco's rapier-sharp lyrics cut to the bone in "Your Next Bold Move," a thoughtful diatribe about capitalism run amok, in which she muses, "What a waste of thumbs that are opposable/To make machines that are disposable." Elsewhere, she tackles the widening rich-poor schism, the economic chokehold exerted by multinational corporations, dirty air, HIV, environmental cancers and, of course, her own personal revelings and reckonings. Check out this nugget from "Garden of Simple": "Science chases money, and money chases its tail/The best minds of my generation can't make bail." Revelling /Reckoning is powerful listening for anyone struggling to make sense of a seemingly capsizing world. (RS 869 - May 24, 2001)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH