Ani Difranco: Real and Different

Give Ani DiFranco an electric guitar and a Marshall amp and she'd be a punk rocker. But then she wouldn't be Ani DiFranco. She'd be just another gambler on the declining fortunes of alternative rock, separated from the pack by occasionally brilliant lyrics.

Certainly she wouldn't play for audiences as big as the 10,000 faithful at her Great Woods concert a week ago Wednesday. Just as certainly, she wouldn't be distinguished by the inconsistent singing that checkered her live performance and makes her nine albums somewhat daunting listening. At Great Woods she began, after a funky opening set by New Orleans's Re-Birth Brass Band, with the title song from her new Little Plastic Castle -- a probing lyric about identity. But her staccato barking chopped its nuanced, personal message to pieces. Odd that she later made sport of Bob Dylan, for whom she opened a Great Woods date last year, for similarly turning his catalogue to mincemeat.

Much of her show offered tastier fare, as drummer Andy Stochansky, bassist Jason Mercer, and keyboardist Julie Wolf provided a melodic and textural foil to their leader, who strummed like the lost Ramones sister. As often as DiFranco's voice honked, she delivered beautiful harmonizing (with Wolf) and lovely high-end purity. And if tunes like "Fuel," where she sings about tossing the same on life's fires, thrived on clichés, the atmospheric music was often intriguing.

Identity has a lot to do with DiFranco's success. What's broken her out of the folk market and into the mainstream isn't just persistent hard work. Her songs have restlessly explored the nature of her womanhood and sexuality, and the introspective journey of her 27 years on Earth. That initially won the ready embrace of the gay and feminist audience. Now that her following has grown to the point where it's too large for mainstream concert promoters and radio stations to ignore, a broader population of teenagers and people in their early 20s -- who are grappling with issues of personal and sexual identity -- find their inner concerns echoed in DiFranco's. On stage, she even mirrored those fans in the nervous, adolescent laughter that flowed with her conversation and in her relatively new, tattoo'd plain-jane look.

The homogenization of alternative rock has compelled this young audience to seek out something real and different to claim as its own. DiFranco is both.

-- Ted Drozdowski