Ani Difranco - Canon - Alternative - CD

It's a funny thing to think about an Ani DiFranco retrospective, one that traces her maturation as an artist and a person -- funny because Ani's music has ultimately been about growing up. Any 15-year-old listening to the flip mission statement "32 Flavors" could have told you that. Her most famous song's most famous lines, "I am a poster girl with no poster/ I am thirty-two flavors and then some," were as pure an image of coming-of-age angst as '90s alt-rock (an angst hotbed) produced. There's an ephemeral quality to this; Ani, it might be said, helps teens get to a point where they don't need to listen to Ani anymore. That's more a credit than a criticism, but it does raise the question of legacy. How do we think about the entire career of someone who struck us deeply for two years?

All the more reason for Ani to release Canon, a two-disc index of key tracks; it forces a consideration of her spot in the modern alternative music pantheon, something her intimate songs wouldn't remind us to do. And it's high time we start thinking of her as a significant pioneer, not just an impassioned upstart.

Indeed, the mix of percussive guitar and rat-a-tat vocals that Ani forged on early albums like Puddle Dive and Not A Pretty Girl (heard here on "God's Country") invigorated folk, giving it new Gen-X relevance. Combining a coffeehouser's self-examination -- "I should have recognized/ That fierce look in my eyes/ I've seen it in the mirror/ So many times" -- with spoken-word ferocity and that unbending backbone of a guitar, she found a template that made folk both more sensitive and more powerful. This music for lonely geeks was packed with muscle.

And Canon, which progresses in near-exact chronological order (a great editing choice, as it lets us watch the style expand and mutate), shows how the older Ani has parlayed this into a new sort of political folk. There was always a political aspect to her early personal songs -- she seemed to be asking what sort of America would do this to its children. But DiFranco in the Bush era has been a tireless prodder of The Man. On anti-suburb screed "Subdivision" she sings "White people are so scared of black people/ They bulldoze out to the country." And in "Millennium Theater," she describes "Halliburton, Enron/ Chief justices for sale/ Yucca mountain goddesses/ Their tears they form a trail."

Interestingly, while the newer tracks keep that distinctive speak-sing style, the trademark Ani guitar has mellowed with age. "Millennium," a track from last year's Reprieve, is especially different, a sleepy whirl of guitar and Wurlitzer -- dreamy where it once might have been driving. Given the spiky lyrics, one senses that this isn't resignation so much as a new way of playing the radical. Where the '90s Ani saw a need for righteous anger, the recent version wants us all to notice we're being hypnotized. "Your Next Bold Move," an '02 track re-cut here (one of five songs to get a new take), is thickened from a slow folk ballad into a chamber lullaby. "The mighty multinationals/ Have monopolized the oxygen," Ani murmurs, cleverly mixing a real environmental complaint into a more visceral one. The song sounds like the very air is being squeezed out of it.