Ani DiFranco Creates Lyrical Protests

More funk, less punk. Ani DiFranco always goes her own way, and right now that frequently means blowing up her folk-based songs with a big jazzy funk sound that even extends to the occasional outburst of scat singing.

She’s no musical dilettante. At the Grove in Anaheim on Saturday, DiFranco often stepped away from her five-piece band, still comfortable alone with an acoustic guitar, singing and shouting lyrics that were biting and vulnerable and alarming and funny all at once. But her new commitment to broader musical strokes were genuine and effective.

Her current U.S. tour offers a notable shift from the indie rock/folk music she first created at the beginning of the ‘90s. Her “Revelling/Reckoning” album offers two discs of rich musical twists, as if working to keep up with her substantial, if subtle, development as an acoustic guitarist. She’s equally powerful during the quietest moments as when the band is at full throttle.

As during her best ‘90s work (such as 1996’s “Dilate”), DiFranco mixed emotion and graphic detail at the Grove without overloading the songs. She could be angry and genuinely funny at the same moment, or vulnerable and iron-willed in the face of personal or political challenges.

Late in the show, DiFranco dialed down her band to quiet waves of sound as she recited a Beat-styled poem/lecture on the lasting implications of the Sept. 11 attacks, with razor-edged indictments on villains both inside and outside the U.S.

It was a leftist indictment for a litany of offenses, questioning the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s election and the influence of the oil industry, declaring: “Here’s to our last drink of fossil fuel/May we get off that sauce.”

A year ago, that kind of statement would have been unremarkable beyond the power and focus of its delivery. But it’s hard to imagine many major artists, from rock to hip-hop, would be willing to make such a withering indictment of contemporary U.S. history.

That fearlessness extends to shifting styles in the face of fan expectations. Not everyone wants their favorite folk tunes transformed into big funk. But DiFranco remains the ultimate indie rocker. Her fans have learned to cope.