Ani DiFranco – Puddle Dive – 1993 (iTunes – Amazon)
The thing about the Listening Posts/Reflecting Pools is that I am not bound by the constraints of really “reviewing”. At least not by the rules set forth by Paul Allen’s How to Be a Rock Critic Series.
This is about discovery. These are about a lay person who fancies himself a reviewer or erudite or a tastemaker to experience music and talk about it from his own perspective.
Why am I going on about this? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I need SOMETHING to fill the space on this page and actually trying to review this record is too much of a chore.
I have been starting this CD over and over the last 24 hours, the last time I accidentally played it on shuffle, and I still had no ability to discern one song from another. Ani Difranco has, with Puddle Dive, worn out her welcome. If this was the record with which I had discovered her there is no doubt that I would have tossed her off as a pretentious, gyno-power windbag.
Take for example, “Blood in the Boardroom”. I had hoped that it was a screed against corporate America. I should be so lucky. This is a song about being “in the I’m so bored room.” and saved by the early coming on of a menstral cycle.
That’s the blood in “Blood in the Boardroom”.
Here are the lyrics:
sitting in the boardroom
the i’m so bored room
listening to the suits
talk about their world
they can make straight lines out of almost anything
except for the line of my upper lip when it curls
dressed in my best greasy skin and squinty eyes
i’m the only part of summer that made it inside
in the air-conditioned building decorated with a corporate flair
i wonder can these boys smell me bleeding thru my underwear
there’s men wearing the blood of the woman they love
there’s white wearing the blood of the brown
but every woman learns how to bleed from the moon
and we bleed to renew life every time it’s cut down
i got my vertebrae all stacked up high as they can go
but i still feel myself sliding from the earth that i know
so i excuse myself and leave the room
saying my period came early but it’s not a minute too soon
i go and find the only other woman on the floor
it’s the secretary sitting at the desk by the door
i ask her if she’s got a tampon i can use
she says oh honey what a hassle for you sure i do you know i do
i say it ain’t no hassle no it ain’t no mess
right now it’s the only power that i possess
these businessmen got the money
they got the instruments of death
but i can make life i can make breath
sitting in the boardroom
the i’m so bored room
listening to the suits talk about their world
i didn’t really have much to say the whole time i was there
so i just left a big brown blood stain on their white chair
You can make life, Ani? You can make breath? You can make me nauseous. I want so badly to give her props for being so in your face about this situation. But, I can’t. I, instead, find it too hard to take. Perhaps this record is really not for me. Or men. Ani is obviously warm in the embrace of her niche audience. If she stays there she will run out of steam fast.
Grade D+
A Side: 4th of July
BlindSide: Egos Like Hairdos
DownSide: Blood in the Boardroom
