new bible

introduction by Rachelle Toarmino
except the quiet is gone: ani difranco’s unprecedented sh!t

“It troubles a body / All this hidden pollution,” Ani DiFranco writes in “New Bible,” the sixth track on her twenty-third studio album Unprecedented Sh!t, out last year from Righteous Babe Records–immediately bringing into the song’s enormous focus everything that seems to ail, haunt, deceive, and subvert us. I first heard the song on the live album Ridgefield November 18, 2009, released as part of Righteous Babe’s Bootleg Series, which captures DiFranco’s characteristically unpretentious introduction: “What the hell is this? This is a song, an opus. I don’t even know what that is, but it seems appropriate.”

The “hidden pollution” might be the “dispenser of pills” from the song’s opening, a grim reprobation of quick-fix pharmaceuticals. But it might be a dozen other things that DiFranco evokes: shareholder capitalism, the failure of written laws, metastasizing screens, singlemindedness. Reappearing now on Unprecedented Sh!t, another meaning comes into relief. The album grieves the encroachments on the world’s quiet, a quiet which music–true music–enacts and protects. “There’s just too many distractions / Too many coming attractions / Too many screens fiercely flashing / Their subliminal frame,” DiFranco writes. Pollution then is noise, in all of its forms: chemicals, traffic, punditry, advertising, digital technology, definition. The risk is in giving into constant noise–pain medication or the sound of the highway–and being dulled by it, impervious to silence and its attendant wonders.

Quiet is the condition that makes awe possible. It is the absence of “troubles” and “distractions,” which thicken the film between our immediate experiences of the “showing” world and our “equal and opposite” reactions of imaginative thought. On Unprecedented Sh!t, rest–whether in music or life–is the pause in which questions construct a story or theory, such as on “Boots of a Soldier,” when DiFranco sings, “And I wonder about the stories / These boots could tell / Did Slidell live or die? / Did their mama cry / And go through hell?” And through awe’s prerequisite of not knowing–and comfort with not knowing–it can be the beginning of discovery. “I think we might be wrong about all of it,” DiFranco sings on “Baby Roe.”

DiFranco’s resistance to the noise of the contemporary moment is elsewhere explicit: “A big picture is just clutter / With no space to hang it in,” she sings on “You Forgot to Speak.” But she also enacts this broader concern through the arrangement and sequencing of the songs, from the pared back instrumentation on “More or Less Free” and “Boots of a Soldier” to her penultimate placement of “Interlude,” a minute-long instrumental. The latter choice especially gives the listener the opportunity to weigh what came before and imaginatively respond–to participate in the music and arrive at their own voice. What comes next is what always comes next: “The Knowing,” the aptly titled final track in which DiFranco croons, “All of these things are just what’s showing / Underneath all that I know is the knowing.”

“New Bible” is, according to DiFranco, an “opus”–whatever that means, as she joked in 2009, it’s big, and appropriate to the singer-songwriter’s belief system, which, over thirty-plus years of evolution, has always proceeded from a capacious open-heartedness. From this place DiFranco can want, imagine, and sing for us another way of living. In “New Bible” and throughout Unprecedented Sh!t, DiFranco identifies an ultimate common enemy: noise, and the people who create and perpetuate it. But it wouldn’t be an Ani album if it didn’t offer and sound, finally, a way out.

“Turn off your combustion engine,” DiFranco pleads, “And listen to the sound.”

new bible

If that nurse don’t get you, then her sister will
With her Monday through Sunday dispenser of pills
Don’t know which of my habits will be my demise
But there’s more ways, every day, to betray what is wise

It troubles a body
All this hidden pollution
Makin’ some kinda cancer
A foregone conclusion
And deep in my saddlebags
I carry a rage
For the greedy top feeders
And their invisible cage

Oh, rise the proletariat
Red banners unfurled
Let’s mend the failures of history
And the manmade world
Let’s mend the failures of the profit system
Let’s rewrite the law books
Quit following the path of least resistance
’Cause that’s what makes the river crooked

Let’s evolve into our true nature
So little flowers can bloom
In a world where relationship is sacred
And sacrifice is assumed
All for one and one for all
Boom chicka boom boom boom

There’s just too many distractions
Too many coming attractions
Too many screens fiercely flashing
Their subliminal frame
It’s no wonder we all just go along
Hungry as we are, just to belong
It’s no wonder we’re all crazy
It’s amazing we’re not all the same

You’re gonna die way too early
Or you’re gonna live way too long
It’s kinda like it always was
Except the quiet is gone
Proving technology gets you nowhere
If your intentions are all wrong

And for clarity of vision
We need a pulsing polarity of vision
It is our singularity of vision
That got us to this place
Without equal and opposite forces
We will only ever know a distortion
We will never hit our resonant frequency
We will never find grace

Our roots are meant to be interwoven

Not churned up and turned upside down
Turn off your combustion engine
And listen to the sound
Get down off your tractor, mister
And put your nose to the ground

Out where the topsoil welcomes a heavy rain
Out where the shoreline can handle a hurricane
Out where god and nature are the same
A mind can think clear
As far as engines of evolution
Cooperation trumps competition
And if I were Darwin’s girlfriend
I woulda whispered that in his ear

I think we should have a new bible
One that only has two words
I think we should have a new bible
That just says, mother earth
And I think men should stand down
When women give birth

But if that nurse don’t get you, then her sister will
With her Monday through Sunday dispenser of pills
Don’t know which of my habits will be my demise
But there’s more ways, every day, to betray what is wise