"It's just incredible how interconnected all those dynamics are, so Subdivision was almost like a little testament... for all this work that Righteous Babe has been doing in the Buffalo community." -Ani Difranco
I have a complicated relationship with Ani Difranco's music. On the one hand, I love her anti-capitalism, I love her attempts at community building in Buffalo (one of her big projects was renovating an old church into a performance space), I love her Rust Belt pride. In a time when people talk dismissively of places like Detroit and Buffalo as dying cities, I view growing up in a "post-industrial wasteland" of Buffalo as a badge of honor. I have intense Rust Belt pride, which I didn't realize until I left. There is a wonderful friendliness about Buffalo; there is a sense that the illusion of capitalism and the American Dream has failed so spectacularly that like Detroit, the way forward was not to embrace the failures of capitalism and "getting ahead," but being nice to other folks. But it's also a super painful kind of love of Buffalo, which Ani gets at in "Subdivision"-- this song tugs at my heartstrings in such deep ways. There is something about folk-inspired music like this, the storytelling of the Ani Difrancos and the working class aesthetics of the Bruce Springsteens and such that hit so close to home. If you went to a public school in Buffalo, you could not ignore the privileges of race and class. And if you listen to an Ani song, you cannot ignore the privileges of gender and sexuality and the interconnectedness. Even if it's from a different angle-- I remember a friend of mine in high school remarking that Ani was the only "female guitarist" he really knew who could play as well as he thought the "male guitarists" he admired could play.
"white people are so scared of black people/ they bulldoze out to the country / and put up houses on little loop-de-loop streets / and while america gets its heart cut right out of its chest/ the berlin wall still runs down main street / separating east side from west"
White flight to the suburbs, segregation in the heart of the city (Buffalo is one of those places where you can be in a super upper class neighborhood on one block, then just a few blocks that way on Main St, you're in the hood)-- these are all painful descriptions of Buffalo, but lovingly depicted. Or lovingly interpreted. Her descriptions of the "boarded up houses" and "empty parking lots" are super evocative of the urban landscape of Buffalo, ones that I walked up and down and drove past on public transportation throughout my years in public school, and her decrying of the "colorful banners" refer to the many beautification projects the city undertook that cover up with a cheerful veneer the main issues of super high poverty levels, super high unemployment, segregation/racism, etc...
On the other hand, I'm not so sure I always like her fan base. Her fan base has included a number of imperial feminists; a number of cisgender white women that prescribe a particular way of being and interacting with the world that fails to include my reality. And it often includes people who see the way forward in Buffalo as investing in a nonprofit industrial complex that has largely failed real movement-building.
"and i'm wondering what it will take, for my city to rise..."
I think Ani's efforts in the community to increase community-driven responses to the failures of capitalism and neoliberalism in Buffalo provide some of a basis for what kind of response we need in Buffalo for our city to rise. And her storytelling and evocative lyrics are a reminder to transplants like me that it's hard to forget where you come from, and that there is a certain solidarity to be found in the sharing of storytelling from different parts of the country hit with neoliberal policies, from the Rust Belt to the South.
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