Sonic Penance: Ani DiFranco’s ‘Dilate’ at 30

During an interlude on her canonistic 1997 live opus Living in Clip, Ani DiFranco characterizes, in her signature self-deprecating chortle, the songs on her 1996 studio album Dilate as “tortured, melodramatic, [and] kind of self-absorbed.” She tells the audience that, when pressed by fans and critics about whether the album was a deliberate move away from the overtly political songwriting of her earlier work, her answer is simple: “No, man…it’s just…I got kind of distracted.”

It wasn’t simply that DiFranco got “distracted” by love or lust that supposedly aggrieved her righteous babes, but that the object of her distraction was a man. DiFranco became a cult hero not just by forgoing major label support and doing it, as her self-funded record company’s slogan puts it, “on her own,” but by occupying the intersection of folk tradition, feminism, and queer liberation. The folk music ecosystem was (and still is) predominantly straight and male-dominated, and DiFranco, whose early songs emphasized her intimate experiences with both men and women, was viewed by some as a disruptor.

Conversely, a song cycle almost entirely devoted to DiFranco’s illicit affair with a man, Dilate was eyed with skepticism and disappointment by many of the folk singer’s queer female fans. But DiFranco is nothing is not self-aware, and she spares herself no critique throughout the album. “Every pop song on the radio is suddenly speaking to me,” she admits on “Superhero,” before later lamenting, “Now look at me/I am just like everybody else,” self-scorn and comedic irony dripping from her mouth in equal measure.

The album’s song titles—“Dilate,” “Going Down,” “Outta Me, Onto You”—are punny and prurient. Eroticism had figured into DiFranco’s storytelling before (“Both Hands” and “Work Your Way Out” are just two early examples), but the songs on Dilate are less sensual and more visceral, angst-ridden, and guttural. In other words, they’re not conventionally sexy at all. “When I say you sucked my brain out/The English translation is ‘I am in love with you, and it is no fun’,” DiFranco says more than sings on the title track.

It’s also not as laugh-out-loud funny as, say, 1994’s Out of Range or 1995’s Not a Pretty Girl. With Dilate, she centered her personal life in a way she hadn’t before, which simultaneously expanded her audience but also makes the album feel, in retrospect, rather insular. In fact, in her 2019 memoir No Walls and the Recurrent Dream, DiFranco recalls recording the songs in a “rustic little one-room urban studio down an unassuming alley that had only a wood stove for warmth,” a stark contrast to the boundless, libertine open spaces where she describes having been raised in Buffalo, New York, in the ’70s and ’80s.

Channeling the punk spirit of Patti Smith, the raw emotion of Polly Jean Harvey, and the musical virtuosity of Prince Rogers Nelson, DiFranco plays almost all of the instruments on Dilate herself, accompanied most often by righthand man and drummer extraordinaire Andy Stochansky. But even he’s sidelined on the dubby “Going Down” and a seven-minute post-modern reimagining of “Amazing Grace”—both bass-heavy, plodding sound collages filled with trip-hop beats and vocal samples that hinted at her nascent love of jazz.

In her book, DiFranco refers to the mixing sessions for these songs as “an exercise in pummeling myself with low-end as sonic penance for my sins.” Her guitar-playing is jagged and percussive, her hands whacking the fretboard like a drum on “Dilate” and “Adam and Eve” until the steel strings rattle and reverberate with her discontent. Opening with a false start and some growling, the claustrophobic “Shameless” erupts with a circuitous riff that eventually gives way to a more spacious chorus—yet, lyrically, more insulation: “We’re in a room without a door/And I am sure without a doubt…They’re gonna wanna know how we plan to get out.”

Dilate dovetailed with DiFranco’s breakthrough into the mainstream: spots on MTV, late-night shows, even a Spin magazine cover. The album’s opening track, “Untouchable Face,” was her hookiest, most accessible song to date, built around a simple, see-sawing chord progression and an uncharacteristically restrained vocal performance. But it’s peppered with f-bombs, a poetic bit of self-sabotage that practically ensured that it would never receive rotation on mainstream radio.

Indeed, DiFranco’s reticence toward playing by the industry’s rules is emblematized by the first song she sent to college radio stations in the lead-up to the album’s release: “Outta Me, Onto You,” a combative rocker that kicks off with a crunchy guitar riff and a chopped-up loop of the singer guffawing and grunting “no” repeatedly. “Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve/I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot,” DiFranco warns. “Don’t think I won’t pull it out/Don’t think I won’t shoot.”

DiFranco’s views on fame were more literally (and self-mythically) spelled out on “Napoleon,” in which she chides a fellow musician for their willingness to dance with the devil and then complain to her about it. Speculation abound about who the target of her ire might have been, turning the song into a then-modern-day “You’re So Vain,” but—like, say, Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” released a year earlier—the answer would likely satisfy no one. Besides, “Napoleon” says way more about the proudly five-foot-two DiFranco and her vision of herself as an artist and woman than it does the unspecified sell-out.

That DiFranco herself would be accused of giving it up to the Man with Dilate is another irony that wasn’t lost on her. The singer bluntly addressed the response to the album not just on tour, but on record. “People talk about my image/Like I come in two dimensions/Like lipstick is a sign of my declining mind,” she muses on the title track to 1998’s Little Plastic Castle.

That album may have been DiFranco’s highest charting debut, but Dilate remains her most commercially successful studio effort, the culmination of over half a decade of waging battle with the “army of suits” she describes in “Napoleon.” From Taylor Swift wresting control of her career by reclaiming her masters to young, “outsider pop” stars like Billie Eilish unapologetically expressing their queerness without the same anti-bi bias that DiFranco faced, the self-anointed little folk singer’s influence still looms large. And the dark and distraught Dilate lurks in the shadows, waiting to be rediscovered.