ANI DIFRANCO - NOT A PRETTY GIRL

 Ani Difranco - Not A Pretty Girl

Angela Maria "Ani" DiFranco (born September 23, 1970) is an American singer-songwriter, who has released more than 20 albums on her own record label, Righteous Babe Records. At 25 years-old an independent businesswoman, giving her significant creative freedom and creative control over everything including her records, independent distribution in US and Canada, her merchandise, her tours selling out venues coast to coast and making headlines.

DiFranco's music has been classified as folk rock and alternative rock, although it has additional influences from punk, funk, hip hop and jazz.  

She's a very bold unabashed singer/songwriter who writes lyrics no one else dares to produce. (An advantage of being the CEO of her own music company)

Her album, Not a Pretty Girl is the sixth studio album, released July 18, 1995.  The album extended the folk singer's early formula of acoustic guitar and drums, accompanied by percussionist/vocalist Andy Stochansky.  "On Not A Pretty Girl, I wanted to really scale down sound to its essence," Ani Says.

Some of the highlights and a few expected topics Ani takes on, on the Not A Pretty Girl album, include "Tiptoe", a spoken word piece about abortion; "Cradle And All", a beautiful, gut-wrenching ballad concerning a rough day in the life of a city girl who's got last night's underwear in her back pocket as she rides home on the subway, depicting a sure sign of the morning after. The album features some of her most memorable songs, like "Sorry I Am"; "Light Of Some Kind", repenting for being unfaithful, sung with heartfelt, bang-it-up umph; "The Million You Never Made", a hardcore kiss-off to the music industry, convincing why she isn't on a major label; "32 Flavors"; "Crime for Crime", a song about capital punishment.

DiFranco's gifts as a songwriter, singer, and musician, showcase imagery that is urban and gritty. The album's title track "Not A Pretty Girl", is a classic feminist song with lyrics like “I am not a pretty girl/ That is not what I do”, and the classic rebuttal to all those macho men who want to save the wounded bird being more than a beautiful woman and refusing to play the socially acceptable role of a damsel in need of rescue, with a line like "Don't you think every kitten figures out how to get down whether or not you ever show up." She addresses the classic misconception of a strong woman being perceived as an "angry woman" with the lyrics, 

"I am not an angry girl but it seems like I've got everyone fooled
every time i say something they find hard to hear
they chalk it up to my anger
and never to their own fear"

.....because people often fear what they don't understand and men are often threatened by a strong woman! 

Ani DiFranco – Not A Pretty Girl
Label:  Righteous Babe Records – RBR007-D
Format:  CD, Album
Country:  US
Released:  1995
Genre:  Rock
Style:  Folk Rock

Tracklist

1.  Worthy  4:31
2.  Tiptoe  0:36
3.  Cradle And All  4:18
4.  Shy  4:43
5.  Sorry I Am  4:45
6.  Light Of Some Kind  4:07
7.  Not A Pretty Girl  3:55
8.  The Million You Never Made  4:18
9.  Hour Follows Hour  6:01
10.  32 Flavors  6:07
11.  Asking Too Much  2:55
12.  This Bouquet  2:28
13.  Crime For Crime  5:42
14.  Coming Up  2:29

15.  Tiptoe (Bloopers)

BIG MUFF - MUSIC FROM THE AURAL EXCITER

 Big Muff - Music From The Aural Exciter

Big Muff, (which he took from the name of an old classic Electro-Harmonix guitar distortion pedal), is the pseudonym used by Grammy Award winning songwriter Itaal Shur.

Shur (who was raised mostly in Seattle and Connecticut, before relocating to Manhattan) inherited his love of music from his father, Bonia Shur, who was a noted composer of Israeli and Jewish music and director of Liturgic Arts at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and originally from Russia via Israel, and his mother, Fanchon Wechsler Shur, born in Chicago, Illinois, a former dancer and a choreographer. 

Shortly after moving to N.Y.C. in 1992,  he joined a local art rock band called Sleep Theater with Rob Hamrick and Chris Sherman (later known as Freekbass) and later became involved in the experimental jazz world of the Knitting Factory before trying his hand at acid jazz. He was a founding member of the acid jazz group Groove Collective,

appearing on the group's first two albums, 1993's self-titled debut and 1996's We the People, and co-penning the song "Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder)" with Maxwell for his hit debut, Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite.

He has written songs for a number of musicians, including Maxwell, Jewel and Enrique Iglesias, and has produced records for various artists, including Kronos Quartet, The Scumfrog and Lucy Woodward. He has released three solo albums starting in the late 1990s, releasing two of the solo albums under an alias Big Muff, -- 1998's Music From the Aural Exciter and 2000's Aurally Exciting Remixes -- a combination of funk, techno, and hip-hop which spawned the modest U.K. hit version of Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” from his first album, Music From the Aural Exciter in 1998. 

Shur was responsible for co-penning Santana's hit "Smooth" with Matchbox 20 frontman Rob Thomas).

In addition to writing and recording music, Shur has created his own artist development/production company, which he hopes will soon stretch out beyond music to broadcasting and computer animation.  

"Big Muff's MUSIC FROM THE AURAL EXCITER starts with the down and dirty groove of "Vavavoom," which doesn't quite get to go-go levels, "Theme from Big Muff" gets into silly, disposable funk, but "To the Bone" starts to reclaim the party, especially as it switches gears and gets more thoughtful after the break. But it's not until the soulful "Feel What You Know" that the album starts to start in earnest. "Poppy's Song" is sensual and melodic, and although there are very few ways to do "My Funny Valentine" wrong, luckily, he hits the right romantic notes. And despite its lascivious title, "Pornstar" is actually pretty fun, with its Spanish exclamations, while "Divine Intervention" starts off with an operatic vocal before the rest of the mellowness kicks in. Inconsistent, but the good parts of this album are very good." -- scoundrel

Big Muff – Music From The Aural Exciter
Label:  Snapt Records – PAD-1473
Format:  CD, Album
Country:  US
Released:  1998
Genre:  Electronic
Style:  House, Downtempo

Tracklist

1.  Vavavoom    3:58
2.  X-Static    4:48
3.  Theme From Big Muff    5:32
4.  To The Bone    5:53
5.  Feel What You Know    6:23
6.  Poppy's Song    5:18
7.  My Funny Valentine  9:57
8.  Soultown    3:50
9.  Pornstar    5:28
10.  Erotic Manifesto    4:42
11.  X-Static Floatations    5:27
12.  Divine Intervention    8:13