"32 Flavors" - Ani DiFranco
This week's piece, "32 flavors" comes from Ani DiFranco, the iconic feminist DIY singer-songwriter and independent record label founder. DiFranco's work embodies the phrase "the personal is political", viewing politics not only in structures and systems, but in every facet of her lived experience.
The topics of her songs range across violence, consumerism, misogyny, abuse, racism, family, relationships, the many experiences of joy, and most of all what it means to speak from her perspective at the moment she is writing from. In all of her work, DiFranco finds ways to bring large, societal issues home. Instead of keeping them at arms length, she writes from herself outwards. In this song, DiFranco challenges the confining standards of physical beauty that our society places on women, describing beauty that defies these arbitrary, and ultimately oppresive, expectations. In deeply poetic language, DiFranco demonstrates something that is often lost in the frenzy of political organizing: that in order to change our society we must first change ourselves and the way we think about and relate to one another.
— Isaac Miller
Spoken Word Editor for The Progressive
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CURRENT ISSUE: July 2013
Peace Bites the Dust in Crawford
| Watching Cindy Sheehan and a dwindling protest at the Bush Library.
From the June Issue: The Commerce of Violence
The cheapening of life is surely the dominant theme of our time.
From the June Issue: Spying on Occupy Activists
How local law enforcement and Homeland Security help Wall Street.
The Spoken Word and Progressive Politics
Howard Zinn, the beloved people's historian and longtime Progressive columnist who died on January 27, 2010, was a brilliant storyteller. He told the stories "not of the heroes and achievements of traditional history, but of all those people who were the victims of those achievements, who suffered silently or fought back magnificently": the labor radicals, the early feminists, the anti-war soldiers. Zinn also believed in people telling their own stories in their own voices. He believed in the power of artists to reshape the larger political narrative towards social justice and solidarity.
Today, a new generation of artists and activists has emerged, using their words as weapons for radical discourse and political empowerment. Coming out of the era of Reaganomics and gentrification, in the traditions of Amiri Baraka and Lenny Bruce, a movement of spoken word artists is speaking up. They combine elements of free verse, hip-hop, stand-up comedy, and soap-box preaching, but connecting them all is a diverse, democratic art form that demands participation. Spoken word is about the call and response, re-definition and self-determination, the street corner and Capitol Hill.
In this series, we are going to present a range of spoken word artists, musicians, and storytellers, all of whom are using their voices to rewrite the American narrative -- one story, many people at a time. As Howard would say, "Let the people speak."
— Josh Healey
Spoken Word Editor for The Progressive
