A Year with Queer Women’s Music - Letting the edges stay sharp - Living in Clip — Ani DiFranco

Week 1 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music

Ani DiFranco has always asked listeners to meet her in motion. Living in Clip doesn’t open with a statement so much as an atmosphere. The first track is instrumental, but her voice appears as sound rather than message—woven into rhythm, texture, breath. It’s a quiet signal that this album isn’t about polish or distance. It’s about presence.

Like a lot of people, my entry point to Ani was through film—the movie Better Than Chocolate, where “32 Flavors” plays a big part in the soundtrack. But that’s just one doorway. Her music has threaded its way through a lot of films and cultural moments over the years, and others may have first heard her that way, or caught her live at Lilith Fair, or stumbled onto her through college radio, a mixtape, or a friend who wouldn’t stop talking about her. That track captures something essential about DiFranco: the way vulnerability and defiance coexist without apology. Her voice is unmistakable—raw but musical, grounded yet elastic. It carries poetry without preciousness. It’s easy to hear why her work feels like jazz and funk and punk and folk and queered feminism colliding and deciding to keep going together.

Ani DiFranco is famously prolific, with a catalogue that offers countless places to begin. Living in Clip stands out because it documents her as she actually exists—with audiences, in rooms, night after night. The album is a collection of live recordings from different performances, stitched together by intensity rather than uniformity. The title comes from a comment by live sound engineer Larry Berger, who noted that the amplifiers weren’t just occasionally clipping; they were clipping so constantly they were “living in clip.” That phrase reads like a metaphor for the work itself. This is music that refuses containment. It lives at the edge.

Two songs in particular help anchor the emotional range of the record, and they sit in tension with each other in a way that feels very Ani.

“Shameless” lands with conviction—sharp, articulate, and unflinching. It refuses the idea that intensity needs to be apologized for, especially when it comes from women or queer people. “Joyful Girl,” on the other hand, arrives quietly and leaves a bruise. It’s soft, intimate, and unsettling in its honesty, the kind of song that gives you chills and then makes you sit with them.

Taken together, these songs help explain why her music meant so much to so many queer listeners. It wasn’t just that she wrote about anger or politics. She made room for contradiction—for tenderness alongside defiance, for grief alongside joy. Her work gave people permission to feel deeply without flattening those feelings into something neat or performative. Strength and sorrow aren’t opposites here. They exist side by side.

What gives Living in Clip additional weight is how it shifted the frame around her work. In a Rolling Stone interview, DiFranco reflected on how the album expanded her audience after years of being narrowly defined by media narratives. She described being siloed—written about almost exclusively by middle‑aged, straight white men—and reduced to a caricature: a “scary, angry dyke who makes songs for scary, angry dykes.” The implication was that unless you already identified with that label, you might assume her shows were hostile or inaccessible.

That framing matters—obviously not because it was ever fair or true, but because it influenced who felt welcome enough to show up.

Living in Clip pushed back against that by letting people hear her as she actually was. On stage. In conversation with a crowd. Sometimes messy, sometimes tender, often intense. Hearing it this way makes it harder to reduce her work to a label or a punchline. You’re left instead with a clear sense of an artist doing her job—showing up, night after night, and telling the truth as she heard it.

So when Living in Clip was later named one of “The Essential Recordings of the ’90s,” it carried a particular resonance. Queer women’s work has long been present in culture without being centered in its official histories. To see this album acknowledged as essential is not just a personal milestone—it’s a quiet recalibration of whose stories are allowed to define an era.

Listening now, Living in Clip still feels alive. It teaches a kind of listening that’s increasingly rare: attentive, generous, and unafraid of discomfort. It reminds us that visibility doesn’t require refinement, and that sometimes the most sustaining art is the kind that stays a little too loud, a little too honest, and fully itself.

That’s why it belongs at the beginning. Happy New Year! If this is the first time you heard the album, or if it's a fun reminder I hope you enjoy the listen!