Ani DiFranco once metaphorically said that she has both spots and stripes. Righteous Babe Records’ Bitch and Animal really have both: Bitch sometimes has a row of dots over her right eye; Animal has been known to sport a bright-red mohawk. They sound like a pro-wrestling tag team, but they’re more likely to tag-team your sister.
“They’re the lesbian Beatles,” says a source in their camp. In addition to their anti-Bush sentiments and aggressive feminist attitudes, their hilarious and poignant repertoire sees them astutely applying no-longer-fashionable, old-school composition techniques such as narrative, songwriting, and wordplay (“Don’t do crystal/Don’t do boys/Don’t do boys who do crystal/Don’t do crystal boys”). Backed by their own violin, bongos, and bass, the songs vary from hymns to ganja odes, to echoing ballads of raw need and rapped cock-rock — before wrapping it all up, as they did on last year’s outstanding Sour Juice and Rhyme, with a long hidden track of Bitch talking like her British mother. After 10 years of interpretive dancing and relentlessly clever anti-folk un-pop, they’re breaking up the band after this trek, “The Pussy Primary Tour.” They’re both working on solo records, and Animal wants to direct (seriously). “It’s that combustive chemistry,” says the B&A source. “They’re creative people, you know?” Yeah, we know.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2004.