[Ani DiFranco interviewed by Kate Hutchinson in The Guardian]

Ani DiFranco, the artist I've seen live more than any other, answered my question as part of this Guardian Q&A. It's about a sobering topic, but still, this made me very happy.

Here's what I asked:

"Woody Guthrie wrote “this machine kills fascists” on his guitar as a symbol of the power of words and music to fight against oppression. We have a new generation of fascists and a nationalism that is rising worldwide with renewed vigour. You once wrote about “coming of age during the plague of Reagan and Bush”; Trump feels like a whole other thing again. How do you think about the role of your music against this new backdrop?"

And her reply:

"Coming of age during the plague of Reagan and Bush, I thought that we could stoop no lower. I was naive – there’s always a lower. As a political songwriter, you would love for your tunes to become passé. I wrote a song in 1997 about the plague of gun violence in America. [There were] these songs that I wrote in the George W Bush era, thinking that there was no greater evil to fight … and now here we are under a Trump regime. It’s horrifying to have these 30-year-old songs be more relevant than ever. Being an activist all these years is exhausting. And that’s also a very deliberate strategy by these repressive forces: to exhaust us. For me, who’s been taking to the streets for 30-plus years, I have to battle this feeling of: does it even matter, if all of the honour is stripped from politics, and the political leaders are just power-hungry oligarchs who don’t care?"

Check out all her answers here.

#Culture

[Link]