“Anarchy” Ani DiFranco & Utah Phillips
"Anarchy"
Ani DiFranco & Utah Phillips
“Anarchy” is less a conventional song than a six-minute piece of Utah Phillips storytelling, with Ani DiFranco building a musical landscape underneath him. Released in 1996 on The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, it recounts Phillips’s experiences after returning from the Korean War, including riding freight trains and eventually encountering the anarchist Ammon Hennacy in Salt Lake City. Hennacy’s ideas become the doorway into the larger subject: what does it mean to live according to your own moral judgment rather than simply obeying authority?
What makes the track particularly interesting is the way DiFranco treats Phillips’s voice almost like an instrument. Rather than interrupting his monologue with a conventional song structure, she surrounds his words with a loose, atmospheric mixture of guitar, samples, percussion, and other sounds. Phillips eventually describes anarchy not as a thing or political system, but as a tension between moral autonomy and political authority—a distinction that gives the piece considerably more depth than its title might suggest. It is part folk story, part spoken-word performance, and part musical collage, capturing the unusual chemistry that made their first collaboration so distinctive.
