“Who the hell brings a beach ball to a folk show?” Ani DiFranco asked her rowdy audience Sunday night at the Aronoff Center.

        But this was not your mother's folk show. Ms. DiFranco, 30, writes socially conscious songs and plays acoustic guitar, but the “folk” elements end there.

        Bouncing around the stage, her hair streaming behind her like a dreadlocked comet, she led her five-member band through 90 minutes that fused funk, jazz, beat poetry, rock and folk.

        The intense singer/guitarist spit out percussive lyrics, attacking her guitar with such force she needed a freshly tuned one after every song.

        Her near sell-out crowd of about 2,450 was predominantly young and female, with a smattering of older fans and the full complement of sexual orientations. They adored her, singing along despite complex lyrics and difficult phrasing.

        Her earlier, more folk-styled material was neglected for her newer, rockier stuff, including several brand-new tunes. The night's folkiest piece, “Angry Anymore,” was a guitar/accordion duet with keyboardist Julie Wolf, a Cincinnati native.

        The attitude of that song, about making peace with one's parents, did not extend to her feelings on contemporary America. Launching a scathing attack on white flight and the decay of our inner cities, she sang that “America the beautiful is just one big subdivision.”

        She tempered protests with humor, winning her biggest — and most timely — laugh with 1998's “Fuel,” a spoken-word song about our media-saturated culture, equating politics to the choice between “Tweedledum and Tweedle-dumber.”

        In her current emphasis on funky beats, however, she's neglecting the melodicism that made many of her earlier songs so compelling. If she can meld her fierce rhythmic attack with an equally vivid melody, she's a song away from headlining arenas. Which interests her not one bit.

        Drums & Tuba, the trio that opened Sunday's concert, was just as iconoclastic. A non-singing trio of guitar, drums and, yes, tuba, the group mixed jazz and funk with electronically processed tuba and synthesizer effects. But it was best when it let the tuba sound like a tuba, bringing an organic wrinkle to the jazz-funk formula.

Pigs fetch some fat prices
Cincinnatian fills in the Jefferson line
KNIPPENBERG: Real show backstage at radio awards
KIESEWETTER: Great comedic talent wasted on 'D.A.G.'
Get to It
Intense DiFranco rocks adoring crowd
Pops subtly provides sounds for silents
Tristate best sellers list
What Tristaters are reading
What's happening in area bookstores