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Taken from ExpressMedia (May, 2001)
The Art of Staying Human
by Michelle Williams
 From beginnings of punk to riot grrl to the Beastie Boys, music has always been linked to efforts to change the world. But if you watch the crests and waves of musical movements carefully, a lot of it starts to look like little more than sing-along-a-political-soundtrack. It's hard to find musicians whose political activism goes beyond their lyrics. Michael Franti is one of the few practising preachers.
Franti started performing in the late 1980's, and in 1990 founded the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Their most recognisable single, 'Television: The Drug Of A Nation', made the mainstream charts, and brought corporate and media manipulation to the attention of a new audience.
Soon after the 1993 collapse of the Disposable Heroes, Franti formed Spearhead. Incorporating the hip-hop stylings of Franti's earlier musical incarnations with the soul, roots and reggae influences he and his band members grew up with, Spearhead create message-music that makes you want to dance as much as it makes you want to fight.
Spearhead's latest album, Stay Human, (their third release after 1994's Home and 1997's Chocolate Supa Highway) is the band's most brazen attack on the US political system yet. Playing like a live community radio broadcast, Stay Human combines dialogue and songs to tell the fictional story of Sister Fatima, a nun awaiting execution for a crime she didn't commit. More War Of The Worlds than The Pulp Fiction Soundtrack in its ability to resonate with listeners, Stay Human highlights Franti's acumen for taking inspiration from oppression, and gaining strength from opposition.
Michelle Williams: Do you write your music to reach any particular demographic or audience?
Michael Franti: [deadpan] Pretty much black, Asian lesbians between thirteen and twenty-one. With a lot of piercings.
No, I don't really look at any demographic. Like I say in my song, 'All the freaky people make the beauty of the world', and, y'know, one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. To some people, someone like myself is looked upon like a freak. I look at someone who's maybe a very conservative person as a freak. But to every different perspective we're all different to one another. I don't believe that we should just tolerate diversity, I think diversity's something we should learn to celebrate.
So when I make my music, I make it from my heart first. If I put the vulnerability of who I am into my songs, it will make other people feel at ease to allow their vulnerability to come out. And in doing that, I don't ever think, 'who are my listeners?' Sometimes if I'm doing an interview, for example, I'll think of who's watching the show, or if I'm speaking to young kids or if I'm speaking to very high-brow intellectual people or whatever, then I'll try and communicate with them the way I know how. But when I'm writing songs, I don't ever think beyond what it is that I like, really.
Tell me about your current release, Stay Human.
We put it out on our own label (Boo Boo Wax). I went in to Capitol Records - that's our old label - and the new president of the company was like, 'I really think you should do a song with Will Smith, and that would help you sell records,' and I was like, 'Wow man, you really don't understand where I'm coming from!'
It took nine months to get out of our contract, and when we finally did, I felt this sense of freedom. I was scraping up every penny that I own to record and to keep the band afloat. So I asked myself the question hypothetically, if I had only made one album my whole life, what would it sound like and what would it say? And so as I was making this album, I tried to draw upon all my musical experience.
When I was a kid I used to listen to artists like Sly Stone, and Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, and Bill Withers, and a lot of soul artists like Gill Scott-Heron, who were talking about social issues in their songs. When disco came about, this was when I was a little kid, y'know, disco came about and that soulful element was gone. It just became about making party songs.
At the same time in the late 70's and the early 80's, I started listening to reggae. That's where I found the voice again. I heard Bob Marley [and all these other artists] who were speaking those social messages. From there I got turned on to The Clash, because The Clash were working with this producer named Mikey Dread who was Jamaican. Through The Clash I started hearing punk rock; I heard the Dead Kennedy's and I heard Seven Seconds, and Minor Threat, and a lot of bands that were really pushing the envelope in terms of their political beliefs and a DIY attitude.
The next thing to come about was hip-hop, and that was the time when I really started writing my first songs; I guess I was like 16, 17 at that time. Hip-hop was the thing that really grabbed me. In the same way that punk rock was just about picking up a guitar and you'd learn three chords and you'd scream whatever you wanted to say over the top of it, with hip-hop you didn't even have to pick up a guitar, you'd just start screaming y'know! And so that's where my musical lineage is from. I'm as influenced by punk rock as I am by soul or by reggae or by hip-hop. I've just always followed the social consciousness of music.
Skits and dialogue are currently being almost over-used by artists on their recorded works. Stay Human uses a similar idea, narrating the album as though it's a live pirate radio broadcast. How did you develop the concept for the album, and how does it fit in with the tracks?
When I came up with the narrative of Sister Fatima, I wrote it first as just that - a narrative. I wrote it as a play, [with] a script, dialogue, characters, what the characters' background were, everything. Then I wrote a song that was thirteen minutes of me rhyming this whole thing and it was just.. it was bad, y'know. [Laughs.]
Then I thought, well, I still want to carry this narrative through the album, but I don't necessarily want to write a rock or rap opera, y'know. So I thought, if I put this narrative through like a call-in to a radio show then the songs can just play. [The songs in between] didn't have to directly follow the narrative. I did about five or six versions of each song. Some were just me playing acoustic guitar and singing, some were the full band set up in the studio just playing the songs straight to tape, some were regular multi-track things, and were break-beat versions, some were a capella. And then when I finished all the recording of the songs, [I] recorded the narrative pieces in between.
I selected people to play the parts of those different characters based on the fact that I knew what those characters were first in my mind. Sister Fatima's played by a woman named Kiilu Nyasha, a former Black Panther. Most of her friends and fellow Black Panthers are either dead or in jail. She keeps up correspondence with about twenty-five or thirty Black Panthers who have been locked up for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and her former boyfriend was George Jackson, the leader of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, who was murdered by the FBI.
I knew that if she just opened her mouth, she would already be the character. Today she's in a wheel-chair, and she has a difficult time getting around. But a lot of people in the hip-hop community who are involved in social activism go to visit her, look through her archives of Black Panther history, speak with her about being committed to the struggle.
The Governor is played by Woody Harrelson. I've known Woody as a fan of his acting, but I also met him during our involvement in the medical marijuana movement, and we went to Cuba together a couple of years ago. Woody's father is serving a double life sentence for killing a police officer. So I knew that Woody. had empathy for the cause, the spirit of the record. But there was also something inside him that could capture that part of an evil Governor.
Would you consider returning the album to its original form and producing it as a performance or theatre piece?
Yeah, we actually [already] have plans. There's a TV show in America that does live band performances, and they've invited us to do the whole album as an hour-long uncut thing. So I think in our winter, like in December, I think we're gonna do that.
You take time when you're touring to learn about and raise local, and particularly indigenous, issues. Why is this important to you?
Wherever we go, I try to touch down with the roots of the community, y'know - grass roots people. That's where I come from and that's where my music comes from. As a kid I never felt like I was really accepted in the community that I lived in. I felt that a lot of time, even in my family, I was kind of the black sheep of my family, so I've always identified with the underdog.
And so when, for example, I come here, I look around and [ask], who are the people who are in most need of help? [Spearhead] has had a relationship for many years with the Winja Ulupna Aboriginal Women's Recovery Home in Melbourne. [I've] gone there, spent time meeting with people who are both trying to get their lives together and those who are trying to help them. In doing that I don't come into it as a teacher, I come into it as a student. Like, what can I learn from this situation? Then when I leave here I pass it on, I share it with other people. I'll go to Alturo [in New Zealand], I'll meet with Maori people and hang out and see what they're up to and learn from that, and then share that with what people are doing in Central and South America or whatever. Actually that's my favourite part of what I do - I get to go and sit down and meet with people and listen.
Over the last couple of years there's been a resurgence of young people becoming involved in political and social justice issues - Seattle, Quebec, here in Melbourne at S11 and so on. What's your opinion of this, and what impact do you see it having on music more generally?
There's definitely been a movement of young people. I think that a lot of times these movements are fuelled in part by music, and by art and culture. Right now we've been in a particularly low period of musical consciousness. It's like all of these boy bands, and the Britney Spears' and Jessica Simpson's and whoever else of the world haven't left very much space for artists who are speaking out about things. But art and music go in cycles. There's times where we go to one extreme and then it comes back around, [and] people are like, 'God, I'm really sick of seeing N'Sync'. I'd like to just be the apostrophe in N'Sync; I could like sneak in there and say my two cents every now and then! [Laughter]. I do see that globally there's people who are really starting to realise that here I am wearing these certain shoes or whatever, and I paid $150 for these shoes, and I just read that the people who made them made 17 cents a day, and so where did all the other money go that I paid for these shoes? So people are starting to ask questions. And [in] my music I try to echo those voices, those voices in the community that aren't being heard. There's this quote that I read today from Alice Walker: 'anything that's worth loving can be saved'. I look at today and I see that there's a lot of young people who are taking that to heart. They feel like, y'know, I love this planet, I love my community, I love my neighbours, I love trees, I love the water, and it's worth trying to make an effort to save some of these things.
You mentioned N'Sync and Britney Spears - when we're being bombarded by that kind of music all the time, what do you feel is the most viable forum for music that does address social and other issues?
I believe that the best way we have to get our music out is not through any electronic means. It [needs to happen] through us doing it ourselves; through playing an instrument, through encouraging other people to play an instrument. By supporting bands who are doing good work or supporting arts or theatre groups who are making good art - support them spiritually, support them by going to see them, buying tickets to whatever they do, or buying their records, and then also doing it yourself, y'know. I think that that's the best way that we can support revolutionary art.
In the current political climate in America [and elsewhere], where politicians are constantly seeking to restrict music, how important do you think community radio is in getting across underground music and political messages?
It's very important. Community radio's the last electronic media that we have that expresses dissent. TV has been completely hijacked. We do have the Internet, and things like indymedia.org, which is a really great independent media site, and there's some other ones. But still they don't have the immediacy that radio does; to do on-the-spot reporting, to be listened to by people who are driving home at the same time every day.
Community radio, when I was a kid, was the thing that opened up doors for me in the world. I grew up in kind of a small town. My father was an alcoholic, I was adopted into this family I didn't really feel comfortable in. Listening to the radio at night got me through hard times, and it was the thing that opened my world to see that god, there's other types of music out there from other countries, from other cities. There's other people in the world who through their music are expressing what I'm feeling inside. And then also the political voices of the DJ's and stuff were like 'Wow, I didn't know that was taking place in my own backyard', and I was hearing stuff that was never in the corporate media. So I feel like it's really important to hold onto community radio and pirate radio. Like Jello Biafra says, 'Don't just hate the media, become the media'.
The other thing is that I think it's important that we define [what we mean by mainstream]. Like a lot of times when we say 'the mainstream media', I say bullshit. They're not expressing the mainstream of what's going on. They're expressing a very narrow viewpoint of what the corporate interests of the world are. It's important that we define it and say what it is - corporate media. In America, television stations are owned by Time Warner, AOL, Disney Corporation, and they express the viewpoints of those corporations.
In the light of the recent McVeigh execution in the USA, and the way the corporate media depicted the death penalty as 'justice being done', do you ever feel that 'mainstream' ideas and viewpoints are too entrenched?
Sometimes I feel frustrated, but I also see that there's been a shift in our country. The McVeigh execution was one that really disturbed me because it was about a bombing. It was about an American military man. A soldier, trained to kill. Had he gone and dropped that bomb in Iraq, Vietnam, Somalia, Kosovo, Central or South America, he would have come back to America as a hero. But because he dropped that bomb in Oklahoma and killed Americans, he's now considered the devil, y'know. So we decide we're gonna execute this one guy, and the media hypes it up and they sell newspapers, and they sell TV time to advertisers because [people] want to read [about] it and hear about this guy who's the devil. But where is the sympathy that we have for those who are grieving in all these other countries?
Have you ever though about taking up a career in [parliamentary] politics?
No. [Laughing.] I don't like politics, y'know, and I don't believe that politics is the thing that really changes the world. I believe that politics is the thing that we need to. be aware of. I think we need to have an understanding of who it is that we're fighting against and what it is that we're fighting for. But I think that at the end of the day the real battle is within each of us, y'know.
There's two arms in life that embrace us. One of them is joy and wisdom and understanding and positivity, and there's another arm that embraces us which is pain and sorrow and depression and negativity and ignorance. And each of us is embraced by that and in our life we learn from both things we can learn from the negative side of life and we can learn from the positive side of life. But a lot of times there's a lot of emphasis placed on jumping from one point of joy to the next point of joy rather than [going] through the different valleys in between, and so we don't live fulfilling lives; we block ourselves off from pain, and then we become depressed as a result of that.
I'm not really into politics. I'm more into trying to wage a battle between ignorance and enlightenment. Politics is really about debt and repayment - 'what do I owe you because you did something for me?'
Do you feel like a bit of a lone crusader these days, incorporating activism into your music?
No, I don't feel that way. I don't feel like there's a lot of artists that are doing it, but I do know there's a lot of artists who feel the way I do and are just singing their songs. But I'm also more in touch with the activist community [now], so I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what a lot of the real work that people are doing. What I mean by the real work is like the Winja Ulupna home; Barbara there is the one who is taking women off the street who have been battered or addicted. She's there while they're breaking down, and she goes through it with them and is trying to help them and put them back together. At the same time, she's fighting this fight to get funding for her place, [which is] an uphill battle for political reasons and racial reasons. So I'm in touch with people like that, and I think, well god, there's so many millions of people in the world who are doing what it is that I do, it's just that I do it in a little different way.
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