| |
Taken from Chicago Tribune (Jun 18, 2015)
Michael Franti expands his sonic palette
Michael Franti went from angry rapper to aerobic concert showman
by Steve Knopper, Chicago Tribune
Musician Michael Franti performs at Thalia Hall on Saturday and Sunday. (Jay Blakesberg) |
Early on, Michael Franti was an angry rapper. He ranted in great detail about how American civil rights would collapse "at the hands of fundamentalists" and television was turning the world into idiots; he titled one song "Satanic Reverses" and covered Dead Kennedys' sputtering punk-rock classic "California Uber Alles." His band, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, became big enough to open for U2 on its "Zoo TV" tour in 1992.
Then Franti's mood changed. "When I first started making music, it was based around anger," says the 49-year-old singer-songwriter. "It was a very limited emotional palette."
In the Disposable Heroes days, Franti and a collaborator, jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter, worked on a song about HIV. "The first song was 'f--- the government, because they're not responding,'" Franti recalls, by phone near San Francisco, where he's driving from his home to perform at a Napa Valley festival. "When I went to get tested, it was like, 'Wow, I'm really scared,' and there were all these other emotions that required a softer touch."
That song evolved into "Positive," a musical change of pace that led to Franti abandoning the Disposable Heroes blueprint and reinventing himself as the frontman for Spearhead. That band's 1994 debut, "Home," was a million times sunnier than "Satanic Verses," and over the next 20 years Spearhead would come up with inclusive dance anthems such as "I'm Alive (Life Sounds Like)" and "Say Hey (I Love You)." "I'd see the way Bono, just through melody, would draw these long vowel sounds echoing across an arena. It would make everybody sing along," Franti recalls. "I realized there was something very powerful in the melody itself. All this got me thinking about music in different ways."
Drawing from reggae, soul, funk and rock, Franti figured out how to express angry emotions in a way that united amphitheater crowds. "We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace," he sings on 2003's "Bomb the World," a lighthearted, mid-tempo pop song that recalls Bob Marley and Johnny Nash. "Dance music and music with meaningful lyrics are usually at two ends of the spectrum, and to bring them both together is challenging — to find a way that you can say something resonant to someone else's life, apart from 'this is the greatest night, let's live life to the fullest,'" he says.
Adopted by white parents in Davis, Calif., Franti, who is African-American, grew up in a community of mostly white, Hispanic and Asian people. His parents were Lutherans who attended church every Sunday, and his father was a depressed, occasionally abusive alcoholic. Franti began to develop interests that weren't perfectly aligned with his family culture. He read the works of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and he consumed Marley's "Uprising" album. At one point as a teenager, he ran away from home.
Eventually, he landed at the University of San Francisco on a basketball scholarship, although he found himself drawn more to the bohemian Haight-Ashbury district and political rallies than practices. When he transferred to San Francisco State University to focus on art and music, his father disowned him. "Four years before he passed away, (my father) had a stroke and he blossomed into this really beautiful person, and I saw him change in front of my eyes," Franti says. "That really made me realize people could grow, and there are opportunities for healing in everybody's life. … Now I can look at my dad's life and appreciate all the things he taught me. Some of them were unintentional."
Franti's first band evolved into Disposable Heroes. It wasn't until Spearhead, though, that he was able to work out all his musical ideas — 2001's "Stay Human" is a gently soulful protest album, while 2008's "All Rebel Rockers" draws from reggae's harder, more political edges. Over time, Franti's bands stretched out their songs to the point that Spearhead fit on the jam-band circuit alongside .moe and String Cheese Incident, and he developed a reputation as an aerobic concert showman.
In January, though, Franti was standing onstage, rocking back and forth, when he felt a pop — he'd torn his meniscus. ("I wish I had some great story to tell about how I hurt it," he says. "I was skydiving into an orphanage to save kittens or something.") For the next few months, he had to perform with crutches, or sitting on a chair. The injury wasn't nearly as serious as an appendix rupture during a tour in August 2009 — at that point, he thought he was going to die, and he took a long break to rethink his life and priorities. The knee injury was more of a blip, a way of refocusing his energy into other areas.
"I learned a lot," says Franti, who after surgery and ongoing physical rehab is back to 85 percent health. "I jump around a lot, but being in a chair, I had to concentrate on storytelling and hitting the notes. It actually turned out to be a really good experience."
|
|
