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Taken from The Dartmouth Free Press (Oct. 23, 2002)
Franti: Music with Heart
DFP Volume 3.3
by Bennat I. Berger
 The Berkeley, CA-based hip-hop group Spearhead brought down the house in Alumni Hall on October 23rd. Along with Chicana muralist and community organizer Judy Baca, Spearhead sparked up the audience of several hundred students, community members, and yes, even administrators.
Michael Franti, Spearhead's ebullient frontman, sat down with the Dartmouth Free Press in-between soundchecks and practicing yoga.
The evening's activities were sponsored by the Dartmouth College Greens and a whole slew of administrative bodies, including the Rockefeller Center, the Tucker Foundation, the Montgomery Endowment and the Dean's Office. Special thanks go to Sally Newman '05, and Lynn White Cloud and Lois Schonberger at Tucker for making the event possible.
DFP: How powerful do you think your music is as a political act?
MF: All music is only as powerful as the truth you put in it. And what's intrinsic in any great art is truth. And it can either be a musical truth, political truth, a spiritual truth, [or] a truth about your passion. That's what makes music have the ability to bring out emotions in us that we didn't know were there before. My responsibility as an artist is to keep digging and searching for the truth, and that's what I consider to be success, a deeper understanding of myself. The better I understand myself, the deeper the well I have to draw upon for my music. I have been making music since 1987 and that's what I've always been trying to do. [Look] at artists who have been able to make music for a long time like the Grateful Dead, U2, Bob Dylan: artists that have had a lot of longevity like John Lee Hooker. He was always searching for the truth; he wrote from his heart and soul.
DFP: Who are some of your role models as far as political activism and music?
MF: My political roots extend to my birth. My mother's white and my father's black. My mother gave me up for adoption as a baby because she felt her family would not accept me. I grew up in a family I never felt very comfortable in. The father who raised me was an alcoholic. I always felt like an outsider, and as a result of that, I always identify with the underdog, with people who feel left out, people who have been oppressed, and so my politics come from that perspective. I believe in celebrating diversity, and not just in equal rights, but in equality, which is different than the right to be equal. I don't think you have to go to court to defend [equality]- I just think people should be equal, and so when I perform I try to create an environment where people are free to dance, sing, and express emotions.
DFP: Do young people understand your music and your message?
MF: I think a lot of times the music industry is a body of people who are thinking about reaching kids. They totally underestimate the intellectual power of young people. They're always trying to dumb things down; you have the Kid Rocks of the world who are always on MTV 24 hours a day. There was a time when I was a kid when you picked up a magazine and you didn't see the cast of Friends of the front cover of Rolling Stone. You would see like Marley or Springsteen or Dylan, somebody who had something to say through music. It's so rare today that the music industry gives voice to people who have something to say. I remember, a couple years ago, I saw Ani Difranco on the cover of Spin. Since then, I don't know if I've ever seen anybody. I've seen Springsteen recently, but apart from that it's very rare that an artist who has something to say is given an opportunity to say it, and so that makes the opportunity for us as artists who are trying to say something. Maybe I feel a greater responsibility because of that, to do things, and really remove myself from corporate culture in order to get my message across because that ends up being what my message is.
DFP: Is there any message more important right now than that of peace and anti-militarism?
MF: I think the most important message no matter what time you're in is compassion. It includes anti-militarism. It includes being ego-conscious. It includes being conscious of the way economics affects people. It includes creativity, and the importance of each person having their creative voice and being able to express their passion. But mainly what it's about is love, and certainly for me being [against] militarism is part of living, and saying we care about other people. I mean, we have the ability to create these computers that do far-out things, can't we figure out ways to promote sustainability, to promote goodwill amongst nations? And so I think that's the battle that we face today as young people, and the next generation of world leaders: how are we going to address and face the problems of the world today? The solutions to the problems we face are not going to be solved by those who create them. People say we should support George Bush and Dick Cheney going over to Iraq. We're going [into war] to take care of this problem, but the U.S.' dependency on oil, and Bush's investment in oil, Cheney's investment in Unocal, those are the reasons were going over there in the first place.
DFP: What truths do you think Americans are most missing out on in terms of terrorism and our understanding of who the enemy is?
MF: One is that Dick Cheney's company that he has a lot of involvement in, Unocal, their second-largest supplier of oil is Iraq, so let's not deceive ourselves into believing that there's no political and personal interests in this war. The absurdities go on, but I would ask people to look at the costs. Some people say this war is going to cost $200 million, and that's money that's coming directly out of the money [we would] be using for schools, healthcare, social security... All this money has to come from somewhere. Do we want to drop it in this other country in order to preserve the oil interests of a few people?
That's one cost but the even greater cost is the tens of thousands of lives that are going to be lost just from the impact of the bombs and the hundreds of thousands of lives that are going to be lost as a result of the infrastructure being destroyed, because the war on Iraq has never stopped since Bush War 1. Now we're about to enter into Bush War 2, it's just a further escalation, but the sanctions between that time [and now] have resulted in over 500,000 children dying because of lack of healthcare, electricity, and clean water, and so the loss of life is ultimately the cost that should be of greatest concern.
DFP: Should we trust that the people in power are telling the public the truth?
MF: My first political memory-I was born in 1966-was being in a car with my father and listening to the resignation of Nixon, and so I've never trusted politicians. They're all crooked, and so far they've never let me down. That doesn't mean that we should drop out, or completely disengage from the system. It's important to become active, and part of this activism is when we vote, [however], having a different president is not the answer. I'm not convinced that if Gore were in office things would be much different than they are right now, but over time I feel like it's possible that we could begin to have, if not a 3rd party, certainly the issues that a third party brings up... I would love to see a third party like the Green Party take political prominence. I imagine that because Democrats and Republicans are so similar right now, that there's this huge vacuum being created. I hope at least that if we don't see the third party in our lifetime, I hope the issues of the Green Party will have some national importance.
DFP: Who are some of your role models in music?
MF: There are a lot of role models that I have [admired], trying to follow in their footsteps: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Bob Marley, The Clash, The Dead Kennedy's, Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ani DiFranco, Bob Dylan... these are all people that stuck their necks out on the line, and said things that were important, and so I consider myself to be a person in a long line of storytellers in music. It goes back even further before recorded music. It's about playing an instrument and telling a story about what's going on. It can be a metaphor for larger things in the world.
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