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 Taken from The Sydney Morning Herald (May 10, 2003)
Sharp shooter
by Barry Divola
Spearhead's Michael Franti uses intelligent rhymes and soulful grooves to prove his political point. Barry Divola listens in.
Michael Franti isn't a professional basketball player, but you can tell a lot about him by watching him on the court. He's the same height as Michael Jordan (2.1 metres) but describes himself as an overachiever who was never really that talented. He was the guy who always dived for every loose ball, playing frantic defence and generally hustling the opposition.
He won a sports scholarship to the University of San Francisco, and made every team he tried out for because he was the first guy to turn up to practice, the last guy to leave, and for a while there he would simply never, ever give up.
"I got disillusioned," he says, his dreadlocks tucked into a knitted cap, his lanky frame in T-shirt and baggy shorts, his feet bare. "By the time I got to the upper levels it became a business and it wasn't fun anymore. The coaches take this group of 18- to 22-year-olds who are young and dumb, and they do a lot of manipulative things in order to get results. So then I gave up and joined the bastion of morality." He pauses. Smiles. "The music industry."
A decade ago, Franti dealt with things a lot differently than he does now. In the early '90s, with his group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, he responded to consumerism and globalisation and the Gulf War (part one) by setting slogan-heavy, information-overloaded lyrics to punishing music that was equal parts free jazz and industrial rap. The group had an alternative hit with Television, the Drug of a Nation and toured the world, coming to Australia for the Big Day Out in 1993.
Around the same time Franti had a revelation. "I realised that there are certain battles you can win and certain battles you can't win. I'm not going to make much headway telling the government how f--ed up they are. We all know that. But I could make some headway writing songs that are going to help people get up in the morning and do simple stuff like cleaning the bathroom."
His message wasn't the only thing that changed. With his new group, which he named Spearhead, Franti's love of reggae, funk, soul and hip-hop came to the fore, and influences like Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Sly and the Family Stone were thrown into the mix. The major label Capitol was impressed enough to sign up the band in 1994 and stuck with them for two albums, Home and Chocolate Supa Highway.
"Then there was a regime change at the company, so I went in to meet with the new dictator," says Franti, with a small laugh. "He hadn't even listened to my records. I was really offended. I'd given him six weeks to listen to the music that I sent him personally so we could then have this meeting to discuss my future."
The new dictator did have some suggestions, however. Why not get Wyclef Jean of the Fugees to produce the next album, and how about a duet with Will Smith? And with that, Michael Franti and Capitol parted.
Now Franti releases music for his own label, Boo Boo Wax, and licenses his albums to different companies around the world. Stay Human, released in 2001, was a song cycle set against a broadcast from a fictional pirate radio station and many of the tracks were concerned with the death penalty - it came out the same month that Timothy McVeigh was executed. The latest, Everyone Deserves Music, is a reaction to world events between September 11, 2001 and the war in Iraq. Despite the subject matter, Franti says he doesn't really see what he does as protest music.
And then he breaks into song.
"People get ready, there's a train a-comin, you don't need no baggage, you just get on board," he croons in his reedy tenor.
It's Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready.
"That song is not overtly political. In one context it can be about us all going to the same party to dance, in another context it can be about us all joining the same political party, and in another context it can be about us all going off to heaven. It can mean anything.
"With our music now, we want to show the human side of whatever issue we're talking about. On this album I wanted to show the human cost of war, but I also wanted to write songs about endurance, tenacity, compassion and spirituality."
The first single from the disc, Bomb the World, has only been added to one major radio station play-list in the US but the words of its chorus have appeared on banners at peace rallies around the world: "You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb it into peace".
Franti has attended marches with his two sons - he carries his four-year-old on his shoulders; his 16-year-old has been arrested twice.
Such family solidarity isn't something Franti experienced in his own upbringing. Given up at birth, he was adopted by a white couple, both teachers. It wasn't a happy childhood. His father was an alcoholic. In his early 20s, Franti searched for his birth parents. Two years later he found them - his birth father, who is black, didn't really want anything to do with his life; his mother, who is white, was welcoming, but still has trouble dealing with the emotions that resulted.
Then, when Franti's adoptive father had a stroke five years ago, "there was a transformation", he says. "He became a totally different person, very open and very emotional. He did some really heroic things after that and spent time with me and apologised for things that had happened."
He's quick to add that there's no Hollywood ending to the story. His father still veered between drinking and abstinence and had bouts of depression after that but their relationship fundamentally changed.
"That's a powerful message for me, because I never imagined that could happen. It strengthened my idealism. It made me think that if people can grow and change then you may as well hope for the best."
And Franti does hope for the best. He tells the story of the New York Post journalist who admitted to him that all his life he was for the death penalty until he repeatedly listened to the Stay Human album while doing research for a Spearhead interview. The songs led to him doing more reading, more soul-searching, and finally reassessing his beliefs.
"He still wasn't 100 per cent sure but he said that he realised for the first time that the system didn't work right," says Franti, smiling at the memory. "That was a great little victory, just with one person. I like to say that I don't know if music can change the world overnight, but I know it can help us make it through difficult nights."
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