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Taken from Guardian Unlimited (June 24, 2003)
Arts reviews - Michael Franti and Spearhead
Royal Festival Hall, London, Tuesday June 24, 2003
by David Peschek
 Since the dissolution of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy in the early 1990s, Michael Franti has pursued accessibility above all things. From 1994's Home, through to the current album, Everybody Deserves Music, Franti's shifting Spearhead collective have pulled further away from the industrial lurch and dazzling rap polemic of Disposable Heroes (and further still from the splendid agit-punk of his previous band, The Beatnigs). Once regarded as the most acute lyricist of his generation, these days he wants to throw a party - a conscious party, mind, but a party none the less.
What is undimmed is his charisma. A gentle, rangy giant, he lopes on stage and launches into a spoken word piece, fusing poetry, rap and toasting, gathering everyone in with a sweep of his arm, espousing fuzzy afrocentrism and a hippyish "God is in all of us" manifesto. His multi-racial, six-piece band bring the funk with bass, organ and guitar solos, and a human beatbox who also does a passable trumpet impression and an uncanny Louis Armstrong.
Franti may be preaching to the converted, but he gets the audience dancing, albeit in that endearingly arrhythmic way that white people dance to funk. (Franti's audience in the UK has always been predominantly white and middle class.) Songs from the new album are almost ridiculously eager to please. Yes I Will is so middle of the road it's dodging traffic. Feelin' Free is a soul-sweet strum that segues into Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On.
Bomb the World has the most overtly political message, but couched in simplistic terms. We sway along, secure in the notion that war is, indeed, bad. And then he pulls a rabbit out of the hat: in Never Too Late, written for a fan killed in a car crash, he implores: "Don't fear the night time, cos the monsters know you're divine." It is genuinely moving.
That's what Franti does: offers hope. The Rainbow Coalition Kool and the Gang he leads can't expunge all that's bad from the world, but they can offer respite. Suddenly fun doesn't seem such a shallow thing after all.
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