Wall Of Sound

“I felt scared every second I was there,” says a barefoot and shirtless Michael Franti, the giant singer, rapper and songwriter, who over the past 20 years has earned the reputation as the most perceptive agent provocateur in American music. It’s a little before 2pm and Franti has just got up, having emerged from his tour bus for his daily yoga session. After driving all night from yesterday’s stop at the All Good festival in West Virginia, his new band Spearhead is halfway through its Big Summer Classic tour and is contemplating the next show at the sprawling, evergreen Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

 

In between yoga positions, Franti is sharing memories of his trip to Iraq. It’s now nearly two years since he and a group of filmmaker friends touched down in Baghdad, and the weather is almost identical: hot and sunny. “As soon as we got off the plane, the first things we encountered were two cars that had been blown up within the past ten minutes. They were on fire, and bodies were hanging out. Our drivers were like, ‘Keep your cameras down.’ Around the airport, it’s all controlled by the US military. You can’t shoot anything. They’ll just open fire on your car, because they’re so paranoid of people surveilling for car-bombing.” 

 

In between twisting himself like licorice, the dreadlocked Franti, who first rose to prominence in the early 1990s with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, has been talking about waking up the morning after the invasion of Iraq, finding a television and seeing politicians and generals discussing the political and economic costs of the war, but never the human cost. Right now, he’s talking about his experience making I Know I’m Not Alone – the documentary film he made while visiting Iraq, Israel and Palestine, and which has just been released to considerable acclaim.

 

“People say, ‘Man, at least when Saddam was here, we could walk the streets. We hate Saddam, were glad he’s gone, we thank America, but now, America, go home.’ Just imagine if somebody came over here took over our government, and then set up shop in our front yards, told us what to do and when to do it. People who fought against them, we would call them freedom fighters. And that’s how the Iraqis look at it.” 

 

How the American soldiers look at it, moreover, isn’t that different. Franti talks about meeting the troops, even playing songs for them at the Sheraton hotel bar – “I come in with a wooden folk guitar and I'm not wearing cowboy boots and I'm not with the USO, so they had me sized up,” he said at the time – before listening to their experiences, and their evaporating belief in the mission. “They’re the ones who told me that what we’re doing there is exacerbating the situation,” he says. “I hear a story about this kid who had been hit by a cluster bomb; little blue and yellow plastic balls, most explode, but fair amount of them don’t. Kids see them, these plastic balls, and they go up and kick it, and then it goes off. And this little kid did that, and it blew off both his legs. Sadly, this is what we’re doing. This is what the war on terror is.”

 

Musically, Yell Fire! marked a new beginning for Franti. The disc was primarily written on guitar, which he plays throughout the album, on which he’s rarely heard rhyming. Franti has, since forming the bad, increasingly explored more of a traditional troubadour path, one that’s a giant stylistic leap from his days as a street performer-turned-MC. The new songs find Franti evolving, but not at his audience’s expense. If his 2001 concept-album masterwork Stay Human marked his coming of age as an artist, Yell Fire! foreshadows a long, fruitful career full of reinvention.

 

At 38, Franti is marking two decades as a professional musician this year. And in those 20 years, he’s blossomed as a musician and man, while amassing a fiercely credible catalogue. The militant history lessons and societal critiques he doled out as a member of The Beatnigs and Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy have given way to songs of peace and love, compassionate, witty poetry balanced with funk-injected party tracks.

 

If Franti ripped his songs from the headlines and rewrote history as a young artist, on the eve of 40 he’s more interested in universal emotions and understanding. “When I first started, every song was angry, every song was, like, “F**k the system.’ Now I want to write songs that reflect the whole rainbow of human emotions.” 

 

In Ohio, though, there is little evidence that fans have much to say about political, social or environmental issues when they approach him. But that’s okay with Franti. “It’s funny,” he says. “When you’re asking somebody to go to the next step, you’re asking them to make a commitment. You’re saying, ‘If you were moved emotionally by what you saw or heard, we’re asking you to do something,’ and it can be something like the commitment I made a few years ago, where everything we bring in the house is reused, recycled or composted. We’re asking them to think consciously about the world, to see what your role is in it, like, ‘Vote from your heart.’ And that’s a hard thing to do.

“For me, it’s important to express these things, and I also feel like I can be helpful to the world in doing it. This is just who I am, and what I feel. I don’t feel like any artist has a responsibility to be political. Their responsibility is to make great art, and get their kids to school on time. But in order to make great art, you have to have some truth. It can be sexual, comedic, spiritual, romantic – there just has to be some truth for it to be a great work of art. And, right now, when I look around the world, it’s hard to ignore what’s happening.”

 

Thankfully, he knows he’s not alone in thinking that. 

 

For the full version of this article, see NOX04.