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 Michael Franti: Growing
Old Gracefully? Interview
interview 0172 added 21.01.04 words: Nikesh
technical:
QED
 When I was
about 13 years old, I was up watching telly at about 4 in the morning,
doing what I shouldn’t be.
I was watching Planet Pop on ITV and suddenly the screen shook over
hysterical static and mesmerising chanting started. I saw a dreadlocked
man rap, “Television, the drug of a nation, feeding ignorance and
breeding radiation.” I nearly wet my pants. Michael Franti was that man.
The band was Disposable Heroes of Hip Hoprisy and the industrial punk
noises and hardcore rap polemic was an integral part of my growing up,
as much a constant to my ears as Public Enemy and KRS-ONE. I loved that
raw edgy punk Hip Hop sound. It got me into bands like The Clash and the
Dead Kennedys and Fugazi. However, in the late 90s when Michael Franti
emerged with his Spearhead project, the complete opposite end of the
spectrum, he took a more reggae, funk, polished and positive approach to
the music, I felt disappointed.
I’m used to my music having darkness, an edge, some danger to it.
Instead, he delivered a capable set of clean, funky, summery songs that
weren’t out of place on Gap in-store CDs. I was surprised at this
complete change in direction. But much as I didn’t like the music, I was
able to appreciate his continued activism and positive political lyrics.
I however could not get on board with the happy summery poppy approach
he was taking and this upset me. For someone whose career has been so
pivotal to conscious rap and to punk energy in the 90s, and someone who
I looked up to as a hardcore lyricist, I wondered whether Michael Franti
was just mellowing with age.
I met up with Franti backstage at his recent Shepherd’s Empire gig as
part of an international tour of recent Spearhead album “Everybody
Deserves Music.” While I waited for him to finish up the interview
before me, I was amazed at his grace, poise and general inner peace. A
tall man in his late 30s, early 40s, he looked young healthy and happy
to answer any question the interviewer from Trouble TV threw at him. I
was a little intimidated by his height and his general bonhomie when we
finally got to sit down and he seemed generally shocked that I knew
about his career and even owned various early albums of his, including
the first Beatnigs cut. As we sat and chatted, I felt that perhaps he
had grown out of the sound he had honed to perfected on “Hypocrisy is
the Greatest Luxury” and as he explained, he needed to keep his music
positive, because he just wasn’t the same person who began his career,
decades ago.
This is what we discussed…
 Who
are you and what was the last thing you bought?
Well, I’m Michael Franti and the last thing I bought was a newspaper
yesterday.
Dr L Shariatri wrote that
the four prisons of man are society, history, nature and ego. Discuss:
Society? Ego, history, nature… I would add one more to that, that is the
fear of death. Yeah, any of those can be prisons but they can also be
liberations. You know. It’s up to us, you know, to find acceptance in
our hearts for our own sense of who we are and when we find happiness in
who we are, we’ll be able to see that anything could potentially be a
trap or be a joy. Yeah, I mean, umm, you know, the real self is
impermanent… I mean the body is impermanent but the real self is
lasting, you know. And so when we’re able to figure that out and find
love for all of our faults and all of our goodness and accept ourselves
for who we are then none of those things will, yeah… we can enjoy
everything.
Ok, the name of your last
album was “everybody deserves music.” What does music mean to you:
Well, music is something that is… well in life, we all want to bear
fruit, well I want to bear fruit… you know, and the fruits of my life
are the destiny, the goals that I have, the vision of what I want to do
in my life. In order for any tree to bear fruit, it has to have roots,
it has to have soil, it has to have rain and so on, and with the
culmination of those things, in time the tree bears fruit. But without
one of those things, it’s impossible for the tree to bear fruit. And I
believe music is one of those elements. Without music, umm, we wouldn’t
be able to find our own fruition. It doesn’t mean that music can change
the world overnight. It just means that with the accumulation of all the
other things that it can help us to achieve what we want. I also believe
that music is a human right, just like a right to clean water and food
and a place to live. We all have a right to experience music.
From the Beatnigs to the
Disposable Heroes to Spearhead, what does each stage in your career
represent to you and how do you quantify each one’s impact?
Mmmm, I started off being a poet and that’s the one thing that has
remained: poetry has always been in my music. But when I started off, I
didn’t know how to play any instruments nor did the people around me so
we just started beating on pieces of metal and adding some percussion
and eventually a bass, and just started making this very avant-garde
style of political poetry mixed with rhythm. And then with Disposable
Heroes, we started to sample those rhythms and then with Spearhead, we
said we wanted to just play instruments now. You know, explore through
that. And at the same time as all that was happening, Hip Hop was going
through an incredible evolution. When I first started making music was
in 1986 and first, it was at a time, just before the whole afrocentric
movement came into Hip Hop. And by the late eighties if you weren’t a
political, or if you didn’t identify with Africa or identify with
culture and roots, you basically weren’t relevant at all. So it was like
X-Clan, Public Enemy, KRS-ONE, Gang Starr, those are the groups that
were making the voice, you know.
“...I’ve always grown
up writing songs and connected politically with people seen as the
outsiders...”
And then in the early nineties, in early 93, about the time that NWA
first exploded, people saw that you can make a shitload of money doing
this time, by talking about stuff that wasn’t conscious. And suddenly
overnight the music changed. People started saying, “Hey, this is my way
out of whatever trap I’m feeling.” Economically. For better or for
worse?… it just is, you know… I can’t really say if it’s for better or
for worse. It’s just the way it is. You could argue that on one hand,
the consciousness in the music wasn’t there and that affects the way
young people live today because they look at the videos and they want
what’s in the videos and they end up striving for those material things
that don’t really give us joy. They just feed the corporation. On the
other hand, you could argue that Hip Hop has reached more people and
more corners of the globe than it ever has before and maybe the videos
and the songs and stuff aren’t bringing a strong message but… everywhere
I see Hip Hop I see graffiti artists, I see breakdancers, I see spoken
word poets, I see people who are doing Hip Hop for the love of it on a
street level and that’s a great thing.
So the original elements
are still there if you know where to look?
 Yeah,
yeah…
What would you say is
your favourite moment of your career?
You know, I don’t…. Say this facetiously at all I would say… everytime I
play. Everytime I play, I find something new in it and I learn something
new from it. And everytime we hit the stage, it’s a different experience
for me. There’s different highlights you know, we’ve played in front of
huge crowds, we’ve played in schools, in prisons, we’ve played in
demonstrations, in front of cops and tear gas. But everytime it’s the
opportunity to play music night after night, that I’m grateful for night
after night.
I heard you talking in
your previous interview about your prison work, do you see any solution
to the current trend of privatising prisons for corporate gain?
Mmmm, well, umm, on an international level, you have corporations like
Wackenhut, who are now building prisons all over the world, privately
owned and… yeah, refugee centres, prisons in Australia and other places
and umm, it’s uhhh… it should be banned, internationally banned.
Corporations should not be allowed to have their own corporate army. You
shouldn’t be allowed to incarcerate people as a business. You know, and
the reason being, there’s no one sentence to let you out of that prison
because each day you’re in that prison there’s a government that’s gonna
give you money. To house and feed and warehouse them. In America there’s
a movement called the Restorative Justice Movement, which is about
getting prisoners to meet face to face with their victims and have a
dialogue. This gets the victims to get into a process of having
financial restoration or have a spiritual restoration through dialogue.
This is something that’s obviously not going to work in every case,
especially with violent offenders… but in America, 70% of prison
population is there for petty drug offences, which is a victimless
crime, it’s just the selling of drugs on the street. There’s no reason
for them to be in there.
Yeah people come out
worse than when they go in…
Exactly…
The sound of Disposable
Heroes was quite industrial punk and Spearhead is more positive, more
funk-based… do you think you’re mellowing with age or just getting the
funk as you grow older?
Well, I think that, to answer that… when I was doing the Beatnigs and
Disposable Heroes, I felt very angry about the world because I felt like
I didn’t have any power in the world. These days, I’m involved directly,
not just speaking out against prisons, I’m inside prisons… I’m putting
on demonstrations against the war, I’m working with people on a daily
basis in a lot of different organisations who are doing groundwork
stuff, so I don’t feel powerless anymore. I no longer feel the need to
get up there and shout “God, everything’s so fucked up, I have this
angry, this rage and I don’t know what to do with it and I don’t know
how to let it out.” It’s like, once you get involved you find that umm
it’s just, it’s not so much about expressing your anger all the time and
going to prisons and getting all angry… I go to prisons and I sit down
and reason and I go to prisons and I go there to try and bring to joy to
the life of people in prison. And there’s time to express angry songs.
But people are locked up, they wanna let loose. They wanna dance, they
wanna have fun. And that’s the thing. To be an activist, you don’t need
a card, you don’t need a degree from university. All you need to do is
show up and show up the first, second, third time is not that difficult.
But to show up two-three years, two-three decades down the line becomes
a lot harder. And that’s who I make music for. People who need that
inspiration.
“...when I was doing the Beatnigs and Disposable Heroes, I felt very
angry about the world because I felt like I didn’t have any power in the
world...”
How did you get into
rapping and who are your rapping heroes and who do you check for at the
moment?
My rapping heroes are umm, Rakim, Eric B and Rakim, the music and the
lyrics, KRS-ONE, a legend, Chuck D of course. These days I really like
Jurassic 5, I’m still a huge fan of Freestyle Fellowship, Aceyalone,
Blackalicious, all the Quanuum records… umm, Immortal Technique. Those
are who I’m really into. But you know, there’s a lot of music that I
like that’s not just Hip Hop. Sometimes you hear a single that’s got a
hot beat and you’re just like, that’s cool. But as far as lyrics, I feel
there’s very few people who are still pushing the envelope as far as
lyrics can go. Most artists are just trying to write a hook and fill
some time in-between.
What do you think of
other spoken word poets who have gotten into rap like
Saul Williams and
Sage Francis?
Mmmm,
yeah, I love Saul. Cos if you ever go and see Saul perform live, there’s
a rock band or when you see him alone. When you see alone, you see, he’s
just a supreme intellect, beyond being an artist or a rapper, he’s a
smart motherfucker, man. And I like being around and listening to smart
people, man. Cos I learn a lot. Ursula Rucker, she’s just a smart woman.
I enjoy being around people who are really intelligent, I just love
listening to them.
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Part 2
 
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