Hiphoprisy free

Spearhead's Michael Franti crosses over

by Franklin Soults

"It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at" has always been a wonderful slogan against essentialist cant, from Afrocentrism to good ol' white-boy racism. But the truth is, where you're from is always a big part of where you're at, if only because your journey through life has no definitive arrival point, just a particular direction. I got to thinking about this while musing over the three successive groups and four albums in the career of Michael Franti, a one-time political poet and experimental musician turned all-around hip-hop band leader. His latest album is his second with the group Spearhead, and it's probably his best yet. With its mix of smooth grooves, disturbing stories, and wide-ranging styles, Chocolate Supa Highway (Capitol) offers some of the most satisfying African-American music I've heard in months. Yet what makes it so successful isn't the summit it reaches but the trail it blazes to get there -- a trail blazed across lines of race and culture.

As much as anything, this movement is a result of Franti's complex background. Born to a white mother and black father and given up for adoption to a white family, Franti surely found that his childhood paved the way for his first musical home, the hardcore punk label Alternative Tentacles. Although I've never heard the homonymous 1988 debut of his original group, the Beatnigs, word has it that the album offered the kind of spoken-word rantings, sampled speeches, and screeching and squawking experimental noise you'd expect from a San Francisco performance artist who hung out with Bay Area agitators Jello Biafra and Consolidated. Yet this performance artist wasn't in it just to have fun making trouble -- after all, he had given up the chance to be a college-basketball star in order to pursue music.

In 1992, Franti honed his efforts with Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury (4th & Broadway), the one and only album by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. The album was impressive but not unfamiliar. Much of the music felt like a variation on what the Bomb Squad had put together for Public Enemy a few years before, and Franti's baritone raps came off like a mixture of Gil Scott-Heron and Public Enemy's Chuck D. The difference was, his outsider lyrics took on not only the lies told by the white power structure but the lies hip-hoppers tell themselves: being gay makes you sick, packing a gat makes you strong, wearing a brand name makes you cool, "Exxon and on and on and on."

But instead of making the most of this difference, Franti formed Spearhead, a group who turned away from abrasive tactics to adopt a more soothing, mainstream approach. Spearhead's 1994 debut, Home (Capitol), won Franti a large fan base with a far less strident political agenda and the kind of loose and jazzy "alternative" rap that was popular at the time (remember Arrested Development?). The group changed personnel after ceaseless touring took its inevitable toll (best newcomer: guitarist and co-songwriter Carl Young). In essence, though, Chocolate Supa Highway is to Home what the Disposable Heroes were to the Beatnigs: a leap in quality rather than any outright change. The easy loping, la-dee-da jazz rap has been left behind, but Franti remains committed to a mix that goes down smooth.

"I want to make the music be enjoyable, and not just something you listen to because you know it's good for you," he explains over the phone from San Francisco. "That's how I felt a lot of time with Disposable Heroes: it was so political, it was really kind of bordering on preachy. I wanted the music to be something that was just soulful and funky, that you vibe to and enjoy as music first of all."

This time around, he fulfills that mission by joining the ranks of black acts who've rediscovered soul, funk, and reggae from the '70s and incorporated these "organic" styles into the hard framework of contemporary hip-hop and R&B. Like the Fugees with "No Woman, No Cry," Franti resurrects an old Bob Marley tune, "Rebel Music (3 O'Clock Roadblock)" (cut with the help of Bob's son, Stephen). Like the Roots on "What They Do," he mixes an easy-flowing rap with some sexy backing vocals to create a surefire hit, "Keep Me Lifted." And like Tony Toni Toné all over House of Music, he gently strokes the chords of memory, not only with retro musical touches but with direct lyrical quotes from hits gone by, from classic Aretha Franklin to classic KRS-One.

All the same, Chocolate Supa Highway continues Franti's move away from a white bohemian subculture into the heart of blackness. The move may make sense commercially and artistically, yet it's disheartening when you consider how America's racial divide has been growing so precipitously that almost everyone who once sought to span it is now being forced to choose sides. Here we find Franti spouting some of the standard dubious hip-hop equations: whites hate blacks but love suntans, the O.J. trial is a source of black vindication, ganja is the staff of life, a shotgun is your only friend when your back is to the wall. All these equations can be justified, but they sound pretty easy when you recall how Franti once challenged hip-hop orthodoxy on every level.

Still, the world is changing, and Franti is changing with it. "There's a lot of other parts to me, and a lot of other parts to life, so I don't just try to rewrite things that I've already written about," he points out. "In my neighborhood, where I live in Hunter's Point in San Francisco, we have a pretty high murder rate, pretty high rate of police brutality. A lot of times, people listen to hip-hop and blame the problems of our community on what's being said in the songs. But I find the opposite to be true. The kids who are expressing themselves through the music -- expressing their frustration, their anger, their tension -- are the ones who are the least prone to actually go out and do the violence."

In other words, Franti wants to be down with those kids. On balance, the culturally mixed history he brings to that impulse outweighs what he's sacrificed to make the leap. Without that history, he might not have felt so free to push the bounds of his sonorous but limited vocals -- as he does throughout the album with sound effects, weird voices, and some first-time singing. That history may also be there when he incorporates trip-hop into his panoply of black styles (at this point, this English import is mostly perceived as belonging in the white "alternative" category). Certainly that history is there when he jokingly drops quotes from the Carpenters and Seals and Crofts, or when he invites Joan Osborne and Zap Mama's Marie Daulne to sit in on tracks, or when he composes the lyric to "Gas Gauge," a number that balances day-to-day hassles and life-shattering disaster with the sureness of good short-story writing or folk storytelling -- or really good spoken-word performance art.

"There is this pressure out there, that's like, `Whoa, how can we make this be what kids are listening to? What people are feeling right now?' But more than anything else, I respond to how I'm feeling, you know? What I'm trying to do, in that sense, is to add not just to the world of hip-hop but to the world of music -- or just to the world in general."

Keep on keeping on.