Keep The Peace
“When I was
growing up, I was adopted by a family who looked very different to how I
looked, I was a black kid growing up with this white family,” says Michael
Franti, explaining how music first changed his life. “In the town that I lived
in, a pretty small town, I felt like an outsider.
“[But] music would
come into my home, and into my ears, and it told me that there was a whole
other world out there. Bands like The Clash, The Police, Run DMC, Public Enemy,
lots of punk rock bands like the Dead Kennedys, dance music like New Order.
Even bands like Midnight Oil and INXS, bands from around the world, were a part
of my living room, and reggae too.
“So just hearing
all these bands, listening to experiences about life in different places, politics
in different places, it really made a difference in my thinking that the world
was bigger than what I was experiencing.”
Music as a way of
changing lives is something Michael Franti holds dear to this day, years after
those formative listening experiences. A tireless crusader for peace and human
rights (he’s made numerous trips to Iraq, Palestine and Israel), music is
Franti’s main platform for affecting change.
He’s well aware
however, that a single song or album won’t bring about peace in the Middle
East, or stop famine in Africa. “Yeah, it’s not that I don’t question it at
times, I feel frustrated,” he concurs. “You watch the news, and you think, ‘The
world is so fucked’.”
But the power of
music, as he sees it, always shines through. “You hear a song, or I hear a song
that moves my heart, changes me and stirs me and inspires me,” he smiles.
Franti chooses to focus on the smaller things – he’s been quoted as saying that
he believes lives can be changed by moments, and of course, those moments can
be musical.
“I really believe
in the power of music, I really believe in the power of one person with a
guitar standing up and singing a song, that power can change a room of people,”
he says. “And when that’s done over and over again, and not just one artist but
by many, many artists, it has the power to effect trends in society; it can change the world.”
And so, over the
course of a career which began in the mid-‘80s with The Beatnigs, continued in
the early ‘90s with Disposable Heroes and carries on to this day with the
all-powerful Spearhead, Franti has done his best to change the world, one
moment at a time.
His latest in a
long line of efforts, is most recent album All
People. It carries on from where his 2010 record, The Sound Of Sunshine, left off. That record moved away from his
earlier work with Spearhead – heavy, reggae-based tunes, very guitar-based –
and more toward dance music, the music from the clubs as he put it at the time.
All People is similar, Franti saying
with a laugh, “Why [shouldn’t] the music of Spearhead be in the clubs?”
It’s an
interesting sonic move for the man and the band, or at least it seems like it
at a glance. “With every record we make, I always expect some people to say,
‘We love it’, and others to say, ‘Why did you change it? You should be doing
the same thing’,” he says.
“If you’re not
pissing some people off along the way, maybe you’re not doing it right,” he
goes on with a smile. “But really, at the end of the day, I just want to make
music that’s listenable, something that people can enjoy, and I don’t ever
really think about the name or the genre, I just make what’s exciting to me,
what I think are cool beats at the time. [And] I always change, I’m always
evolving and trying to find new ways of doing things.”
Lyrically, the
album adheres to his MO, “People doing small things in a big way”, which is what
inspired the record as a whole. “I got to thinking,” Franti muses, “that you
don’t have to stop the war in Iraq,
you could start a birthing clinic in the Philippines. There are so many little
things you can do.”
As far as Michael
Franti is concerned, All People is a
moment in time, a moment that, if it manages to change in some way just one
person, then to him, it’s a success.
Samuel J. Fell
Gig: Metro Theatre, April 15 / Byron Bay Bluesfest, April 20 & 21
Tickets: Sold Out / www.bluesfest.com.au
Live: Beat-oriented reggae-roots
Best Track: ‘Everyone Deserves Music’ from Everyone Deserves Music
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