As part of the continuing fascination with the blackity black part of my intellect, a thought occurred to me that resides like a splinter in my mind. It is the greatness that is Michael Franti.
I cannot remember when I first heard of Franti, as I never really got so very deeply into the Disposable Heroes (or Digable Planets for that matter). But I think it must have been sometime around my boohabian phase. Hard to say. What I do recall specifically was that one of my online friends was telling me that my writes (what you know about my writes?) resembled those of Franti. Full disclosure: before I was married, whilst living in Brooklyn, I believe that I had the potential to save hiphop from itself. I was one and a half degrees of separation from Brooklyn Moon, Fez Cafe, Nuyorican, The Freestyle Fellowship and Greg Tate's band. Get me drunk and I'll tell you what I did at a reverse poetry slam. So when I heard that compliment, a bit too late, it still went to my head. So I had to hear what this dude was all about.
If you ask me, Spearhead 'Home' has to be one of the greatest hiphop albums ever. Everything about it is close to perfection. It spun on my player many, many times, and despite and perhaps because of the difficulty in just grooving to cuts with serious themes like 'Positive' and 'Caught Without an Umbrella' it never got really tired. Franti pushed the envelope even further with 'Chocolate Supa Highway', his follow-up album, moving into a realm of art far beyond the groove.
I listened only once to the album that came after CSH. I think Franti just went off the edge of edgy into the realm of radicalization - he practically went Gangsta where the beats were just sublimated to the power of harsh words. Or maybe I was on my way to a right turn and it hurt my neck to turn my head and listen to his left direction. I mean I can get into an artist with the humor and wisdom to say within the same song 'fuck the police / we can keep the peace / we can make love and conquer that disease' and then 'throw your hands in the air / let me see your armpit hair', as he did on the Home album but after listening to Gas Guage for the fifth or sixth time, it just gets a bit too depressing.
But the fact that Franti can, with wit and style evoke such heart rending stories is testament to his craft and the possibilities of hiphop. His is true poetry, the kind you can't simply bob your head to without it rattling your brain. He handles mature subjects with maturity, and beyond that with respect for the genre of hiphop and a real flair for the right groove. His deadpan delivery strikes the perfect balance of coolness and gravity, his music a mix of funkified, ganjafied instrumental fusion. You never once get the impression with Spearhead that he has poked his head outside of a life of elevated blackified consciousness. I say without any sense of exaggeration that if anyone deserves to inherit the mantle of the crown worn by the late Curtis Mayfield, it would be Franti. And while I am just a bit too pragmatic in my politics to cosign all the stuff he's saying, he's got the right flavor. The only reason I don't compare him to Gil-Scott Heron is because I think Franti's life is more together. Check out this sample:
I am not a muslim but I read the final call
because within it's pages there is something for us all
and I am not a professional, but I love basketball
the squeakin of the sneakers they echo in the hall
But if I don't have enemies I'm not doin' my job
I might throw out a curve ball but I never throw a lob
people criticize me but I know it's not the end
I try to kick the truth not just to make friends(chorus)
but hey diddle diddle
to the people in the middle
we got hot wax
and it's cookin' on the griddle
Got the guitar strummin
the drummer drummin
the people all hummin
and the vibe was lovin
on and on and on
'till the breakadawn
That's the kind of jam I expect from a righteous black brother. Except. Michael Franti doesn't fit the genetic profile.
I would not be so bold to suggest anything beyond the obvious. Franti's pedigree, as perfect as it stands within the context of the art, has not endeared him to a mass audience. And I'm surely not the first person to think what a tragic irony it is for hiphop to make a greater star out of Eminem than Franti. Which goes to the real meat of this piece aside from my intent to communicate how cool I think he is.
One of the most oft-quoted bits of popular wisdom about hiphop's commercial success is that is that it owes to the listening habits of white suburban teenage boys. I'm going to step out on a limb and suggest that I'm something of an expert of this dynamic. Or at least I'm willing to say that sometimes it's real easy as a man to see what's going on in boy heads. I'll reduce it to a simple concept, over-mothering. The reason suburban teen boys go for the dirrty is because they can't get dirty at home and their parents are trying desparately to raise little princes. Stereotypical enough? That is essentially the gut of the 'frat boy' audience of rap. I'm not trying to raise this analysis to anything about the suburbs or whitefolks except to the extent as it is not what we are inclined to think about as the core audience for hiphop. But let me keep it real, I'm talking about my hiphop. After all it was my generation that wore the bandannas on our Chucks in 1985. We were the ones responsible for overloading it with significance in our desparation not to be completely subsumed into New Wave and sick and tired of that same old funk.
Then again, we had a cultural agenda and we were mad successful. American pop culture is blacker because we did our part, but please distinguish between our producers (Jimmy Jam, Babyface, Full Force, Prince) and those running sh*t today. Franti inherits the mantle of those people who listened to groups like Madhouse, oh yeah and like I said, Curtis Mayfield and Gil Scott-Heron.
So let me be so bold as to beat the dead horse of black cultural nationalism again and ask if hiphop is black in the sense of demographics or in terms of a constructed and maintained aesthetic. I, of course, would prefer the latter taking Culture seriously. For those reasons I promote Franti over just about every hiphop artist out there save Chuck D, Dres, Wycleff, Andre 3K, QTip and Posdnous. And still I say Franti is the most mature and thoughtful of the bunch. I call his art black consciousness in and quite frankly you can't get any more explicit than Dream Team:
Well Chuck D'sannouncin'/ Flava's doin' color
halftime enterntainment by Dre and Ed Lover
Malcolm X is the coach he's drawin' up the strategy
he's choppin up America's anatomy
'cause they're the ones/ we're up against of course
are general manager is Chief Crazy Horse
Huey Newton/ 'cause he was extra hard
he's the one/ who would be playin at the shootin' guard
I dreamed Charles Barkley would be
played by Marcus Garvey
he'd be throwin people off his back and makin
sure they never got a rebound rebound / and
he'd throw it to the outlet
Nat Turner/ 'cause he can turn the corner when
he's out there
he be flyin through the air/ throwin passes like
he really doesn't care/behind the back /and in
between the legs
he's handlin the rock /as gently as an egg
he's throwin it in/ to Angela Davis's neighborhood
she's postin up down in the extra hard wood
So there you have it. To the extent that hiphop is political culture, nobody exemplifies it like Franti. I disagree with him of course, but he's an artist and his statements are clear, his art is nuanced and he's a smart rebel. He has respect for the genre and extends and expands it, and quite frankly, he knows how to jam. None of it would be worth a dime if he didn't, and so he gets props.
I'll just leave it this way. If there were more artists like him hiphop wouldn't be so sorry. We can only hope for the sake of what it might have been, that more of the younger set grow up with Franti's example in mind.
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