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Michael Franti

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Albums7
Songs83
AboutSince his days as a member of the Beatnigs while in his early twenties, Michael Franti has grown from angry young hiphopper with a political, socially conscious bent (the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Spearhead), to a man who has channeled his seriousness, his social unease, and his desire for change and merged them with his love for music, particularly oldschool RB, soul, and hiphop. What he has left behind in brash, makesomenoise aesthetic he has gained in compassion. And through his use of his own raw power charisma, sex appeal, sense of social injustice he has carried out in his music a communitygenerated passion in much the same way as Gil ScottHeron or Marvin Gaye. Franti was adopted at birth by white parents in the predominently black community of Oakland, CA. That set of contradictory circumstances instilled in him a hyperawareness of his own cultural identity as did the sobering fact that his more thoughtful, less provocative style of expression was not accepted by the AfricanAmerican audience that had embraced a harsher, more combative faction of the hip hop movement. In 1986 Franti formed the drum'n'bass/industrial duo the Beatnigs with turntablist Rono Tse which disbanded after releasing one album. He then formed the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, whose combination of jazzinfluenced heavy rap set out to challenge the materialism and misogyny of what had become mainstream rap. His next project, Spearhead produced the critically acclaimed Home in 1990, which contained his biggest single "Hole in the Bucket," a thoughtful lament on the plight of the homeless, and "Positive" which addressed the growing AIDS epidemic. The album boasted adept funk samplings, sinuous guitar vamps, and soulful, melodic tracks about family and social injustice. 1997's Chocolate Supa Highway was not as popfriendly as Home but neither did its themes of kidnappings and police brutality lend themselves to such overt accessability. Its mixture of harsher musical styles techno, rock, and funk was a step forward for Franti as his worldview broadened and deepened. In 2001 Franti released Stay Human. In it he expresses his anger at the system, his advocacy of love, and his belief in freedom through individuality and selfexpression through a set of songs that revolve around a fictitious death penalty case. In it his embrace of the genres that inspired him is achieved with a musical eloquence.

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