Artist: Michael Franti Genre(s):
Rock
R&B: Soul
Discography:
Songs From The Front Porch: An Acoustic Collection Year: 2004
Tracks: 10
Stay Human Year: 2001
Tracks: 22
Since his years as a member of the Beatnigs piece in his early twenties, Michael Franti grew from an angry young hip-hopper with a political, socially conscious bent (the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Spearhead) to a isle of Man world Health Organization channeled his sincerity, social disquiet, and desire for change and integrated them with his love for music, especially old school R&B, soulfulness, and rap music. What he left hand behind in nervy, make-some-noise esthetic, he gained in compassion. And through his use of his possess raw ability -- charisma, sexual urge attract, sense of social iniquity -- he carried knocked out in his music a community-generated heat in much the same way as Gil Scott-Heron or Marvin Gaye.
Franti was adoptive at parentage by caucasian parents in the predominantly black community of Oakland, CA. That set of contradictory fortune instilled in him a hyper-awareness of his have cultural identity as did the sobering fact that his more thoughtful, less provocative style of expression was not recognized by the African-American audience that had embraced a harsher, more disputative faction of the pelvis hop movement. In 1986, Franti formed the drum'n'bass/industrial brace the Beatnigs with turntablist Rono Tse, disbanding afterwards one album. He and so formed the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, whose combination of jazz-influenced heavy rap music set verboten to challenge the physicalism and misogyny of what had suit mainstream rap.
His adjacent project, Spearhead produced the critically acclaimed
Home plate in 1990. The album contained his biggest individual, "Fix in the Bucket," a thoughtful lament on the quandary of the homeless person, and "Positive," which addressed the growing AIDS epidemic. The album boasted whizz funk samplings, wiggly guitar vamps, and soulful, melodic tracks about fellowship and social shabbiness. 1997's
Chocolate Supa Highway was not as pop-friendly as
Home plate, merely neither did its themes of kidnappings and constabulary brutality loan themselves to such open approachability. Its admixture of harsher musical styles -- techno, tilt, and funk -- was a step forward for Franti as his world view broadened and deepened. In 2001, Franti released
Ride out Human. In it he expresses his ire at the system, his advocacy of love, and his belief in freedom through individuation and self-expression through a lay out of songs that orb about a pretended death penalization grammatical case. In it, his embracement of the genres that divine him is achieved with fluency.
Songs from the Front Porch was Franti's first proper solo record album, appearance in 2003. It was an acoustic matter that had him direction regular more on his vocalizing, merely not at the expense of his thinking, thought-provoking lyrics. In 2005,
Love Kamikaze: The Lost Sex Singles & Collectors' Remixes appeared. Again billed solely to Franti, it was a accumulation of Spearhead tracks that didn't quite fit into the albums they were originally recorded for (as well as a couple different mixes from the
Appease Human album). In 2006, Franti and Spearhead released
Call Fire! The album was partially recorded in Kingston, Jamaica, and, along with the record and film
I Know I'm Not Alone, was component of a trilogy that was themed as documenting Franti's recent visits to Israel, Palestine, and Iraq.
