You Can't Bomb the World Into Peace,,,,,

We Don’t Stop

Michael Franti Talks Peace, Love and Music

Interview by Gregory Dicum from Common Ground

If the contemporary struggle for a better world has a soundtrack, it surely features the music of Michael Franti. To Franti, music and activism are one and the same — his albums, the last three of which have sold over 100,000 copies combined, are truth-telling manifestos you can dance to. While touring constantly, he tirelessly promotes peace, sustainability and human rights. His annual Power to the Peaceful festival raises money for different causes each year — from Mumia Abul Jamal’s legal case to bringing American troops home from Iraq. Last year, 60,000 people attended in San Francisco and 4,000 in São Paulo, Brazil. He has been named an Ambassador of Peace by the World Health Organization, and performs benefit concerts for Iraq Veterans Against the War, grassroots workers in New Orleans, as well as free concerts in prisons. In his personal life he is a vegan and yogi, and if you find yourself behind his hybrid or his biodiesel tour bus, follow him: he’ll pay your bridge toll. Last month we visited Franti in his San Francisco studio as he was putting the finishing touches on his new release, “All Rebel Rockers,” due out in September.

Gregory Dicum: Emma Goldman was famously paraphrased “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Whenever I hear that, I think of you.

Michael Franti: If at the end of the political upheaval and change, we’re all sitting around wearing armbands and having meetings and nobody’s having any fun, then what was the point? That’s where I come in. I love to make people dance, and what I’ve seen is in the places where people have been hit the hardest, that’s the place they’re most eager to dance.

GD: Your music is danceable and catchy and often very happy, but a lot of your lyrics are really heavy.

MF: Well, I always want people to rise above whatever they’re going through. And in music, the best way to do that is through the beat. Through rhythm we access parts of our body and emotions we never knew existed.

If you can invest meaning into the lyrics, then once people say, “Oh, I like that beat. And oh, God, that melody’s kind of catchy” — then they spend more time with the music and eventually find the lyrics.

GD: It’s pretty amazing: you can be in here in your studio working on some lyrics, and the next thing you know, you see them on a placard somewhere. What does that feel like?

MF: It feels satisfying when someone takes on something I’ve said as part of their own life — that it means so much to them they’re going to go out and put it on a poster or wear it on their t-shirt. Or even tattoo it on their skin! It’s a humbling thing.

But I always feel like it’s just part of the flow. I don’t ever feel like anything I write comes just from my imagination. It always comes from an experience or maybe a phrase I heard somebody say on the bus — two words you’d never imagine would go well together. And then I might add something or elaborate to make it make sense in a song.

GD: The classic is “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace.” How did that come about?

MF: Well, it was 2001, the week of September 11th. And in San Francisco, this bastion of progressive values, there were cafés that had their windows broken because they were owned by Arab families. So we decided to put a concert on declaring San Francisco a hate-free zone.

And as we were planning, there was a woman, Pam Africa, speaking at this circle we had. She started ranting, saying, “They’re going to bomb Afghanistan, and they’re going to bomb Iraq. And they’re going to bomb, and they can bomb, and they can keep bombing.”

And I just thought in my head, “Yeah, but you can’t bomb the world into peace.”

GD: A lot of your lyrics are hopeful, which is inspiring because they’re often about pretty grim situations. How do you maintain that perspective?

MF: Yoga. That’s the short answer. The long answer is I have a lot of days where I’m really bummed out. Just like anybody else, I feel frustrated.

But I’ve found music and yoga, and the two of them, together especially, are incredible medicine. They’ve both helped me in so many ways to stay on target. There was a while when I was touring a lot and I felt physically rundown. Emotionally alone, really. And I found yoga.

It was that same week, actually, the week of September 11, 2001. It came to me at a time when I really needed to hear that there is a philosophy and a history of peace work beyond just my years — dating back thousands of years. I go to class every day in different cities, and the community of yogis I meet in every town around the world alters my life. It’s given me the endurance to find ease of heart when things get rough.

GD: What came first — your peace work or your music?

MF: Well, I was born to a mother who’s Irish, French and German and a father who’s African and Native American. And my mother gave me up for adoption because she felt her family would never accept a brown baby. I was raised in a family with two Finnish parents who had three kids of their own, and they adopted me and another black son. My whole life, I felt I was kind of the underdog or the outsider, even in my own family. So I’ve always identified with people who were that way. And really, what I found is that all of us feel that way at times.

My musical experience started from wanting to speak up for the underdog. I started writing poetry in college, and then I started my first band, The Beatnigs, and it was really a kind of conscious poetry.

GD: Plenty of musicians have a body of musical work that is totally separate from their political work, which is a lot of people’s experience in life: it can be hard to embody our values in all of our work. But you’ve managed to pull it off.

MF: Yeah, I’ve done it. And I kind of went the opposite direction, because when I first started writing, my work was really political and gradually it’s become more personal. I feel like the two now are the same thing. Because ultimately, I want people to go away from a concert feeling connected to each other. When you really connect, it’s not on an analytical level. It’s not like a political discussion or an economic discussion; it’s a feeling. When I write songs, I aim for that. And I found the more I invest personally into the song, the more easily people connect.

GD: In the film I Know I’m Not Alone, about your experiences in Iraq and Palestine, there are these amazing scenes in which you are holding a guitar and you’re up against a guy holding a gun. Were you consciously juxtaposing the two things?

MF: No, I was just scared shitless. I was really scared. And strumming the guitar was kind of like petting your cat. That’s how it is for me when I’m at home: it relaxes and calms me. But hearing the chords also calms other people. When things got really tense, I’d start strumming the guitar and it made everybody talk quieter. It’s not my music — it’s the gift of music God has given us.

GD: It seems like it opens doors too; you were able to just walk into situations you would never have been able to without the guitar.

MF: Yeah. And it’s still that way everywhere I go, especially in foreign countries. I go into a village somewhere, and as soon as you start playing the guitar, people are welcoming to you and responding to you. That’s why I started to play the guitar. I’ve only played for about five or six years out of the 20 years I’ve been making music. It came on a trip to Cuba: I was sitting down at dinner, and all these musicians were passing a guitar around the table — followed by cigars and a bottle of Cuban rum — and everybody’s singing wonderful boleros off into the moonlight. Even though I couldn’t understand the words, I got this incredible feeling, and I was like, “I’ve got to learn… that.”

GD: I think “We Don’t Stop” is the best protest song of the current generation, because it encapsulates the dynamic tension between beauty and ugliness we’re all living all the time. But when I think of the actions we’ve been taking, it’s not actually affecting the reality where the bombs are dropping every day. Do you ever get that feeling?

MF: Sometimes I do, but I remember when I came back from Iraq in June of 2004, the nation was polling 80 percent in support of the war. We were up against Fox and CNN, and all we had were some little signs. But people went and talked about it at their dinner tables, at their water coolers at work, and independent filmmakers and journalists made the works that we did, songwriters wrote the songs, and soldiers came back and told the stories, and because of that, now the world — and this country — are totally against the war in Iraq. And my hope is that not only are they against the war, but that they’d be opposed to war, period. And not just opposed to war, but in support of finding solutions to make life more livable for people so we don’t come to war.

GD: What aspect of your work contributing to that change means the most to you, personally?

MF: I receive letters from people describing how what I give has encouraged them to give. So it becomes this exponential web. I believe it’s not going to take the efforts of one leader, one president or one hero to change the direction of the world. It’s going to take all six billion people on this Earth. So if we can be people who inspire others, and they inspire others, then we’ll see the change we want.

Head over to Soundtrack for Change to stream the cross cultural, booty shakin’ track “Hello Bonjour” from Franti’s “Yell Fire!” Album!