Michael Franti & Spearhead Music and Tickets

About Michael Franti & Spearhead

Since his days as a member of avant-garde group the Beatnigs while in his early twenties, Michael Franti became an angry young rapper with a political, socially conscious bent in his next group, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. With his later group Spearhead, he channeled his social unease and desire for change and merged them with his love for music, particularly old-school R&B, soul, reggae and hip-hop.

Spearhead debuted with the critically acclaimed Home in 1990. The album contained the 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. Released in 1997, Chocolate Supa Highway was not as pop-friendly as Home, but neither did its themes of kidnappings and police brutality lend themselves to such overt accessibility. Its mixture of harsher musical styles — techno, rock, and funk — was a step forward for Franti as his world view broadened and deepened. In 2001, Franti released Stay Human. In it he expressed his anger at the system, his advocacy of love, and his belief in freedom through individuality and self-expression 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 eloquence…Read more @ Apple Music