Michael Franti & Spearhead – Yell Fire!

At the close of Yell Fire! and the song “Is Love Enough”, just before the final strum of an acoustic guitar fades away, Michael Franti says, “Believe in coexistence.”

It’s not just a pretty thought. Franti and his band Spearhead walk the walk not only literally — on a recent trip to the Middle East, they met with U.S. troops, Palestinians, Israelis and Iraqis, an experience documented on the DVD I Know I’m Not Alone — but sonically as well. The music on Yell Fire! fuses reggae, guitar rock, Latin dance rhythms, fierce rap lyrics, sweet pop melodies and much more into a kind of world music that deserves the name.

“When I went to Iraq,” Franti told USA Today recently, “I thought I’d come back with a whole notebook of stop-the-war protest songs, but what I found from every person I met over there was that they wanted to hear songs that got them dancing or tender songs about a person they loved.” Longtime Spearhead fans (this is the group’s fifth album) already know this wasn’t exactly a lesson Franti needed to learn. Indeed, his work has long been marked by its refusal to believe great art should segregate people from politics.

“Hello Bonjour”, to cite a representative example, features rhythm provided by famed Jamaican drum-and-bass team Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. Isn’t just agitprop; it’s a sing-along anthem and a dance-floor mover with an emotionally gripping lyric, and “a sound you can shake your soul to.”

The title track begins with an electric guitar that sounds so pissed, it’s almost choking on its own strangled rage. But the drums and bass enter soon enough — they’re pissed too, but there’s power in numbers. Franti begins to sound the alarm — about military torture and corporate corruption, about killers such as poverty and war, about everything that dominates our news cycles of late — except this is a report you can mosh to, dance to, sing along to. All the while, it insists that even though change is painful and inevitable, the general shape of that change is always ours for the creating.

“Yell Fire!” Franti shouts. And, later, “I Know I’m Not Alone”. And, “Time To Go Home”. I wonder, can he get a witness?