An interview with Manu Chao.

By Josh Kun

THE LAST TIME I sat down to talk with Manu Chao, the French son of Spanish refugees, he confessed to feeling "lost in the 20th century." He had just finished his first solo album, Clandestino, an extraordinary song cycle of minimalist lullabies inspired by a world transformed through immigration and exile, which within months would sell more than two million copies internationally and establish Chao as globalization's most eloquent voice of protest.

From 1987 to 1994 Chao led the band Mano Negra, a motley crew of polyglot politicos who, over the course of six unruly albums – including their landmark Latin American swan song Casa Babylon – barreled through rock, salsa, rai, reggae, and cowpunk with the abandon of barroom anarchists. When the band disintegrated, Chao hit the road and recorded Clandestino while traveling across Europe and Latin America with his eight-track. It bubbled with a continuous collage of songs in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English that drew a map of linked underbelly experience between Gibraltar and Tijuana, between the ghettos of Paris and the jungles of Chiapas. His travels landed him in collaborations with like-minded musicians in Tijuana (Tijuana No, Mexican Jumping Frijoles), Argentina (Todos Tus Muertos), France (Anouk, Color Humano), and Spain (Tonino Carotone, Negu Gorriak, Amparanoia, Joaquin Sabina).

His new album, Próxima estación: esperanza, recycles some of Clandestino's melodies and rhythms but creates something altogether different: a celebration of the joys and pleasures needed to survive the politics of pain and violence. Where Clandestino's patron saint was Subcomandante Marcos, Próxima bows to Bob Marley. With its glistening horns and nearly ceaseless smiling bounce, Próxima harks back to Chao's Mano Negra days; it's a tempered postcolonial patchanka party that blows up European conservatism from the inside-out. Since finishing Próxima, Chao has become a temporary settler in Barcelona: he has an address, a bed, and a studio that doesn't fit in his backpack.

Bay Guardian: During Clandestino, you were very much a migrant. Now you are living in one place. Does this record reflect more of a settler's mind-set?

Manu Chao: For the last three years the biggest change in my life has been that I now have an apartment. For seven years I had been living without an apartment and just traveling. Now my apartment is in Barcelona, and I have my neighborhood there. What it allows me to do is to be more organized. When you're traveling all over the world, it's more difficult to bring your studio. But I'm still always traveling a lot. This album was recorded and finished a year and a half ago. It was recorded the same way as Clandestino, with my eight-track and me just traveling around. Some are songs that were not on Clandestino because there wasn't any space, like "Mi vida." I never stop to make an album and record it. I'm always recording. Both albums were recorded in the same way with the same kind of production. It's me and my friend Renaud Letang. It's a record made by two people.

BG: But this record sounds bigger than Clandestino. There are horns. There's more of the old Mano Negra patchanka sound.

MC: Yeah. It's more up-tempo. Clandestino was really a kind of blues album. This one is more patchanguero. And it's because of the horns.

BG: You also sound happier here. Some of the songs are just lighter emotionally, like "Papito."

MC: Yeah. It's because we want to change. Próxima estación is the little sister of Clandestino, but she's come out much happier.

BG: And more hopeful, which was what was absent on Clandestino. The last time we heard from you, you were "lost in the 20th century," you were "waiting for the last wave" to wash you away. Where does this new hope come from?

MC: My best teacher of hope has been the third world. In South America you learn a lot about hope. Where you see the people with the most hope in the world are the people who are in the worst situations. In the first world sometimes we lose this kind of hope. We hope for things that are more general, less precise. In South America or in Africa, every morning when they wake up, they need hope. In the third world, when you are faced with a bad situation, there is not time for depression. If you're depressed, you die. You need hope every morning when you wake up to feed your children, to make a living. It's an everyday hope. It's the hope you need to survive. So they have a sense of hope that is more evident than ours in the first world.

BG: Even though you are European by birth, I have always thought of you as a sort of ex-European, as a voice of the part of Europe that Europe has never wanted to claim.

MC: Europe is a strange place. I'm European. I was born in France and raised in France and Spain. I cannot hide that, and I do not want to hide that. Europe is an old lady. One day I was talking with a guy from Chiapas, we met in Paris, and we were talking about Mexico, and he said, "Man, come to Mexico, things are moving, new things." So I asked him, "How do you see Europe?," and the guy said, "Sorry, but it's like a rusty boat. South America is like a little speed boat, but Europe is like an old rusty boat." Almost like a kind of Titanic! That's the difference: Europe is old; the people are old.

BG: If Europe's the Titanic, then you're the music playing as it sinks.

MC: There are two Europes. There is the economic Europe and the other Europe that economic Europe tries to kill. The actual Europe is so different from the Europe they try to create. A good example is in France, where for years there were racist and nationalist parties coming out and earning like 40 percent of the vote and wanting to close Europe, with big walls, so Africa cannot come anymore, so the Turks cannot come into Germany, to close everything. When France won the World Cup, they were all Africans. France was so proud to win the World Cup, but all the people on the team were exactly the kind of people that Europe doesn't want anymore. After the World Cup the racist parties in France fell down. People were so proud to win the World Cup but it was all black people. So maybe they're not so proud. But they help the country. They bring us money. Everybody in the world knows France is the champion. But all black people! From North Africa, places that are not French.

BG: Can you talk a little about your songwriting process? It seems to me that more and more you're really writing songs that are fragments of a larger whole, like short chapters in an ongoing novel.

MC: My process is to not have process. Every song is a new adventure. My process is to be recording at all times and to have no concept of what I am doing. That's what saves me. If you go to record an album and you have two months in the studio, you need to have a concept; you need to know what you're gonna do. If you're just traveling with an eight-track, you just record when you want to record, when there is an idea. What I love about my job is that I get to work with coincidence. I'm not the boss. The boss is the moment. My job is to catch that moment, that instant. It's a difficult job. I'm still learning how to do it. I'm looking for professors for that because they never taught us that in school. If you have a nice idea at five in the morning, tomorrow is gonna be too late. Maybe you'll just change a comma or something, but it's finished, it's out. My eight-track allows me to work when it's hot. The idea is there, I record it, it's in the moment. I write the lyrics in the moment, I record them, it's really fresh. I love to work like that. I really learned to work like this on Casa Babylon. The real border between what I'm doing now and what I was doing with Mano Negra came before Casa Babylon. That was the same kind of recording. There was no band. Mano Negra had split up. We were just in a studio somewhere and said, "Let's see what happens."

BG: On Próxima estación, like on Clandestino, you repeat themes and melodies, recycle rhythm tracks and even lyrics. "Calavera no llora," one of my favorite lines from your song "Bienvenido a Tijuana," even shows up here.

MC: I call those my little dwarfs, my little sounds, my little universe. A lot of it has to do, again, with coincidence. There is a song on the album sung by Valeria ("Homens"). She's from Rio de Janeiro. She's a capoerista there, and she has a little hip-hop band. I used to live with this family there. It was my little town, my little place. She was rehearsing with her band, and I was working with my eight-track, and they were not happy with their rhythm, so I had the "Bongo Bong" rhythm with me, and I said, "Try it with that." And they were happy, so we recorded it, in that moment.

BG: You mentioned Chiapas earlier, and clearly a lot has happened in Chiapas since Clandestino was released. Is any of Próxima's hope also hope for what changes might be happening with Chiapas with the Fox presidency?

MC: These guys in Chiapas always give me hope. They are a little light on this planet that I believe in, and there are not too many things left to believe in. The message from Chiapas, I always understood it, has always been so pure. And after so many years it is still pure. That's incredible. I really believe that what happened in Chiapas was the precursor of what happened in Seattle, of this kind of protest all over the world, this protest against globalization. And what amazes me is how fresh they still are. They haven't changed. I really believe in them. I try to help them, but I don't think I help them enough. In December of last year, we played there, in La Realidad, in San Cristobal, we met Marcos; we met with la Subcomandancia. I let them know how much I believe in them. Because it's so not so often you really believe in something and you really get in the kitchen. Usually you are deceived. That happened to me back when I was a big fan of rock and roll bands. I was ready to give my life to them, but when I became more well known and had the opportunity to meet them, 80 percent of the time I was deceived. When I'm really happy is when I'm in places like Chiapas, when I'm not deceived. It confirmed that they are following the good path.

BG: Marcos has always said that much of the EZLN's goal is to restore truth to Mexico, to expose the lies of Mexico. On Clandestino you sang, "Everything in this world is a lie," and you've been organizing a series of concerts you call "Festival of Lies." Isn't their commitment to truth, their protest against the lies of globalization, also what attracts you to them?

MC: I really appreciate their way of talking and that whole discourse. They say, "We are a movement, and all we want is to disappear. Our aim is to disappear, when nobody needs us anymore." They don't fight for power; they don't fight for fame. They fight for the dignity of so many communities. They fight for the day they can disappear, when nobody needs to hear what they have to say.

BG: The name of the touring band you've put together since recording Próxima estación, Radio Bemba, means "word of mouth" or "rumor." Is there more truth in what gets passed along mouth to mouth? Is there more truth in this unofficial, oral communication?

MC: No. Don't trust us, because we're lost. I'm still lost. I'm still looking for any solutions. I'm still lost in the century. Don't believe the hype. [Laughs] I talk about this with my friends all the time. In South America it's amazing how many people come to us looking for answers. It's our tradition to do press conferences before every show, but press conferences not just for press, for anyone who wants to come and talk. But everywhere the questions were 10 percent musical and 90 percent political or social. It's like, I'm a musician. That's the job I've chosen in my life. I want to be a musician. This kind of political thing, political responsibility, I didn't choose it. It's there, and I'm gonna take it. But it's very difficult because the border between giving your ideas and demagogy is really thin. That's why maybe on Próxima there are less politics. Because I don't want to make a living on that. If people ask for my ideas, I give them. But we live in a world where rebellion is such a weapon of marketing that now I want to be careful. It would be really easy for me to make an album that was full of political things. But that would stink.

BG: But for music to be political you don't have to shout "Viva Zapata." Pleasure can be political too.

MC: That's what I'm proud of about Clandestino. It's not a political album. There was just one political thing on it: Marcos and the EZLN. It was just a political affirmation, nothing more. What I always say is that the only revolution I can handle is my own revolution. My revolution is to try to radiate positive vibrations everywhere I go and give hope to people and give good energy to people and to have my kitchen clean. That's the only revolution I believe in. When they ask me about solutions, I say the only solution that I have is to have my own kitchen clean. If everyone would do the same, there would be a huge revolution, and it would be a wonderful revolution, because it wouldn't be recuperable. My job is to clean my kitchen. Your job is to clean your kitchen. I believe in that.

BG: Earlier this year I saw you play in Tijuana and then the next day in Los Angeles. When you played L.A., to a crowd that was as much industry as it was fans, your energy was very different from the T.J. show, where the crowd embraced you with a fever and intensity that I had never seen before.

MC: I still have that vision of the guy standing on a piece of cardboard on top of the audience. It was incredible. They were totally different shows. Most of all because the place in Tijuana was messy. It was a war. Because of the sound. You could not work on the sound so you had to work on the energy. The L.A. place was so different. All we were thinking about was the sound and getting the sound right. We used to try to have good sound in Tijuana, but now it's like, forget it. It's impossible. So let's just have a good show and explode.

BG: In Tijuana you were food. In L.A. you were entertainment.

MC: I respect both. I'm a musician. I'm an entertainer. That's my job.

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