and why, praytell, would i have thought they would be?
Original Message: ----------------- From: Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 09:44:48 -0400 To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: global "antiglobalizer"
Wall Street Journal - September 10, 2001
Rock Star Protested Globalization in Genoa But Makes Music for Major Record Label
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NIMES, France -- Thanks to a global corporate giant, the face of one of the best-known antiglobalization protesters hangs over this southern French town.
There are Manu Chao billboards on the roads. A life-size Manu Chao towers at the entrance to the FNAC department store. And at electronics dealerships, TV sets can be seen broadcasting Manu Chao.
These aren't wanted posters. Mr. Chao, a Franco-Spanish rock star who's become the bard of the antiglobalization protest movement, is in town for a performance. For his recording company, EMI Group PLC, this is yet another opportunity to bolster sales of Mr. Chao's latest album, which has already sold 1.8 million copies since its release in June.
"I've always wanted to make popular music," Mr. Chao says. "I don't really want to cater to a ghetto."
So in the afternoon shadow of Nimes's Roman-era arena, the 40-year-old professional anticapitalist sat down for some back-slapping and a friendly chat with Laurent Chapeau, the managing director of Virgin France, the French unit of EMI and the label for which he has worked since 1989. Nearby, as musicians in Mr. Chao's band rehearsed for the evening concert, an executive from Vivendi-Universal waited his turn to discuss business deals. In the field downstairs, organizers of the sold-out event prepared stalls for vendors of Manu Chao T-shirts.
The relaxed ambience was worlds away from another concert just a month earlier -- in Genoa, the Italian city that turned into a battlefield between police and people protesting against the Group of Eight summit of world leaders.
There, on July 19, the night before the deadly riots erupted, thousands of protesters assembled in a thick cloud of marijuana to hear Mr. Chao sing and play guitar. His songs, an energetic mix of Hispanic, Caribbean and traditional rock styles, bear such titles as "Bongo Bong" and "Me Gustas Tu" -- which translates to "I Like You," and includes the line "Me gusta marijuana" in its long litany of things Mr. Chao likes.
Lining up next to video booths that repeatedly broadcast images of prior clashes in Seattle, Prague and Goteburg, Sweden, youths from all over Europe paid $4.60 each for entry, and got the words "Manu Chao" stamped on their wrists. Just before Mr. Chao burst on to the stage, which was erected on a beachfront parking lot, an announcer urged fans to wear helmets duringconfrontations with the police "because we don't want any casualties on our side."
Recommended Listening
Mr. Chao's unabashed support for the antiglobalization movement has made him a key figure in an otherwise amorphous, faceless group. He is a founding member of Attac, Europe's leading antiglobalization group, which seeks to create a just society through raising taxes and restricting financial markets. Politicians and the media scrutinize his pronouncements, hoping to decipher the movement's direction. Recently, the leader of Spain's main opposition party, Jose Luis Zapatero, urged conservative Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to listen more often to Mr. Chao's songs. Francesco Caruso, coordinator of protests against an upcoming North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Naples, says Mr. Chao's music is "fundamental" to the loosely structured protest group. "It makes people reason and brings them into our movement," Mr. Caruso says.
A wiry man with curly black hair who likes to wear baggy pants and T-shirts of South American soccer clubs, Mr. Chao is the first to recognize the contradiction between his lucre and his politics. Working for a multinational corporation, he says, disqualifies him from being a symbol of antiglobalization. "The dictatorship of the world economy, if it continues, will mean suicide for all of us," he says. "I'm just trying to help where I can -- though it's true that I do have a lot more means to do so than other people."
As for the Virgin connection, it's turned into a complicated love-hate affair. Sure, transnational corporations are evil, Mr. Chao says, but Virgin has also allowed him to reach millions of people. He says he is funneling some of the proceeds from his latest album -- "Proxima Estacion: Esperanza," which sells for about $18 in Europe -- to the antiglobalization campaign. Mr. Chao declined to specify how much and to which groups he has sent money.
The album, whose title translates to "Next Station: Hope" -- "Hope" being the name of a real subway station in Madrid -- is being marketed globally, ringing up two-thirds of its sales outside France, where Mr. Chao launched his musical career. Its popularity is helped by its simple, backpacker-friendly lyrics in Spanish, French and English that steer clear of overt propaganda. This summer, "Me Gustas Tu" dominated Europe's radio waves and music TV channels.
While still merely a blip on the mainstream U.S. music scene, the album this summer made it to the No. 8 spot on the Latin chart, as compiled by Billboard magazine. One song from a previous album, "Bongo Bong," which begins "Mama was queen of the mambo," was featured in last year's Madonna movie, "The Next Best Thing."
As the artist himself sees it, working for a global corporation can be a kind of undercover revolutionary mission. "From the outside, all the multinationals look like a fortress," Mr. Chao says. "But now I know the beast, I know where they are strong, where they are weak, and where one can grab them by the testicles." As a nonchalant Virgin spokeswoman nearby took a sip of bottled water, the singer rushed to add that there are also "great guys" and "buddies" of his within the company.
Unusual Demands
The positive feelings, at least, are mutual. Virgin France's Mr. Chapeau says Mr. Chao is one of the label's five top-selling artists. In 1989, when the relationship began, Mr. Chao belonged to an already-popular band, Mano Negra. His success means Virgin can afford to tolerate his demands for unusual control over how his music is advertised and sold, Mr. Chapeau says.
Bowing to Mr. Chao's alternative tastes, Mr. Chapeau says Virgin has shelved plans to run television commercials for the new album, a decision that is "very rare" in the TV-dependent music business. Instead of plastering the Paris subway with traditional billboard ads, Virgin agreed to rent an entire subway station, Menilmontant, in the multiethnic Paris district where Mr. Chao grew up, transforming it into an art show dedicated to the album.
Mr. Chao's star status allows him to dictate other conditions to the company. His current concert tour is scheduled to end after only six months, even though Virgin wanted him to extend it for at least another year, and to tour the U.S. (His only recent U.S. performance was a show in New York's Central Park in July.) Then there's the money: The singer takes between 20% and 30% of the album's revenue, Mr. Chapeau says -- an unusually generous split.
Indeed, despite the pro-tax stance of his antiglobalization group, Attac, Mr. Chao sometimes sounds like a more typical, conservative millionaire. "The tax [collectors] are the biggest piracy group out there," he complains.
The singer, although proud of his lucrative contract, says he's not interested in money anymore. Unlike many artists, he says he's pleased that his music is pirated around the world. Mr. Chao estimates that in Mexico, seven fake CDs of his album are sold for every genuine one. "When I'm on a beach in Italy or Spain, and I see this guy from Senegal peddling my disks -- well, it's really cool," Mr. Chao says. "It may be different for small, struggling bands, but for the established ones like ours, complaining about piracy is simply out of place."
Mr. Chao's theory is that the recording companies themselves generate piracy by overpricing CDs as they seek unfair profits. He once called Virgin to complain that a store was selling his records at too high a price, Mr. Chapeau says. The store later lowered the price, saying it had made a mistake.
Paper Airplanes
As the Nimes concert was about to begin, French youths huddled at the entrance to the arena, looking for ticket scalpers. Taking advantage of the opportunity, several Attac volunteers busily handed out propaganda material to potential converts. The leaflets, some of which ended up as paper airplanes, praised Mr. Chao's fight for an "equitable, solidarity-driven and social world," and posed the question, "Where is democracy when the sales of just one company, TotalFinaElf, equal the GNP of a country like Portugal?"
Inside the arena, it was party time. The show kicked off with a talking clock that told time in communist bastions such as Havana and Pyongyang, North Korea. As dancing fans lit up marijuana cigarettes and spilled beer, a hypnotic mishmash of reggae, ska, punk-rock and Latin American-folk sounds pulsed from the stage.
The music reflected the several years that Mr. Chao spent traveling across Latin America, picking up local tunes and performing at free concerts in remote areas controlled by some of the region's left-wing guerrillas. (Mr. Chao's father, Ramon, an exile from Franco's Spain who now heads the Spanish and Portuguese services of Radio France International, wrote a 242-page book about part of his son's journey.)
As the concert went on, one of the most frequently used nouns onstage was "marijuana," from the song "Marijuana Boogie" -- featuring the refrain, "Como te quiero, marijuana," or "How much I love you, marijuana" -- to a bilingual incantation of "Welcome to Tijuana, tequila, sex and marijuana," to simply "Marijuana, legalize it!"
The other political idea didn't emerge until halfway through the performance. The singer and his band suddenly stood still in a soldierlike pose, as the loudspeakers broadcast a crackling recording of a revolutionary speech by Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of Zapatista guerrillas in Mexico's Chiapas province. When the speech ended, Mr. Chao raised his right fist in a revolutionary salute. Some in the audience followed suit. Many others didn't even know the name Subcomandante Marcos, let alone understand a political monologue in a foreign language.
'I Like Manu's Music'
"Zapatista who?" wondered Caroline Roux, an 18-year-old student, after the concert. "I like Manu's music a lot, but his politics, I don't even know what they are. I guess there was a Che Guevara T-shirt on stage, so he must be Communist, right?"
Not everyone is so blase. A few weeks before the Genoa concert, an Italian police squad descended on Virgin's office in Milan, seeking evidence that Mr. Chao's music encourages the drug trade. Things weren't helped by Mr. Chao's interview with a French Communist newspaper, "L'Humanite," in which he said he has friends among the Black Bloc, the violent anarchist group behind most of the devastation at recent international gatherings. Following these comments, some Italian officials called for a ban on Mr. Chao's Aug. 31 concert in Naples, saying his performances instigate rioters. (The concert had to be cut short for security reasons -- albeit of a meteorological kind, as heavy rain threatened to flood the stage.)
Before the Genoa summit, Italian authorities tried to negotiate security arrangements with Mr. Chao -- addressing the proposal to him as a representative of "nonviolent protesters" -- but he rebuffed them. "I don't accept being labeled as a pacifist, and especially not so by the Italian minister of the interior," he says. During the summit, police raided the area where his band was staying and searched their belongings but made no arrests.
"Manu Chao's is a deviant message," says Paolo Varesi, head of Rinnovamento Sindacale, an Italian police officers' union. "It can be interpreted as an appeal to engage in warfare."
As to the Black Bloc, Mr. Chao says he has "one or two" friends in the group. He says he attended one of its training camps but didn't see anyone preparing Molotov cocktails or planning violent attacks.
Such statements don't appear to trouble the folks at Virgin. "Oh, we're not going to meddle with his political views," says Mr. Chapeau. On the subject of Mr. Chao's open praise of drugs, he says: "You know, after Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones and Bob Marley, this really hasn't been controversial for the past 40 years."
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MERRY BLUES
So many nites With your shadow in my bed. So many nites Baby you whisper in my head. So many nites Sing along the Merry Blues. So many nites. I told you once. I told you twice. The Merry blues The Merry blues
I can not sleep Haunted by your pretty body I can not sleep I want the world set on fire So many nites Can't keep from goin down loose ...
I told you once. I told you twice. The Merry blues The Merry blues
Hello nadina do you do do do do do I feel so happy when I see see see see you You make me sing a like a douba doubade I know you like it like a zoumbou zoumboue
Hello nadina do you do do do do do I feel the moody like to picky picky you I know you like it like a rub a dub stylee I know you like a marijuana smokey
So many nites Sing along the Merry Blues. So many nites Can't keep from goin' down loose. The Merry Blues.
EL DORADO
What happened, what happened? The country boy has been planting What happened, what happened? The police have arrived What happened, what happened? The landless die What happened, what happened? Massacre not El Dorado
What happened, what happened? Globo reported What happened, what happened? The politician spoke What happened, what happened? and nothing happened What happened, what happened? Massacre not El Dorado
What happened, what happened? Radio Bamba reported.
LA PRIMAVERA (SPRING)
What time is it my heart? What time is it my heart? What time is it my heart? What time is it my heart?
What time is it in England? What time is it in Gibraltar? What time is it over there in Fisterra? What time is it hey Bye bye Bom? What time is an entire life? What time is it in Japan? What time is it in Mozambique? What time is it in Washington? They fooled us Bye bye Bom! They fooled us with Spring! They fooled us Bye bye Bom!
BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA ... BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA ... BOMBALA BOMBALA BOMBALA ...
What time is it my heart?
DENIA
Poor Algeria Life beats in the rhythm of your dismay Life itself is a lie My heart aches to watch you Poor Algeria Life through your eyes Life as lie Life swarming with police Life soaked with mothers'tears Life racked with madness Poor Algeria
Who really cares in America about what's happening in Algeria? Who really knows??
ME GUSTAS TU (I LIKE YOU)
I like airplanes, I like you I like to fly, I like you. I like the morning, I like the wind, I like you. I like dreaming, I like you. I like the sea, I like you.
What am I going to do I don't know What am I going to do I don't know anymore What am I going to do I am lost What times these are, my heart.
I like motorcycles, I like you I like to run, I like you I like the rain, I like you. I like coming back, I like you. I like marijuana, I like you. I like Colombian, I like you. I like the mountains, I like you. I like the night, I like you.
What am I going to do I don't know What am I going to do I don't know anymore What am I going to do I am lost What times these are, my heart.
I like supper, I like you. I like the neighbor, I like you. I like your cooking, I like you. I like to flirt, I like you. I like guitar, I like you. I like regaee, I like you.
What am I going to do I don't know What am I going to do I don't know anymore What am I going to do I am lost What times these are, my heart. I like cinnamon, I like you. I like fire, I like you. I like to swing, I like you. I like la Coruña, I like you. I like Malasaña, I like you. I like la Castaña, I like you. I like Guatemala, I like you.
What am I going to do I don't know What am I going to do I don't know anymore What am I going to do I am lost What times these are, my heart.
MR BOBBY
Sometimes I dream about reality Sometimes I feel so gone Sometimes I dream about a wild wild world Sometimes I feel so lonesome
HEY Bobby Marley. Sing Someting good to me This world go crazy... It's an emergency...
Tonight I dream about fraternity Sometimes I say : One day ! One day my dreams will be reality... Like Bobby said... to me...
HEY Bobby Marley. Sing Someting good to me This world go crazy... It's an emergency...
HEY Bobby Marley. Sing Someting good to me This world go crazy ... It's an emergency ...
HEY Bobby Marley. Sing Someting good to me This world go crazy ... It's an emergency ...
HEY Bobby Marley. Sing Someting good to me This world go crazy ... It's an emergency ... etc.
Tonight I watch through my window ... And I can't see no light Tonight I watch through my window ... And I can't see no rights ...
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