The musical revolution of Manu Chao.

I remember the first time I heard his name – and his music – in a dilapidated bar in a poor barrio of Bolivia. Maybe it was the altitude or the buzz of local beers, but he was all shrouded in mystery, going by different names, Mano Negra, La Radio Bemba, Mala Vida, Clandestino; singing reggae, rock, punk, and ballads, in Spanish, English, what sounded like French, and other languages I couldn’t decipher. All of the Leftist university students and poor sons knew him equally, like a friend, a shadowy revolutionary, or a patron saint. 

It was a time long before you could just jump online and Google him, and the internet was still widely in English at that point, but it was rumored he was Bolivian, no Ecuadorian, no from Spain. And then someone told me his name, right before the police shot tear gas inside the bar to clear out a fight, whipping the place into a rampage of bodies bursting toward the front door as people choked and screamed and crashing bottles. But his song never stopped playing, and even seemed to accelerate with the urgency of the moment, and it was perfect. Many Chao. I remembered that name. Manu Chao.

Manu Chao was everything to the masses of poor, frustrated youth, coming up at a time when they shook their fists at the injustice of the world. American ghettos have hip-hop, but South American barrios have Manu Chao. The burning streets of London had punk, but in France and Spain, they had Manu Chao, a generation of disenfranchised fire jugglers and carnival griots, wandering around South America smoking cheap drugs and living off their cunning. He was all things to all people, called the spirit of the Third World revolucion embodied in world music, the spirit of Bob Marley long after he was dead.

Now, nearly 15 years later, it’s easy for me to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Manu Chao, born José-Manuel Thomas Arthur Chao on June 21, 1961. Born in the Basque region of Spain of intellectuals who emigrated to Paris when he was young to avoid Franco’s dictatorship, even as Manu’s grandfather was sentenced to death. There, he thrived among the writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and Leftists that came around his parents.

He took to music at a young age, and as a teen played with the anti-establishment bands Los Carayos and Hot Pants in the Paris street scene. His main influence at the time were Britain’s The Clash and other punk bands, and the rebellious desperation and anarchism are themes and moods you’ll feel in many of his songs throughout his career. Their most famous demo, Mala Vida, released in 1984, became one of Chao’s signature songs, reworked many times over.

In 1987, he formed the band Mano Negra with friends., his cousin, and his brother Antoine, and they went on to considerable notoriety and underground buzz in Europe. Their version of Mala Vida went on to be a hit in Europe and later South America, enough to get them a contract with Virgin Records. Their first album, Patchanka, a slang term for “party,” brought them on tour all over the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, where they electrified young crowds with their universal messages and electric dynamism. They went on to visit South America with their Cargo Tour in 1992, when they inexplicably chose to play shows in a series of wild and dangerous port towns – where the rough, poor crowd lived; their people. They performed their shows to appreciative rabid crowds from a stage built into the hold of their tour ship, and later on an old train in Colombia. By 1994, the group was struggling and Antoine left his brother, and Manu was left with too many legal troubles to keep the rest together.

He embarked on a solo career in 1995 with his new live band, Radio Bemba. With Radio Bemba he toured South America for two years, keeping a musical diary of his travels and the sounds and happenings of the streets, a gypsy with an acoustic guitar getting in touch with the poor tribe of youth more than ever. The ensuing album, Clandestino, is a Latin roots classic. It became one of the best selling albums in French music history and shot him to international fame. The follow up album, "Proxima estacion esperanza,” or, “Next station: hope,” named after a stop on the Paris metro, was so good that it landed Manu Chao on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in 2001 and Rolling Stone to name it one of the 10 best albums of the year between.

Instead of cashing in on his newfound fame, Chao perhaps further stepped into the shadows of his nomadic and revolutionary Zapista roots, preferring to play live music festivals and benefit concerts worldwide. He played a free concert in Mexico City’s Zocalo Square and 100,000 people showed up. He played a benefit concert in the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, New York in 2006, then Lolapalooza in Chicago, Outsidelands in San Francisco, the Austin City Limits music fest, opened for the Sydney Festival in Australia, and performed for free at an anti-globalization concert to protest the G8 summit in Milan.

Always the innovator and iconoclast, Manu Chao released his passion project La Colifata in 2009, three hours of music recorded with patients from a psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires who run a radio station.

His catalog of music includes songs in in Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Galician, Arabic and Wolof bouncing between rock, reggae, ska, punk, Mexican ballads, French chanson, Iberoamerican salsa, and Algerian raï.

Check out some of his music with a quick search on YouTube. Then again, I far prefer the way I first heard about Manu Chao.