Manu Chao - Portrait of an Illegal Immigrant

He was the voice of Mano Negra for seven years, standard-bearers of Latin rock, and then with his solo debut Clandestino — over four million copies sold — he won over audiences all over the world. A success that was half musical, half political, given that Manu Chao also became one of the icons for the youth of the squats and the "people of Seattle". His story, however, has always shown an underlying continuity and consistency.

Starting in 1987, Manu Chao - born Jose Manuel Arturo Chao Ortega - became, with Mano Negra, a pivotal outfit on the French alternative scene of the 1990s shared with brothers, cousins and other musicians from the Paris scene, the founding father, at least on a European level, of what we now call latin alternative. While in South America the genre's leading lights were Argentina's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs and Mexico's Maldita Vecindad y Los Hijos Del Quinto Patio, the main European reference point for latin alternative was indeed Mano Negra, mirrored by their rivals Negresses Vertes. Their incendiary blend of rock, French chanson, African rhythms, flamenco, ska, salsa, reggae and blues is still referred to today as patchanka, in honour of their debut album ("Patchanka", 1988). That said, it wasn't their most significant work - that would arrive only a year later under the title "Puta's Fever".
After two more albums, constant line-up changes and even a change of name to Radio Bemba (effectively a precursor to the solo Manu Chao project), around 1997 Mano Negra disbanded and their frontman temporarily withdrew from public life to wander between Latin America and Africa.

But to better understand Manu Chao's choices and the ideologies he would remain forever tied to, it's essential to take a further, much bigger leap backwards - to a time well before Mano Negra's revolutionary, insurrectionary inventions, back to his childhood.
Manu Chao's parents, Galician journalist Ramon Chao and Basque CNRS researcher Felisa Ortega, left Spain for Paris due to their fierce opposition to Franco's dictatorship. Born in 1961, the musician grew up in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, in a house that resembled a commune, where his parents hosted numerous exiled artists and dissidents from various South American dictatorships.
The young Manu Chao thus found himself surrounded by art, music and a sense of rebellion. Instead of fairy tales, his imagination was populated by stories of oppression and struggle, of suffering, but always infused with an unstoppable sense of redemption and hope. All traits that are plainly audible in even a single line or chord of "Clandestino". Thanks to his family background and his travels, Chao would go on to learn, alongside French, English, Spanish and Galician, also Arabic, Portuguese, Italian and Wolof (the language of the Senegalese people of the same name). He often mixes all these tongues, sometimes even within a single song, proving himself a true polyglot minstrel, a standard-bearer for a method with no linguistic or genre borders.

At the twilight of the twentieth century, in the midst of Pre-Millennium Tension, to borrow Tricky's phrase, Manu Chao became the barricade-storming champion of an antagonist generation that rejected the consumerist laws of globalisation and the rapacious exploitation that multinational corporations inflicted on the peoples of the Third World. Paradoxically, the very man who embodied multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, with his polyglot, stateless approach, ended up becoming the symbol of those who wanted to defend borders and the identity roots of peoples and their lands. This has nothing whatsoever to do with today's sovereigntism, of course, but back then the political battleground was positioned along different coordinates, and the enemy wasn't Trump but the International Monetary Fund, and secondarily the European Union itself, or at least the ECB and the financial institutions to which it appeared submissively beholden.
By singing about clandestine existence as a state of the soul (and as a condition of perpetual estrangement for the "invisible", those who live outside the social and economic logic of turbo-capitalist Western society), Manu Chao became the bard of an alternative vision of the globalised world, understood as a place of welcome and inclusion, where commercial dynamics are fair and supportive, defending territories and workers' rights. Cultural diversity as an antidote to global conformism and its logic of subjugation. A utopia, in short, not so far removed from that of the Age of Aquarius, and as such destined to fade quickly. For a moment, though, those delicate melodic fragrances and those slogan-like lyrics truly conveyed the sense of a revolution with a smile, made of resistance and hope. His vocabulary is the aforementioned patchanka, a hybrid mongrel style marked by a blend of colours, sounds, styles, languages, music and traditions - one with a precedent in The Clash's "Sandinista".
Another paradox is that his debut solo album - clandestine in name and in fact - came out with virtually no promotion, like a kind of silent swan song for the French-Spanish singer, yet went on to become a bestseller with 5 million copies sold and the launchpad for a (long) solo career that continues to this day, even if it never again reached these heights.

The curtain rises on Clandestino (1998) over a chaotic, anonymous, indistinct metropolis: it could be Paris as much as New York or Mexico City. It's "la grande Babylon" where the "Clandestino" of the title track has lost himself ("perdido en el corazón") and lives invisibly, resigned to his solitary, outlaw fate with no chance of redemption ("Solo voy con mi pena, sola va mi condena/ Correr es mi destino para burlar la ley"). Over a bare acoustic guitar, propelled by a reggae-tinged rhythm, Manu Chao murmurs in a hushed tone, embodying the voice of someone living in the shadows. A glimpse of illegal immigration brutally denied. Lines like "Soy una raya en el mar" ("I'm a line in the sea") or "Clandestino por no llevar papel" ("Clandestine for having no papers") condense the sense of rootlessness and the anxiety of denied belonging. The melodic repetition becomes hypnotic, symbolising an endless condition. "Clandestino" is a bittersweet ballad, as achingly beautiful in its sound as it is unflinching in its lyrics, with that list of non-EU nationalities relegated to the margins - African, Algerian, Nigerian, Peruvian, Bolivian - and that nod to the mother band ("Mano negra ilegal").
It's followed seamlessly by another gem, "Desaparecido", with the same reggae gait, mixed with rumba and Caribbean influences, this time underpinning a moving anthem for all the "dissidents" who were silently disappeared by dictatorships in every corner of the globe: without noise, without trials, without sentences and without lawyers. The deliberately bare, almost lo-fi arrangement underscores the urgency of the message: “Yo llevo en el cuerpo un dolor/ Que no me deja respirar/ Llevo en el cuerpo una condena/ Que siempre me echa a caminar”. Wandering, then, as the only possible condition for those living with a target on their forehead, drawing an ideal parallel between the plight of undocumented migrants and that of the victims of South American coups.
These are tracks that, rather than Mano Negra's rock and tight rhythms, favour the languor of a melancholy, softly hypnotic electro-acoustic pop (not unlike that of their fellow countrymen Noir Desir at the time) and the shades of an aching yet groovy ethno-folk that, amid off-beat little guitars, distant brass and faint electronic filigree, remains suspended in the unreal dimension of that Malegria (also the title of another track on the record), which, in the spirit of certain Brazilian music, marries joy and sorrow, light and shadow, in a permanent dialectic. With street noises and radio fragments running through the songs, as if to keep the antennae permanently tuned to contemporary reality.
Also recalling the Mano Negra experience is "Bongo Bong", a rap-leaning rereading of "King Of Bongo", the title track of the French band's third album. While the underlying theme remains the same - the proud assertion of artistic autonomy of a bongo player, popular in his own community but ignored in the big city - the arrangement drops from the original version's rock tribalism to a minimal chant punctuated by a bleep, which flows naturally into the following "Je ne t'aime plus", sung by Manu Chao in French, in a melancholy, disillusioned tone, giving voice to the end of a love affair. The ironic title recalls the famous erotic song by Serge Gainsbourg, but here the lost love becomes a symbol of identity loss and personal unease. The cadences are delightful, vaguely bossa nova, with the guitar underpinning a languid arrangement and a gorgeous melody that unfolds bittersweetly, instilling a sense of vulnerability that makes the song emotionally immediate (it's no coincidence that it would later be covered by Robbie Williams as well as Germany's Max Raabe & The Palast Orchestra). French also takes centre stage in "La viè a 2". Here, though, Chao strips it of sensuality and aspirated consonants to drop it into a suburban setting, delivering it with the street-hawker swagger of a market trader

The sixteen tracks that make up Clandestino feel less like a tracklist and more like a journey, a cyclical, organic wandering, where key phrases, as well as rhythms and melodies, come and go, enriching themselves with new shades, becoming part of an experience that blends music with phone recordings, news reports and field recordings. While "La despedida", with its guitar embroidery and electronics trailing like a comet, recalls the atmosphere of the two opening tracks, there is also (for example) a close connection between "Mentira" and "Luna y Sol". Drawing on two interchangeable, complementary sets of lyrics, the two songs rail against the lies told by the governments of both capitalist and developing countries to convince the masses of the soundness of their choices. The first, though, goes straight for the heart with a gorgeous, aching plucked-guitar melody, while the second is more rousing, adorned with parade-style brass and stirred by a driving, lively rhythm. What turns the combo into a political manifesto is a brilliantly placed news sample about the Kyoto Protocol, highlighting the denialist stance of certain political leaders regarding global warming.
The journey and the experimentation continue with "Welcome To Tijuana", where the Mexican city, intoxicated by "tequila, sexo e marijuana", becomes the most psychedelic setting on the record. A stumbling little guitar, blaring trumpets, electronic flashes, dub bass and overlapping vocals are kneaded together by Chao and band into a track that's catchy and winking, yet charged with a strong psychotropic kick.
Manu's passion for drugs, marijuana in particular, then pervades "Minha galera", a kind of sweet, wobbly lullaby in Portuguese, where the singer-songwriter plays with words and their pronunciation so as to refer both to a girl and to the THC-bearing hemp plant: "El viento viene/ El viento se va/ Por la frontera". That's the refrain of "El viento", the track that closes the album and the clandestine traveller's wanderings. When the music and words stop, all that remains is the ceaseless field recording of the wind: it's an imaginative triumph, where nature, through this element, ignores and mocks the borders man imposes on his fellow men, and on himself.
It's almost superfluous to say it, but besides being a timeless folk masterpiece, with its references, its sense of urgency and its incurable hope, Clandestino was a profoundly topical record both when it first appeared almost thirty years ago and still today.

Buoyed by this unexpected success, Manu Chao tried to repeat the trick three years later with Proxima Estacion: Esperanza (2001). It's an album that adds almost nothing to the hugely successful Clandestino. A twin sibling, or rather "a sister", as Manu Chao himself described it, considering it more "feminine" than its predecessor. Seventeen songs that retread the cornerstones of his repertoire, built on Latin rhythms, pop digressions and linguistic cross-pollination. Among the tracks, there are nine in Spanish, two in English, one in French, one in Arabic ("Denia") and two in "Portuñol", that curious hybrid straddling the border between Portuguese and Spanish that Chao says he feels is his true language. Plus one track in all the languages at once. A veritable Babel, in short, though one that conceals an underlying monotony.
There's the single with the catchy but short-breathed hook ("Me gustas tu"), there's a tribute to Bob Marley ("Mr.Bobby"), and the motif of "Bingo Bong" (one of the standout tracks on "Clandestino") returns with the voice of a Brazilian rapper singing about men ("Homens"). A winning formula, granted, but how long can it last?

"I never imagined I'd make another record," Manu Chao himself candidly admitted. "With the money I've made over the years, I could live travelling for the rest of my days."

But this bard of Latin American-flavoured antagonism still believes he can reinvent himself: "If I went back into the studio, it means I still had things to say," he explained. After all, Manu Chao carries an endless array of musical influences in his suitcase. "I'm a human sampler," he says. "I absorb everything without even realising it, and then I pull out the most varied sounds. I can no longer say exactly where they come from, whether Brazil, Venezuela or Senegal."

An omnivorous spirit, capable of leaping from punk to flamenco, from Cuban "son" to Neapolitan "tammurriata", Chao can't stay anchored to one place for long. Manu has in fact recently moved his base to Barcelona, "because after thirty years living in Paris, a stimulating city but one with a cold heart, I had a real craving for sun and warmth." But even there he's remarkably hard to pin down, and he doesn't take long to explain why. "Mano Negra was born because I wanted a band where I could play whatever came into my head, and above all satisfy my unbridled urge for constant movement." "And even now that I'm approaching forty, that urge is still very much with me. In fact I can't stay still in one city for more than a fortnight, but at the same time I can't stand conventional tours, the kind where you play one night and move straight on to the next stop. Because I have friends all over the world, and whenever I pass through their part of the world I want to see them, spend some time with them, make music with them. That's why I created Radio Bemba: it's the answer I was looking for to that need."

His recipe is clear: mixed-blood music, played with musicians of every race and colour from every corner of the world, from Chile to Senegal, from Cuba to our own Italy. Africa and South America, however, remain his favourite destinations: "There the world is truly mixed together like in a giant human laboratory. They seem behind on everything, yet they're actually hundreds of years ahead." Among his activities is also a futuristic project, born in London out of research alongside the cyber-tech outfit Prodigy: "I want to turn techno from cold, hypnotic club music into street rhythm, with drums, among the people." Another musical wander for this perpetually migrating "human sampler".

Radio Bemba Sound System is a 2002 live album that marked the split from Virgin.

Two years later came a return to the recording studio for Sibérie M'Etait Contée, a rather rich and ambitious project in which a popular air captured amid the alleys and market stalls of the French capital takes centre stage. Released as a book with an accompanying CD, the work is embellished with "sketches" by Polish illustrator Wozniak.
Sung entirely in French, the record ranges from the polemical disenchantment of "La Valse à Sale Temps" to the desolation of "Helno est mort", by way of the love ode "Je suis fou de toi" and the emotional chill of "Sibérie".
Thierry Bartalucci's accordion and Roy Paci's trumpet and trombone sketch evocative vignettes of a disoriented, disorienting Paris, where bitterness and loneliness simmer, sublimated in the aching ballad "Dans mon jardin". There's also no shortage of mazurka flourishes ("Madame Banquise"), mambo ("Les rues de l'hivers") and tropical exoticism ("Sibérie fleuve amour").
Sibérie M'Etait Contée reveals a different Manu Chao, no longer hostage to no-global rhetoric but a bittersweet observer of everyday life in the recesses of the metropolis.

With La Radiolina (2007), however, old vices resurface: monotony, overly easy and cloying cocktails, overreaching lyrics. So, despite Manu Chao's efforts to blend a vast array of languages (Spanish, French, Italian) and styles (rumba, rock, pop, ska), boredom soon sets in for the listener, who is further worn down by Chao's wordiness. Twenty-one tracks is decidedly too many for the Chao of this era, who seems intent on stretching the same old script to infinity. What survives are the lively single "Rainin paradize", complete with a video directed by Emir Kusturica, the contrite "Tristezza Maleza" and the Maradona ode "La Vida Tombola". But the impression is that he's genuinely scraping the bottom of the barrel by now.

For anyone who lived through the musical years straddling the turn of the millennium, it feels very strange to think that Manu Chao then stayed put, at least in terms of output, for a full 17 years. His friendly, cosmopolitan brand of melody had, after all, firmly lodged itself in our collective imagination, and radio, television and streaming platforms kept it alive regardless. Just last year, producer Sofia Kourtesis's album did its part, with a gorgeous remix of "Estación Esperanza" reminding us just how current the vision of this pioneer of (especially with Mano Negra) latin alternative still was, and how much we still needed it - both its sounds and its messages.
Perhaps these days of deaths at sea and governments dangerously veering to the right served as a calling for the polyglot musician, who has thus returned with Viva tu (2024), which sounds, as ever, like a show of solidarity between forgotten peripheries. It seems no accident that the album opens with a track titled "Vecinos en el mar", where Manu reminds us how natural it would be to behave towards those less fortunate: "Io tu abriré mi puerta/ Como tu abrio comigo".
So begins a record that plays like a collage. A mosaic of decidedly short pieces, whose brevity and fleetingness perhaps keep them from lodging in the mind. Fragments containing all the Manu Chao we know: the soothing female backing vocals in French ("La couleurs du temps"), the soft electronic touches forming the nervous tissue of the songs ("Tu te vas"), the trademark acoustic-guitar punctuation ("Vecinos en el mar"), the Latin-flavoured guitar strumming (think of the flamenco flashes of the title track). No unthinkable additions, except perhaps the country insert of "Heaven's Bad Day" and the longer, more theatrical "Sao Paulo Motoboy": everything just as we left it 17 years ago, but all of it still delightful and reassuring.

This is not success
This is not progress
This is just a collective suicide

There's no shortage of warnings, like the one just quoted, taken from "River Why", but overall the mood of Viva Tu is optimistic and heartening. Probably exactly what we need so as not to sink into the relentless sense of cynicism and powerlessness that so often hangs over these politically and socially dreadful times. The advice, then, is not to make the mistake of thinking this is some nostalgia trap, just another comeback that's missed its moment - rather, enjoy it with ears and heart wide open.

Contributions by Michele Corrado (“Viva tu”, “Clandestino”)

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