Manu Chao

When "Clandestino" by Manu Chao landed on record store shelves worldwide in 1998, and its singles were being pushed relentlessly by the then-influential heavy rotation of MTV and other music channels around the globe, his name came almost as a surprise in a musical landscape dominated by English-language music (be it rap, r&b or rock). And yet, the man who would soon become the musical prophet of a certain no-global culture, and would show up on countless sales charts, was anything but a new name.

Starting in 1987, Manu Chao — born Jose Manuel Arturo Chao Ortega — had already been, with Mano Negra, a pivotal outfit of the French alternative scene of the 90s shared with brothers, cousins and other musicians from the Parisian scene, the forerunner, at least on a European level, of what we now call latin alternative. While in South America the genre found its leading lights in 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. Their explosive blend of rock, French chanson, African rhythms, flamenco, ska, salsa, reggae and blues is still known today as patchanka, a name taken from their debut album ("Patchanka", 1988). That said, it wasn't their most significant work — that would come only a year later, with the album titled "Puta's Fever".

After two more albums, continual line-up changes and even a name switch to Radio Bemba (effectively a dry run for Manu Chao's solo career), Mano Negra broke up around 1997 and their leader temporarily withdrew from public life to wander between Latin America and Africa.

To better understand an album that has literally entered the collective imagination like "Clandestino", the choices made by Manu Chao and the ideologies he would forever be tied to, it's essential to take a further, big step back. To a time well before the revolutionary, insurrectionary inventions of Mano Negra, to the days of his childhood.

Manu Chao's parents, the Galician journalist Ramon Chao and the Basque CNRS researcher Felisa Ortega, left Spain to move to Paris because of their fierce opposition to the Franco dictatorship. Born in 1961, the musician grew up in the Paris 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 injected with an unstoppable sense of defiance and hope. All qualities that are plain to hear even in a single line or a single chord of "Clandestino". Thanks to his family background and his travels, Chao would learn, besides French, English, Spanish and Galician, also Arabic, Portuguese, Italian and Wolof (the language of the Senegalese people of the same name). All idioms that he often mixes together, even within a single song, proving himself a true polyglot minstrel, a champion of a method with no linguistic or genre borders.

Solo voy con mi pena, sola va mi condena

Correr es mi destino para burlar la ley

Perdido en el corazón de la grande Babylon

Me dicen "el clandestino" por no llevar papel

At the twilight of the 20th century, in full Pre-Millennium Tension, to borrow a phrase from Tricky, Manu Chao became the barricade-storming champion of an antagonistic generation, one that rejected the consumerist laws of globalization and the greedy exploitation practiced by multinationals at the expense of Third World peoples. Paradoxically, the very man who embodied multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, with his polyglot, stateless approach, ended up becoming the symbol of those wishing to defend the borders and identity roots of peoples and their lands. Nothing to do with contemporary sovereigntism, of course, but at the time the political battle lines were drawn elsewhere, 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 meekly subservient.

By singing clandestinity as a state of the soul (and as a condition of perpetual estrangement for the "invisible", those living outside the social and economic logic of turbo-capitalist West) Manu Chao became the bard of a different vision of the global world, conceived as a place of welcome and inclusion, where commercial dynamics are fair and cooperative, in defense of 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 thus destined to burn out quickly. For a moment, though, those delicate melodic fragrances and those slogan-like lines truly conveyed the sense of a revolution with a smile, made of resistance and hope. His idiom is the aforementioned patchanka, a hybrid mongrel style marked by a blend of colors, sounds, styles, languages, music and traditions – which finds a precedent in the Clash's "Sandinista".

Another paradox is that the album – clandestine in name and in fact – came out with virtually no promotion, like a sort of quiet swan song from the Franco-Spanish singer, yet it went on to become a 5-million-selling bestseller and the launchpad for a (long) solo career that continues to this day, even if never again at these heights.

The curtain rises on 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 as an invisible man, 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-ish 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" ("Clandestino for not carrying papers") capture the sense of uprootedness and the anguish of denied belonging. The melodic repetition becomes hypnotic, symbolizing an endless condition. "Clandestino" is a bittersweet ballad, as poignant in its sound as it is unyielding in its lyrics, with that roll-call 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 without a break by the other gem, "Desaparecido", the same reggae gait, mixed with rumba and Caribbean influences, this time underpinning a moving anthem to all the "dissidents" made to silently disappear by dictatorships in every corner of the globe: without a sound, 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, in an implicit parallel between the plight of undocumented migrants and that of the victims of South American coups.

These are songs that, rather than the rock and tight rhythms of Mano Negra, favor 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, which, amid off-beat little guitars, distant horns and faint electronic filigrees, remains suspended in the unreal dimension of that Malegria (also the title of another track on the album), which, in the spirit of certain Brazilian music, marries joy and sadness, light and shadow, in a permanent dialectic. With street noises and radio fragments running through the songs, as if to keep the antennae always tuned to contemporary reality.

Also harking back to the Mano Negra experience is "Bongo Bong", a rap-leaning reworking of "King Of Bongo", the track that gave its title to the French band's third album. While the underlying theme remains the same – the proud claim to artistic autonomy of a bongo player, popular within his own community yet ignored in the big city – the arrangement drops from the tribal rock of the original version to a minimal chant punctuated by a beep, which flows naturally into the following "Je ne t'aime plus", performed 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 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 splendid melody that unfolds bittersweetly, instilling a sense of vulnerability that makes the song emotionally immediate (unsurprisingly, it would later be covered by Robbie Williams as well as by the German act Max Raabe & The Palast Orchestra).

French also takes centre stage in "La viè a 2". Chao, however, strips it of sensuality and aspirated consonants, transplanting it into a suburban setting, where he delivers it with the streetwise swagger of a market trader.

Todo es mentira en este mundo

Todo es mentira, la verdad

"Todo es mentira", yo me digo

Todo es mentira, ¿por qué será?

The sixteen tracks making up "Clandestino" resemble less a tracklist than a journey, a cyclical, organic wandering, in which key phrases – as well as rhythms and melodies – come and go, gaining new nuances each time and becoming part of an experience that blends music with phone recordings, news reports and field recordings. If "La despedida", with its guitar embroidery and electronics trailing like a comet, recalls the atmosphere of the two opening tracks, there is (for instance) also a close connection between "Mentira" and "Luna y Sol". Drawing on two interchangeable, complementary 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, decked out in parade-style brass and stirred by a straight, lively rhythm. What turns the pairing into a political manifesto is a spot-on news sample about the Kyoto Protocol, highlighting the denialist stance of certain political leaders on 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 of the whole 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 playful, yet carries a strong psychotropic charge.

Manu's passion for drugs, marijuana in particular, then runs through "Minha galera", a kind of sweet, wobbly lullaby in Portuguese, in which the 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

El viento viene

El viento se va

This is the refrain of "El viento", the track that closes the album and the wanderings of the clandestino. When the music and words fall silent, all that remains is the ceaseless field recording of the wind: it's an imaginative triumph, in which nature, through this very element, ignores and mocks the borders imposed by man upon his fellow man, and by man upon himself.

It's almost superfluous to say so, but beyond being a timeless folk masterpiece, with its references, its sense of urgency and its incurable hope, "Clandestino" was every bit as deeply topical when it first appeared almost thirty years ago as it is today.

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01/12/2024