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Esperando La Ultima Ola I Waiting for the Last Wave

Manu Chao and the Music of Globalization

JOSH KUN

It is not only by shooting bullets in the battlefields that tyranny is overthrown,

but also by hurling ideas of redemption, words of freedom and terrible

anathemas against the hangmen that people bring down dictators and empires. -Emiliano Zapata

Subcomandante Manu

In 1994, only months after the EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Lib-

eration, first emerged out of the Lacand6n jungle to occupy San Cristobal de

Las Casas and hold a deeply cracked mirror up to the face of contemporary

Mexico, the Franco-Spanish band Mano Negra released their final album, Casa

Babylon. Recorded while the band was touring Latin America, the album

touched on everything from ragga to salsa, but it began in Chiapas, with a trib-

ute to guerrilla insurgent leader Subcomandante Marcos and his Internet- and

fax-issued "Declaration of War" against Mexican political lies. The opening

track of the album was named "Viva Zapata," in which chants of "EI pueblo,

unido, jamas sera vencido" unfurled over an escalating funk groove. It was the

first recorded musical testimony to Marcos's new-school Zapatismo. i

The EZLN's campaign for indigenous dignity-built on demands for indig-

enous land rights, self-government. political equality, and self-education-was

a perfect Mano Negra cause. 2 Born in 1987 out of the ashes of the post-Punk

Parisian underground bands Hot Pants and Los Carayos, and led by Manu

Chao (the French son of anti-franquista Spanish exiles), Mano Negra posi-

tioned themselves as anarchic, polylinguistic ringleaders of an international.

Pacini, H. D., Zolov, E., & Fernandez-L'Hoeste, H. (Eds.). (2004). Rockin las americas : The global politics of rock in latin/o america. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from rochester on 2021-08-17 18:13:24.

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WAITING FOR THE LAST WAVE • :In

postcolonial underclass. They were themselves a band of ex-Europeans, a

wandering gaggle of Europe's Others-Spanish refugees, North African immi-

grants, gitanos. Showcasing the hybrid, wild-style carnival mix of rock,

cowpunk, Algerian rai, and Afro-Cuban rhythms they called "patchanka," early

Mano Negra songs like "Sidi H' BibV' "Indios de Barcelona," and "Peligro"

flipped between English, Spanish, Arabic, and French to unpack Europe as an

exploding bomb of immigrant sounds and boiling third world anger. "There's

going to be war on the streets," Chao threatened on "Indios de Barcelona":

"Gringo better take a trip trip trip."3

The liner notes to Mano Negra's debut album, Patchanka, were littered

with immigration documents and passport stamps. Next to the lyrics for "Killin

Rats" (where Chao decries political "rats" like Adolf Hitler, who "set the world

on fire") is a faux-CIA wanted poster with Chao's photograph: "Wanted for

subversive lyrics, corrupting songs, outrageous guitar-playing, sexually ex-

plicit voice committed in this album." From their very beginnings in Paris,

Mano Negra flaunted their ambivalent relationship to European nationalism

(musicians who needed immigration papers and passport stamps to belong as

citizens) and their desire for musical subversion by singing threatening, sedi-

tious, "wanted" songs that critiqued the European political order-in order to

"provincialize Europe" to use Dipesh Chakrabarty'S term-from the stage of a

nightclub.'

Mano Negra eventually left Europe altogether for its former colonies in

Latin America, beginning in 1992, when they started playing working-class

port towns from the deck of a traveling ship as part of their Cargo Tour. The

trip produced the most oft-cited piece of Mano Negra lore: when asked what

anarchy meant by an Argentinean talk show host, the band trashed the studio.

A year later, they were doing free shows with local street musicians in train

stations across Colombia. It all just fed the Afro- Latin menudo of Casa Babylon's

Latin American critical fury. "Goodbye Paris," Chao sang on "Drives Me

Crazy": ''I'm leavin' you. Nothing they said about you is true." On "Senor

Matanzas," the band chanted down Latin American military dictators. On

"Sueno de Solentiname," they dreamed of Guanajuato, Guatemala, and

Panama during the same night of unrest, asking the "beloved world" to relieve

them of a suffering that has no cure. And on "Bala Perdida," the world's urban

centers seethed with "guajira blood" and "explosive cargo," where people "boil

night and day on the avenue." "When they ask for liberty," Chao laments,

"they don't give it to them." Chao had always treated Mano Negra's songs as if

they were agit-pop comic books. On Casa, he recycled themes ("the last wave"

before the end of the world) and characters, like Super Chango (the Yoruban

thunder god reborn as a Latin American answer to Batman) or the kicked-

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:1:14 • JOSH KUN

around "little monkey" of the urban jungle who "speaks his mind" and takes

over cosmopolitan capitals as "King of the Bongo" and one of the "King Kong

Five."

Long considered a masterpiece of kinetic aural globalism, Casa Babylon's

gleeful Spanish and English merger of rock, funk, dancehall, and rap (with

hints of zouk, mariachi, and rai) has grown over the years into a sort of

unofficial template for Latin American rockeros looking for models of New

World collision. When I interviewed Monterrey, Mexico's Plastilina Mosh,

years ago, their ex-trashero guitarist and rapper Jonas couldn't stop beaming

about Chao, crediting Casa Babylon as the inspiration for Plastilina's 1998

break-beat and monster truck lounge session Aquamosh. And in 1995, Tijuana

NO drummer Alex Zuniga wouldn't let me out of his house in Playas de Ti-

juana until I had seen his copy of a Mano Negra book, which, along with es-

says, lyrics, and polemics, contained all of Chao's art collages from the band's

album covers: loterfa cards, bar codes, cabaret playbills, newspaper clippings,

and kitschy images of ethnographic natives.

But Mano Negra's audience was never just limited to one city, one conti-

nent, or one region. The audience the band sang about and sang for covered a

wide, internationalist terrain populated by immigrants, exiles, political dissi-

dents, and refugees from Tijuana to Gibraltar, from Paris to Algiers. In their

seven years as a group, Mano Negra's music became a galvanizing node in a

dissenting globalist circuit of musical activists that grew to include Tijuana NO

in Mexico, Bad Brains in D.C., and the Basque separatists Negu Gorriak in

Spain. Of course, their message also eventually reached back to Chiapas. In

February 1999, Mano Negra was included in an EZLN communique issued by

Subcomandante Marcos and addressed to "Musicians of the World." Marcos

offered his gratitude to a long list of bands who have pledged their support for

the Zapatista struggle in dedicatory songs, benefit concerts, and political pro-

tests-artists who have all used their music to echo the Chiapas cry for dignity

and justice, "Ya basta." He even sent Lacandonian shout-outs to ticket sellers

and roadies. Marcos wrote, "Viejo Antonio said ... that music holds roads that

only the knowledgeable know how to walk and that it ... builds bridges that

bring closer worlds that otherwise you wouldn't even dream about."5

The memo had come five years too late. By the end of 1994, Mano Negra's

multinationalism had toppled beneath the weight of its own musical Babel,

and Manu Chao went missing-in-action, existing only as pseudo-legend for

the next four years: an insurgent Parisian-Basque nomad who travels the

Americas without an identity, is wanted by goon squads across the planet, and

hangs out, whenever he can, in Tijuana. He resurfaced in 1998 with a long-

awaited solo album, Clandestino. "To run is my destiny, to make fun of the law,"

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WAITING FOR THE LAST WAVE • 335

it began. "Lost in the heart of the Great Babylon, they call me the clandestine

one because I don't have papers." Chao recorded Clandestino on an eight-track

recorder and a six-string guitar, while traveling from Africa to Latin America

to Europe. He sampled radio broadcasts from his temporary homes across the

planet and also sampled the voice of Subcomandante Marcos on "Luna y sol."

"For us, rebellious dignity. For us, the negated future. For us, the future, noth-

ing," Marcos says, right after Chao sings, over and over again, "Everything is a

lie in this world."

Though it fashioned itself as an album without maps, an album that moved

freely back and forth across North Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Clandes-

tino did have two geographical centers, both of them border cities: Gibraltar

(the connective node between Europe and Africa), and Tijuana (the maquila-

dora metropolis that is, with its sister city San Ysidro, the busiest crossing point

between the United States and Mexico). Chao has called the cities "two central

points of the planet's fever."6 They are both cities that lie pulsing but undetec-

ted at the heart of the global economy, cities that are at once sites of trans-

national global commerce and sites of transnational dislocation and low-wage

economic poverty, where entire populations pursue menial labor on the

streets and in maquiladora factories to keep exported goods flowing across the

very borders they are not allowed to cross. Clandestino even begins with Chao

as a lawless mojado crossing the border to EI Norte, "lost in the heart of the

great Babylon" and branded "clandestino" because he isn't carrying papers.

Fifteen songs later, on "EI Viento," the border returns, but this time Chao mor-

phs into the wind and crosses unseen. His "tequila, sexo y marijuana" tribute

to the border metropolis, "Welcome to Tijuana," is more fun than revelatory,

but it doesn't matter. Tijuana has left its mark all over Clandestino through

sound: the plastic whistle of a falling bomb issued from a toy key chain popu-

1ar with Tijuana street vendors.

But like Mano Negra's global rebel yells, Chao's new "clandestino" identity

is rooted wherever political guerrillas are causing trouble, and he shifts perso-

nas between being peruano, boliviano, and africano, between being EZLN and

Caravane des Quartiers. When he becomes "EI Desaparecido," we hear famil-

iar traces of Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Ciudad Juarez, but we also hear Chao

turning disappearance into an act of shape-shifting resistance. "When they

look for me," the post-European trickster boasts, ''I'm never there."

Clandestino's true subject, however, was not Chao himself but the popula-

tions and communities he met on his travels, populations and communities

across Europe, Africa, and the Americas who were all, in different ways, nego-

tiating and surviving experiences of displacement, dislocation, and disperse-

ment, whether through exile, migration, genocide, or politically legislated

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336 • JOSH KUN

xenophobia. The characters in Chao's global musical dramas are people with-

out a place or people fighting to keep their place in a world where

placelessness has become a dominant feature of the contemporary political

order (according to the U.N., over 125 million people currently live outside of

their country of origin).7 Chao's subjects are disenfranchised world citizens

who have found themselves caught between the contradictory pulls of global-

ization: increased prosperity for some, increased labor exploitation for others;

increased freedom of movement for some, increased barriers and expulsions

for others. As George Lipsitz has characterized it:

The rapid movement across the globe of people, products, ideas, and

images seems to undermine foundational certainties about the meaning

of local and national identities, the value of personal and collective

histories, and the solidity of social relationships and social networks.

New forms of economic activity produce both astounding wealth and

appalling poverty-sometimes in the same locations. New technologies

liberate us from tiresome tasks yet create unprecedented environmental

dangers. In some respects, global marketing brings the people of the

world closer together than ever before, yet consuming the same

products, enjoying the same products, or working for the same employ-

ers does not seem to make us any less divided, as old antagonisms and

new enmities create violent conflicts on every continent.s

It is precisely this crisis that Chao's music speaks to, but he speaks with an

acute attention to place-to border cities like Tijuana and Gibraltar, but also to

urban centers where marginalized and displaced populations struggle for new

forms of community across policed civic maps. In a recent study of music and

the European racial imagination, Philip Bohlman has written of music as the

key soundtrack to the lives of "the placeless" in Europe. "Throughout Euro-

pean history, race has been a problem of defining and enforcing distances be-

tween those who belong and those who do not," he argues. "The ultimate act

of racializing is the denial of place, that is, the removal of conditions of belong-

ing." Bohlman proposes that it is through listening to Europe's "sound-mixes"

that we are able to map the pasts and futures of the placeless. 9 Chao's

Clandestino, which he recorded as a continuous minimalist song cycle built on

a limited number of the same recycled melodies and rhythms, is precisely that,

a migratory song-mix born from placelessness, a song-mix that explores the

racialization of Europe's and America's displaced others, from the Peruvians

and Africans of "Clandestino" to the Mexican and Central American indocu- mentados of "Welcome to Tijuana."

Chao's 2001 follow-up to Clandestino is Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, which

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WAITING FOR THE LAST WAVE. 3317

continues the cycle of 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, Proxima bows to Bob Marley, and Chao recorded

it wherever inspiration hit: Brazil, Spain, Africa. As a sequel to Clandestino,

Proxima further established Chao as one of globalization's most eloquent voices

of protest, an artist who participates in the workings of global capitalism (both

solo albums have been released and distributed through the multinational

label Virgin Records) as a vehicle of giving voice to globalization's under-

belly-its low-wage laborers, its displaced populations, its migrants, its victims.

And he does it with music born from the exchanges and hybridities not of the

corporate transnational sphere that Guillermo Gomez Pena has called the

"mainstream bizarre" of franchised, commodified difference (a transnational

muticulturalism "devoid of 'real' people of color"), but from the vernacular,

everyday sphere of grassroots transnational multiculturalism, where differ-

ences are performed and negotiated through cultural exchange, conflict, and

encounter within, not outside of, the global capitalist apparatus.!O

In this sense, Chao makes music with what Chela Sandoval has called a

"differential consciousness," in that he has dedicated his career to using music

to forge "a global decolonizing alliance of difference in its drive toward egali-

tarian social relations and economic well-being for all citizenry: an opposi-

tional global politics, a cosmopolitics for planeta tierra."!! In Proxima's accompa-

nying CD booklet, there is a photograph of Chao wearing an Algerian soccer

jersey and he is standing on the beach in Playas de Tijuana, the Tijuana beach

community where the rusty border wall protrudes out into the ocean after

running out of land to divide up. Chao is facing the sea and a group of white

seagulls drenched in orange sunshine fly over his head.

The first time I spoke with Chao, in 1999, by phone from Paris right after

he finished Clandestino, he was still "waiting for the last wave" -that recurring

glimpse of the apocalypse held over from Casa Babylon-and "waiting for the

last song." Like a troubadour Che Guevara, a guitar-picking Marcos, or a

NAFTA/GATT Gregorio Cortez, he was ready to face the end alone, waiting for

the last revolutionary drum, the last sign that maybe he wouldn't be swal-

lowed whole by the twenty-first century. By the second time we spoke, in a

Los Angeles bar in 2001, that doubt had turned to hope on Proxima Estacion. I

learned that he had stopped traveling, had rented an apartment in Barcelona,

and for the first time in years, had a place that he was comfortable calling his own.!2

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338 • JOSH KUN

The Monkey Speaks His Mind

JK: Though you were born in Europe and spent much of your life

performing in Europe, in recent years-especially since the release of

Casa Babylon-your attention has moved to Latin America. How did

that shift happen?

Me: When I was living in Europe, I already had a lot of contact with

South America. When I was a child, in my home, my father used to

be in contact with a lot of people from Argentina, Uruguay, and

Chile who were in exile from the dictatorships and came to Europe

for political reasons. My father's place was a meeting point for all

these people. Plus, my grandfather lived for ten years in Cuba. There

were a lot of relationships and a lot of records.

JK: Tijuana is central to Clandestino. What is your attraction to it as a

place?

MC: When you travel a lot, you feel that there are certain places in the

world that are hot points. Tijuana is one of them. It's a symbol of

what is the biggest problem of the end of the century: the border

and problems of immigration. Just like on the record I talk a lot

about Gibraltar, a hot point between Africa and Europe; Tijuana is a

hot point between the United States and South America. There's the

same kind of problems and you can feel the condensation of the

troubles of the world there. Another big world problem is the

political mafia, and Tijuana is a good example of that, too [laughs).

Tijuana is a place of contradiction. For a lot of people coming from

South America trying to cross the border, it can begin to be like a

kind of jail. And for the other side, you come there just to have a

good time. That's the hypocrisy of this border: from one side it's so

easy to cross over, just to have fun one night, see some prostitutes,

get drunk, spend your money, and on the other side it's completely

the opposite.

JK: But this separation often gets misunderstood as an actual dividing

line. On the one hand, the border is a physical geopolitical reality

but on the other it's a fiction.

MC: It's an abstraction. A guy from Tijuana has more in common with a

guy in San Diego than a guy in San Diego has with a guy in Boston or

a guy from Tijuana has with a guy from Oaxaca. They're more

hermanos, despite the border. Because not one frontera is actually a

cultural border; there are always economic borders between those

who have money and those who don't.

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WAITING FOR THE LAST WAVE • 3:19

JK: So many young Latin American rock bands, say Tijuana NO or

Plastilina Mosh, talk about Mano Negra as the biggest influence on

what they do. Why do you think Mano Negra was so influential for

them?

MC: Maybe we came to South America at the right time, when all the

bands were a little bored with the music always coming from the

outside. Everybody started thinking it was possible to use his own

culture without shame. And we came at that moment, when it was

time to change and they saw a band that used to change any kind of

music using a lot of cultures without shame and they liked it. They

saw it was possible. A lot of bands really took to Casa Babylon-the

way it was recorded, its songs, the sense of freedom it has, the idea

that you can use anything without a problem.

JK: Can you talk about the importance of Marcos and the Zapatistas to

your music?

MC: Four years ago, when we started with Casa Babylon, the Zapatista

movement was beginning, for us anyway. At that moment, we felt

very involved with these guys. We liked the message, we liked what

they were talking about, the way they see the world. It was like,

finally, someone we could trust. Because all of the messages from the

Zapatistas were the exact same things I was thinking. There just

aren't that many examples of messages like that coming to you in

the world. So four years later, with this album, I'm still not deceived

by them. They're still an example. They have a good analysis of what

modern society is and how it works. They understand the power of

the economy for us all. Economy runs the world; politicians mean

nothing. Also, they never said that they were fighting for power.

They fight for dignity. They don't want to be presidents of Mexico.

They don't want political responsibilities. They don't want the

power. They want dignity. That changed a lot of things.

JK: Does "clandestino" refer to anyone community in particular or is it a

general category for you?

MC: There's more and more people who have to live like clandestinos in

the world. It's not easy to live that way. A lot of friends of mine in

Europe have to live like clandestinos. It's the same in the U.S. for

many Latinos. Years ago it was more a matter of being political

refugees, but now it's not just people coming for political reasons.

They come for social reasons. They have to feed a family and in their

countries it's not possible anymore. Why is it not possible? Because

the first world has taken everything. So they go to the first world to

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340 • JOSH KUN

try to make a living, but the first world says "No, you can't come in."

That's a problem and one day, the third world is gonna get really

angry and we'll see what happens.

JK: So "clandestino" becomes a symbol of all indocumentados, refugees,

exiles ...

MC: It's the same problem. When I'm in Mexico or South America or

Colombia, I talk to the guys on the beach waiting for the boat, or in

Algeria I talk to the guys waiting for any opportunity to get into

Europe. It's the same-they have the same life, the same kind of

problems, and they try to cross the border for the same reasons. And

it's getting worse everyday. The laws of the governments are getting

tougherandtoughe~

JK: What kind of social future will this lead to?

MC: There's gonna be hard times. Things have to change quickly. This

problem of clandestinidad from borders really close by is making

rage grow in the third world. And then you have to decide how to

act on that rage either positively or negatively. A lot of people try

positively and others, because they're lost and because they have

rage, they do it negatively. It's not the right solution-they use

violence, bad interpretations of religion, other bad things. It's like, if

the first world treats us bad we're gonna treat them bad right back.

And they're right, but we have to find better solutions.

JK: Part of what I love about Clandestino is the way it links different

revolutions, different communities, and different geographies to

common causes.

MC: The world is wonderful for that. There's plenty of universes. Brazil is

a universe. New York is a universe. And at the same time it's a little

little little planet. There's so much difference, yet at the same time so

many links. It inspires me when you can be in Africa and talking to a

guy about African religions and after that you're talking with a guy

in Ireland or Galicia about Celtic religions and they're so different

but there are also so many big links and connections. I like traveling

for that reason.

JK: On Clandestino, there's a feeling of constant movement and

migration. And in your own life, you travel constantly. What's the

importance of migration and travel to current global culture?

MC: Migrations and travel have been happening throughout the history

of mankind. People travel, people move. The gypsies who live in

Spain migrated from India. The French who they say are so French

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WAITING FOR THE LAST WAVE. 341

migrated from the East or I don't know where. There have always

been migrations. Human societies are like rivers and that's why

borders don't mean anything. If you close a river, the water no

longer runs and it builds and builds and nothing good can come of

it. If there's riches in the North, then bring the people North. Or if

not, make riches available in the South and they'll be better off

there than in the North-they'll have the possibility of feeding their

children.

JK: If you could imagine a revolution between all the c/andestinos you

sing about-africanos, bolivianos, mexicanos, Arabs-how would it

look?

MC: The only thing I know is that we are in a race against time. I don't

know from where these changes are going to come, but I know they

have to come soon because if not, what is growing the most right

now is not unity between these communities but the radicalization

of each one. In that sense, I'm somewhat pessimistic. Instead of

uniting, everybody thinks they can find the solution themselves: that

this God values more than that God, this flag more than that flag.

No, no: the problem is worldwide and the people have to under-

stand that quickly.

JK: During Clandestino, you were very much a migrant. Now you are

living in one place. Does this record reflect more of a settler's

mindset?

MC: 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 allover the world, it's more

difficult to bring your studio. But I'm still always traveling a lot. This

album [Proxima Estacion) 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.

JK: But this record sounds bigger than Clandestino. There are horns.

There's more of the old Mano Negra patchanka sound.

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34Z • JOSH KUN

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.

JK: You also sound happier here. Some of the songs are just lighter

emotionally, like "Papito."

MC: Yeah. It's because we want to change. Proxima Estacion is the little

sister of C/andestino, but she's come out much happier.

JK: And more hopeful, which was what was absent on Clandestino. The

last time we heard from you, you were "lost in the twentieth

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.

JK: 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.

JK: 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

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WAITING FOR THE LAST WAVE • 343

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.

JK: 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 Baby/on. The real border between what I'm doing now and

what I was doing with Mano Negra came before Casa Baby/on. 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."

JK: On Proxima Estacion, like on C/andestino, you repeat themes and

melodies, recycle rhythm tracks and even lyrics. "Calavera no lIora,"

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

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344 • JOSH KUN

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.

JK: You mentioned Chiapas earlier, and clearly a lot has happened in

Chiapas since Clandestino was released. Is any of Proxima'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 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.

JK: 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

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WAITING FOR THE LAST WAVE' 345

of so many communities. They fight for the day they can disappear,

when nobody needs to hear what they have to say.

JK: The name of the touring band you've put together since recording

Proxima Estacion, Radio Bemba, means "word of mouth" or "ru-

mor." 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 demagoguery is really thin. That's

why maybe on Proxima 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.

JK: 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.

JK: 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 TJ

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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.

JK: 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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