Manu Chao, globalista.

• Author: D'Ambrosio, Antonino
• Position: Biography

More than five years ago, I was sitting in the crowded backstage dressing room of St. Anne's Warehouse with the late musician and former Clash frontman Joe Strummer, who was in town performing at the acclaimed Brooklyn waterfront venue. As a host of actors, musicians, and hangers-on shuttled in and out gazing at the punk legend, we sat quietly in the corner discussing the looming war in Iraq. When the discussion turned to music, Strummer excitedly declared his admiration for the one group in the world that was similar to the Clash. That group's leader had, in Strummer's view, taken the baton and sprinted further in producing music possessed with a brazen spirit of humanism and an adventurer's creative sensibility. The group was France's multiracial, multilingual Mano Negra, led by Manu Chao.

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Jose-Manuel Thomas Arthur Chao was born on June 21, 1961, in Paris to a Galician father and a Basque mother. Chao's family was forced to leave Spain to escape the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Resisting fascism is in Chao's blood. "My grandfather used to work in the telephone center. So his job, when Franco was taking over the city, was to blow up the center so the Fascists couldn't use it," Chao says. "He was sentenced to death." (His grandfather escaped execution.)

Chao's father, Ramon Chao, is a journalist, and was chief editor of Radio France Internationale and a writer for Le Monde . When the family moved to Boulogne-Billancourt and Sèvres, the house was always full of artists and intellectuals. These fellow immigrants and outcasts formed a multicultural counter-society that set fire to the young boy's imagination.

In the late 1970s, Chao and his friends became politicized in the fight against the neofascist National Front. Influenced by musicians like the radical American rock 'n' roll band the MC5, the great French band Berurier Noir, and a heavy dose of reggae and punk rock, their weapon of choice became music. "The community got united--people that played reggae, people that played punk, people that played rock--against the fascist skinheads," he recalls. "That was the real political fight at the time."

Chao's first foray into music was the commercially unsuccessful rockabilly band Les Hot Pants. Still, the band garnered critical notice, which paved the way for Chao, with his trumpeter brother, Tonio, and drummer cousin, Santiago Casariego, to form Mano Negra (Black Hand), named for a nineteenth-century Andalusian...