Pop Albums: Spearhead Chocolate Supa Highway Capitol CDEST 2293

You have to admire Michael Franti's gift for surfing the successive waves of hip-hop style without diluting his polemical ardour. In the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, he offered fierce Public Enemy-style lectures on neo-colonialism and cultural decay; with Spearhead's 1994 debut, he shifted more towards a blend of funky didactic soul; and now, with its follow- up, he makes another subtle but significant shift in direction, with swingbeat, ganja and basketball more to the fore.

The message throughout is still one of black underdevelopment, however, whether he's highlighting the drawbacks of typical black job `opportunities' (rapper, postie and cop) in "The Payroll", or narrating the tale of another doomed homie, shot by cops en route to a job interview. It's ferociously intelligent stuff, perhaps too much so: how many swingbeat-soul tracks do you know that namecheck Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, as he does on "Keep Me Lifted"? But when the polemic is as skilfully woven into the track as it is on "Why Oh Why", it's powerfully populist: here, Franti reminisces about a youth spent shooting hoops with friends long since cut down by crack and crime: "I played with brothas with so much badness/ But now they gone I sing a song/ Pop a three from the top of the key in they memory."