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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Toward the end of a live show, weary musicians often appeal to the audience with a stock phrase intended to invigorate the proceedings: "How is everyone feeling tonight?" "I can't hear you!" "Cleveland, make some noise!" Manu Chao, a wiry forty-six-year-old of Spanish extraction who grew up in Paris, used a different tactic when he played the first of two sold-out shows in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in June. He shouted out the names of countries, and people cheered, often in reverse proportion to the nation's population: "Uruguay!" Some whoops. "Costa Rica!" Roars. "Macedonia!" Total mayhem.
Few pop performers take the idea of being a global musician so literally. Chao's new album, "La Radiolina," consists of twenty-two tracks in five languages, including English, which he learned as a teen-ager by listening to Lou Reed songs and reading crime novels by the African-American writer Chester Himes, who moved to France in the nineteen-fifties. Chao maintains apartments in Paris and Barcelona, and spends part of each year in Fortaleza, a town in northern Brazil, where his eight-year-old son lives. He is completing an album of songs in Portanol (a hybrid of Spanish and Portuguese) and collaborating on another, with patients in a psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires. He also produced--and co-wrote some of the...
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