Pointed Lyrics : Pop music: Spearhead will aim its songs of ire, social commentary and sympathetic anguish for the poor and afflicted at a Fashion Island crowd.

By MIKE BOEHM

Sept. 30, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Adaptability has been the forte of Michael Franti, the San Francisco-based politicized singer-songwriter-rapper who has won acclaim through a series of chameleonic-style shifts.

Since 1988, Franti has been the creative cog behind three very different albums by three radically different groups.

Franti emerged with the Beatnigs, who played on the punk circuit and dished out a wild blend of industrial beats, rock and funk. He moved on to lead the rap group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, whose 1992 album bristled with the intense polemics of a radical Op-Ed page.

Last year he returned with Spearhead, a six-member band with a much warmer sound that harks back to such old-line funk-soul influences as Stevie Wonder and Sly & the Family Stone, while also incorporating rap and reggae.

On Sunday, Franti and Spearhead will have to adapt to a strange, new performing habitat: a stage in the parking lot of Fashion Island Newport Beach. There they will have a chance to see how their songs of pointed ire, sympathetic anguish and soulful encouragement to beleaguered black Americans will play out in Newport Beach’s gilded heart of affluent mall culture.

All along, Franti has been figuratively confronting the gap in reality between the affluent and privileged and the poor and afflicted; one of Spearhead’s songs is called “Crime to Be Broke in America.” Now, as he performs, he’ll come literally face-to-face with Neiman Marcus.

Speaking over the phone this week from his home, Franti, 28, chuckled when asked whether he has any previous experience playing at shopping malls.

“No, nothing like that,” he said, allowing that the setting might seem more suitable to a gig by Debbie Gibson than by Spearhead. “It’s a little weird [compared to] what I’m used to.”

Still, Franti said, the performance makes a lot of sense. Spearhead and Ben Harper, the Pasadena-based, blues-inflected guitarist also known for weaving social commentary into his songs, will be the musical attractions at the Hard Rock Cafe 1995 World Championships of Skateboarding.

Proceeds will go to AIDS education programs for Orange County youngsters--a perfect mesh with the theme of Spearhead’s upcoming video, “Positive,” in which Franti traces the anxious thoughts running through the mind of a man who awaits the results of an HIV test. The character is bolstered by the knowledge that, difficult as the testing process is, he has done the right thing: “If I love you, then I better get tested / Make sure we’re protected.”

Franti said he was wary at first about playing a mall concert (Spearhead was invited by Transworld Skateboarding magazine, an event co-sponsor). “When they said [the Fashion Island concert] was for the Red Cross AIDS awareness [programs], we were down with it,” Franti said.

(Mark Sperling, event coordinator for Transworld, said that Spearhead and Harper both have received favorable reviews in skate-oriented magazines; Harper is a skateboard enthusiast, Sperling said, whose current video, “Ground On Down,” features some of the champions who will be competing at the Fashion Island tournament that will be staged between musical sets. Punk acts have been the entertainment norm at recent skate-oriented events such as the Warped Tour at Irvine Meadows and Board in O.C. at the Olympic Velodrome; Sperling said that the Hard Rock Cafe wanted to steer clear of punk; also, “We felt kids had been overloaded [with punk bands], and we wanted to show them a different side.”)

Spearhead’s Fashion Island gig--its last in a yearlong round of touring--does jibe with the band’s growing tradition of fitting in just about anywhere.

“In the last month, we played at two big reggae festivals, a big hip-hop tour and some dates with the [alternative rock band] Foo Fighters. We’ve been all over the map,” Franti said. The same diversity that allows Spearhead to fit on a variety of concert bills has denied the band a chance for mass exposure under today’s regime of narrowly formatted radio programming--one reason why sales of the critically acclaimed album “Home” have not taken off.

“I don’t go into it saying, ‘We’ll move a million units,’ ” said Franti, who sees Spearhead as a long-term, ongoing band, unlike the short-lived Beatnigs and Disposable Heroes.

“We’ve sold enough records to keep going, keep touring,” he said. “We’ve developed an audience that’s really loyal, a base of support, and that’s what we’ve been working toward.”

In launching Spearhead, Franti was spurred by new insights he got from revisiting some of his oldest musical influences--including Wonder, Sly, Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye--and realizing that their pure musical appeal had been the hook that drew him to their deeper messages.

Consequently, while still highly political, Franti’s songwriting has lost its soapbox tendencies. The lyrics instead spring from vignettes drawn from everyday life, such as the AIDS test of “Positive,” or, in “Hole in the Bucket,” the ethical dilemma of whether to give money to a panhandler.

Franti has arrived as a well-rounded, wide-ranging artist, able to celebrate such simple, life-sustaining forces as a grandmother’s love, a savory plate of red beans and rice or a good, pumping house party, yet also able to probe the toughest, cruelest social injustices confronting Americans--especially poor, black Americans.

“One thing I found is that music is really about emotions,” Franti said. “When you’re really concerned about an issue, the easiest thing is to come in and hammer people over the head. The harder thing is [to create] fun and enjoyment and a spirit of compassion and enlightenment.

“I’ve tried to come up with ways to bring ideas about important social issues to people in a way that’s going to be attractive and fun and entertaining to watch,” he said. “I want to inspire people, not just educate and preach to them. If you have a good groove, a good beat, that can be inspiration enough.”

* Spearhead and Ben Harper play Sunday at the Hard Rock Cafe 1995 World Championships of Skateboarding, outside the Hard Rock Cafe at Fashion Island, 451 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach. The skate competition begins at 10 a.m., with breaks for performances by Harper at 12:30 p.m. and Spearhead at 4:30 p.m. $1. (714) 640-8844.