Bongo Bong

It arrives like a shortwave radio signal from somewhere between continents — Manu Chao's voice buried in reverb and tape hiss, a guitar riff that sounds simultaneously Jamaican and West African and somehow also like it belongs in a Parisian squat. The rhythm is built from a reggae chassis but the acceleration is wrong, slightly too fast, slightly too urgent, giving the whole thing the quality of a party that's running just ahead of trouble. Horns appear and disappear, a melodica moans underneath, and there are samples and fragments of other songs woven into the mix like found objects embedded in concrete. The lyric is deliberately nonsensical and deliberately political at the same time — an image of a character who doesn't fit, who slips between categories, told in a voice that seems amused by its own marginality. This was 1998 and Chao had just dissolved Mano Negra and wandered through South America and West Africa with a portable four-track recorder, and the sound of that wandering is baked into every layer of the production. It sounds like it was made in transit, which it essentially was. Put this on when a party needs to turn a corner, or when you're on a train through somewhere unfamiliar and you want to feel that being lost is actually a position of freedom.