Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Manu Chao’s reputation stands on a few solo albums and, before that, his career with the band Mano Negra. Active from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Mano Negra mixed rai, ska and punk into an incendiary francophone take on Sandinista-era Clash, like the second coming of Rachid Taha’s band Carte de Séjour.After the group imploded, Chao’s first solo album, Clandestino, was the inescapable sound of the end of the 1990s, as ubiquitous as Buena Vista Social Club. It was an acoustic version of the sound world of Mano Negra, the lower voltage revealing a characteristic nursery-rhyme singsong rhythm; but its songs of travel and migration — notably the title track — were instantly memorable.The second solo record, Próxima Estación: Esperanza, was halfway between a follow-up and a remix, a darker Mediterranean night mirror world of Clandestino’s full sun. The same melodies, the same rhythms, the same textural elements (notably slide whistles) recurred over and over again. A third album, La Radiolina, showed how far the returns had diminished. Then, from 2007 onwards, nothing. Chao produced other artists with varying results (turning Malian duo Amadou and Mariam into his own clones, but adding pep to Trinidadian singer Calypso Rose) and has made the odd guest appearance. In recent years he has been on the road with musicians Lucky Salvadori, Miguel Rumbao and Mauro Metralla, playing concerts in a variety of trio formats.Viva Tu comes out of that process. It is a more original set than La Radiolina, but the recycling is still very much in evidence. “Heaven’s Bad Day”, a collaboration with an almost inaudible Willie Nelson, has those infuriating whistles amid country-and-western harmonica; the deceptively childish diction persists. When the French rapper Laeti joins Chao to duet on “Tu Te Vas”, the song picks up abruptly. “São Paulo Motoboy” has a familiar smooth seaside cruise. Viva Tu is a perfectly engaging album; but after nearly two decades, Chao’s fans will have hoped for more.★★★☆☆‘Viva Tu’ is released by Because
