To many Jamaicans Marley’s Rastafarian involvement makes him far more than just another entertainer. Rastafarian “philosophy” and imagery have in the last five years gained more than a toehold among the nation’s poor. Once the most despised segment in the Jamaican social structure, the sect today is credited with bringing about a new pride in indigenous Jamaican culture and speech patterns. Rastas are proud people who may beg for work but never for money. The only obvious sign that a man’s a Rasta is his hair, which is never combed nor cut but braided into long strands and waxed. These masses of knotted curls are called “dreadlocks.”
What has made Rastas seem visionary to Jamaican youth has been their alienation from Babylonian (Western) society, their refusal to pay taxes, their muddled mysticism that sees the late Haile Selassie as the personification of Jah-Jehovah-God and their spectacular success in spreading Jamaican music across the globe.
Reggae was initially an imitation of American rhythm and blues—circa 1950—and was known as blue beat, ska and rock steady before becoming popularized as reggae. From the very beginning it was characterized by a uniquely identifiable rhythmic pattern unlike anything in the world. Even though much reggae continues to imitate R&B phrasing and vocal technique, some of the best is delivered in Rastafarian transformations of English, which are totally incomprehensible to people unfamiliar with the West African rhythms of their dialect.
Some of the most popular records on the island get the least airplay because of the controversial subject matter: sex, marijuana, the dozens traded between enemy camps of musicians and a coming police state that some Jamaicans see as inevitable. Bob Marley emerged from the underground through the constant use of these themes in his music. He started writing hits 15 years ago, and aside from Jimmy Cliff he is the most consistent songwriter on the island. Like most exponents of authentic root music, it is impossible to separate Marley from his music.
“People come down ya and them ask why I turn Rasta and why I wear me hair like this. Even me own mother didn’t want talk to me when she first hear that I turn Rasta. But is no me turn Rasta, is you turn something else. Every Black man is born a Rasta, is just that most of them don’t realize it. The way I wear me hair is the natural way, the way that Jah meant for the black man to wear his hair. If I was anything else, I could explain to you. We not think that one set of people should hoard up everything, we want share what we have with everybody. Them still don’t like Rasta even though there is a whole heap of Rasta. And sometimes if two policemen catch you ’round the corner, them might still want beat you. But the wicked shall perish because they deny the truth. The Black man shall run the earth again.”
In Kingston the crushing levels of poverty stand in bold contrast to the sumptuous houses in the hills. The minimum wage is $20 a week, but the cost of living is twice as high for the basics and three to four times as high for a “luxury” item such as an American automobile. Rastafarian philosophy and reggae speak to this. And the music and the message have found a ready and enthusiastic audience for such criticism and social commentary.
This phenomenon has not been completely lost on the Jamaican government, which has initiated a policy of Democratic Socialism with vague hints of eventually distributing the wealth. So far bauxite, the nation’s prime industry, has been nationalized, and the tourist business, which ranks second, is next on the agenda. Marley, who makes it his business to stay out of politics, is highly amused by all this.
“Maybe them go nationalize reggae next. Them didn’t use to like it, but reggae is the people’s music, and if them no like it, them no like the people. Them going have to do something, or the people going burn this place down in the next few years. Me no take no part in the government because me no interested in power. If me was, me would try to become a politician. But me is a Rasta man, and me talk bout things the way me see them.”
Bob Marley has made being a Rasta a form of acceptance and recognition. Jamaican music has found a rallying point. And in the Kingston nights the streets throb with the looming bass shuffle and more reggae bands singing about “Rastaman” and “natty dread.”
Innocents in Babylon: A Search for Jamaica Featuring Bob Marley and a Cast of Thousands
by Lester Bangs
(Source: Creem Magazine, June and July 1976)
THE FIRST thing that should be established is that I was only in Jamaica for a week, and there is no way to compress Jamaica or its music scene into one week, or one article. So what you are about to get is just the surface, the shell. But I hope that if you look beneath this surface you may begin, as I am, to figure out a lot of what is going on in Jamaican music, and a little of the turmoil currently besetting Jamaican society.
I can’t say that this piece is really representative of that society, even from an outsider’s viewpoint, because I never got out of Kingston, a bullet-pocked industrial metropolis not dissimilar to Detroit. Even though Jamaica is a country where 2 percent of the population has 80 percent of the money and the rest suffer some of the worst poverty in the world, it’s also true that in Jamaica at its least urban the poor can live more comfortably than most other places in the world: build a simple house in the country, start a garden, grow food and herb, pick fruit off the trees or go to the ocean and catch fish. The trouble begins when country people come into Kingston, lured by promises of a better life in the big city. They end up in slums like Trenchtown and Jones Town, living in shacks and incredible squalor. The result, of course, is crime and violence both “random” and “political.”
Out of all this, however, like oppressed black people in other places before them, they have created a vital indigenous musical form called reggae. I’m not going to argue the merits of reggae here: it’s still an ac- quired taste for the vast majority of U.S. listeners, white or black, so if you respond to it at all you will probably love it and if not you may find it an intolerably boring form of protracted ricky-ticky rhythm. Reggae has been intimately linked with the growing awareness on the part of western Caucasians of Rastafarianism, a primitive mystical-religious sect which has been around Jamaica for several decades now. The Rastafarians believe that Marcus Garvey, father of the Back to Africa movement, was a prophet who foresaw the coming of Jah, the Savior also promised in the Bible, a Savior who would lead all oppressed black people to their Promised Land. Garvey said the Savior was coming in 1927, and in 1930 Haile Selassie was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia, becoming the first black head of a 20th Century African state. Ergo, the Rastas believe that Selassie, who was born Ras Tafari and ruled Ethiopia till his death in the Seventies, was (is) Jah; and that soon he will return to bring the Rastas, who believe themselves to be the lost tribe of Israel, home to Ethiopia a.k.a. Zion. In the meantime, while they await Armageddon as prophesied in the Bibles they read daily, they’ll have nothing to do with Babylon, the present system of things— they do not vote, instead espousing pacifism, anti-materialism, growing their hair out in long, wild, bushy patches called dreadlocks, and the smoking of lots of herb a.k.a. ganja a.k.a. weed/tokes/dope to us, which they believe to be a mystical sacrament of Jah. Soon, through the combined forces of Jah and higher herb consciousness, Armageddon will come in the form of a mystical revolution which will topple Babylon and set all Jah’s children free to return to Paradise.
In other words, kind of a Third World cross between John Sinclair and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Out of all this has risen one major musical figure, who represents to Jamaicans approximately what Bob Dylan represented to white American college students ten years ago: Bob Marley. Marley and his group the Wailers have thus far released four albums (plus two earlier ones in England and several more in Jamaica) which have made him a star among white youth in England, but is just beginning to break through in America, where reggae is still regarded as a bit of a curiosity by most white listeners and outright disdained by blacks. Which is why I, along with a raft of other white journalists and photographers, was flown down by Island Records for a sort of Cook’s
Tour of Jamaican music and the somewhat obligatory interview with Bob Marley.
I am on the phone with an L.A. rep for Island, who shall henceforth be referred to as Wooly, because of the cap this white lad wore, in imitation of the Rastas, throughout his stay in Jamaica. I tell him that, even though I love reggae with a passion that is threatening to cost me some friends, I have always considered Bob Marley’s records rather cold and he is in fact my least favorite reggae artist.
He laughs. “Shhh—you’re not supposed to say things like that!”
“Okay, then, where’s this guy Marley at?”
“Well, Bob’s philosophy can be summed up in one word: ‘righteous.’” “Do you mean like righteous weed, or the righteous wrath of Jehovah, or righteous brothers and sisters living off the land . . . ”
“Well, kind of a combination of all three.”
“I see—he’s a hippie.”
“Right.”
Jamaica is still undergoing what might be termed a colonial hangover. It has no real indigenous population, not even a few scattered enclaves like the American Indians, because the original Jamaicans, the Arawaks, were all slaughtered by Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards. The island was for centuries but one protectorate in the British Empire, and in fact only gained its independence in 1962. Since then it has made very little progress toward autonomy, and there is a lack of motivation among most of the people that can be ascribed to more than the tropical climate. All the most negative connotations of “laid back” can be found in Kingston—people are slow, lackadaisical, facts get lost in the haze of ganja and time barely exists. “I’ll be back in 45 minutes” can mean three to six hours, “We’ll get it together this afternoon” may mean tomorrow night or never at all. One writer on this trip claimed that every horoscope in the Daily Gleaner counseled “patience,” and there is an expression that you hear constantly which perfectly sums up the lazy, whenever-we-get-around-to-it tempo of Jamaican life: “Soon come.” I think the discernible lack of motivation on the part of many Jamaicans can be ascribed to a rather complex combination of ganja, lack of education, and having little to no idea what to do with themselves as a people in the absence of colonialism. A lot of people (especially Americans) feel that legalization of herb would be the answer to the island’s economic problems; I think that the situation in Jamaica is the most persuasive argument I’ve ever seen for its non-legalization, and the fact that everybody smokes it anyway does nothing to contradict that. Of course, the argument could be raised that the people resort so extensively to this dope, which is not nearly as strong as legend would have it and has the most tranquilizing effect of any I’ve ever smoked, to blot out their feeling of helplessness in the face of such realities as that Michael Manley, the current Prime Minister who came in on a liberal reform ticket, is now taking on some of the earmarks of a dictator. As for the Rastas, it makes sense that they should dream of a pilgrimage back to the cradle of Ethiopia since all black people in Jamaica are descended from people originally brought here as slaves, except for one hitch: the current government of Ethiopia is almost virulently anti-Selassie, and would hardly welcome an influx of Jah knows how many thousand dreadlocked dopers with almost no skills or education. I seriously doubt most of the Rastas know this, just as I doubt that most Jamaicans would know or care that their “freedom” has made the island perhaps more wide-open than ever for colonialist carpetbaggers.
What all this has to do with reggae is that for most reggae connoisseurs the old-time Jamaican music scene is rabble-rousingly epitomized in The Harder They Come, the Perry Henzell film about a youth who records a song he wrote himself for an unscrupulous (and archetypal) producer who pays him twenty bucks and tells him to scram. He is forced to resort to selling herb for money, the producer rips him off for all royalties, his dealings lead him to a shoot-out, and the great twist upon which this intentionally amateurish film hangs is that the kid is Public Enemy Number One and has the Number One hit single at the same time: a Bob Dylan wet dream.
Understandably, this film is banned in Jamaica. But conventional wisdom has it that the music-biz situation depicted in it has been rendered a thing of the past, principally by the founder-president of Island Records, Chris Blackwell. When reggae first became a popular export, in England in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the big English reggae label was Trojan, where boxes of tapes with nothing but artists’ names and song titles printed by hand used to arrive to be waxed and sold with the artists in most cases receiving no royalties at all. It must be remembered that most of the people making this music come from poverty and illiteracy so extreme that they can have little to no idea of the amounts of money to be made from it; undoubtedly many have been satisfied merely to have a record released with their name on the label and voice in the grooves. In such a situation many vital performers and groups, such as the Pioneers and even Desmond Dekker (who had a U.S. hit in ’69 with “Israelites”) were allowed to die on the vine, and Chris Blackwell is the first exception to this—the first person to try to build the careers of individual reggae artists and an international market for them.
Many people, however, feel that conditions for Jamaican musicians are much the same today as in The Harder They Come, even if most don’t actually resort to picking up the gun. The content of the records being released has become increasingly geared to visions of Rasta revolution of the mind and heart, although it is difficult to see how Babylon could fall and leave the record companies standing, a paradox that your average Rasta musician is cosmically adroit at skirting. With all their talk of “Jah will provide,” the Rastafarians may yet prove the first people in history to actively (if innocently) collaborate in their own exploitation by the music industry. Robert Johnson got ripped off too, but I doubt that it was a tenet of his religion. Then again, it may be that the Rastas are merely the logical extension of the sad lethargy, punctuated by random blasts of berserk gunfire, which permeates Jamaica like the smog steadily building over Kingston.
Then again, that lethargy may be as illusory as many other things in Jamaica. The rude boys (Jamaican street punks of the early Sixties) were not lethargic, Marley has sung that “a hungry mob is an angry mob,” and there is certainly no lethargy in a white person going to a black country, or shouldn’t be if he values his skin. There is something almost obscenely ironic in the need to find exotic strokes in folks so far removed from you, who are not, at all, exotic to themselves; in the way white longs to lose itself in black.
Monday. Flying over Cuba, I first realized that I was heading for the celebrated Third World. All that means for us is poor people, poorer than you or I could probably ever conceive. There’s no way they’re not gonna hate our guts, there’s no way you’re not gonna be slumming no matter who you are—I had been told that they hate black Americans as well as white (a certain odd comfort in that), and when I got there I was to discover that the hatred you feel emanating from many Jamaicans has far more to do with class and economic status than race, and that many of them would display a genuine warmth that had nothing to do with fawning with seething guts for bwana’s silver. So you might as well enjoy yourself, rubberneck, and try not to get killed. It ain’t no tropical paradise to the natives; seem to remember a guy singing a song about tables turning, begin to see what it means.
Flying from Montego Bay to Kingston, impressions of California; green hillsides dotted with elegant swimming pool split-levels below, but the music reverberating in my head bespoke only Trenchtown and was at such variance with what I saw down there that I could only wonder how long till they tear this place apart, burning and looting non-metaphorically with no metaphysical ganja above-it-all possible. You wonder if you’ll be able to visit this country at all in a few years, and your wonder increases during your stay as you read in the daily papers how Manley is chumming up with Castro, supposedly all because of a cane thresher developed by the Cubans whose blueprints could revolutionize the sugarcane business in Jamaica (where it’s still cut by hand) and
thereby perhaps save the economy. Meanwhile, the only people more violently anti-Communist than Cuban refugees are seemingly the people of Jamaica on all class levels; you wonder at times who they must hate more—the mindlessly patronizing American and Canadian tourists, or the Communists. In any case, there’s something in the air that you can breathe and taste like emotional cinders, and it isn’t love. When you get off the plane in Montego Bay and walk in to get your health card stamped, Disney World calypso natives in straw hats serenade you with backdrop of Holiday Inn sign, poster advertising the beaches of Negril (where all the white hippies go), arid latrine-green plaque warning in two languages that smoking, possession, or sale of ganja (“marijuana,” they add in parentheses for naïve hiplets) is a crime punishable by imprisonment. From the plane window, I look down and see a red lake, which I will later discover has been turned that hue and into a quicksand bog by bauxite mining on the part of the Alcoa corporation.
The first sound I heard on arriving in the Kingston airport was the Muzak blasting a Jamaican imitation Otis Redding version of “Hey Jude,” which I thought was funny enough until I discovered that Jamaican AM radio almost never plays reggae. After a week of very little beyond Helen Reddy and Neil Diamond, I would be anxious to get the hell out of this place and back home just so I could hear some Toots and the Maytals.
Kingston is very little more than a vast slum surrounding the ominous towers of babel in an enormous plastic palm Sheraton hotel, from which tourists seldom venture and around the swimming pool of which a great deal of Island Records’ business is conducted. This place has a Marcus Garvey Room (I peeked in the door; it looked like one of the rooms where I used to give speeches to Rotarian banquets in high school), but that is no reason why, upon arriving or anytime else, you should buy dope, “gold” bracelets or anything from the guys hanging around the parking lot. My colleague from Rolling Stone, arriving a virtual rube with no one to warn him, purchased a rather small quantity of not very good herb from one of these characters for the outrageous sum of $25. I have decided that it is a truth, if not a right, that in Kingston you are going to get burned, regardless of race, creed, or color, even if you never go out in the sun at all.
Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright Page 6