Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (27 page)

If the slight misrepresentation of his position in the hierarchy of Jamaican pop stars makes the Super Beagle feel guilty, he does not show it. Nor does he seem sheepish about the fact that his repertoire, while including some of the advertised “cultural” tunes, also encompasses much dance-hall rapping, in addition to several old-style, rock-steady love ballads. As the Beagle later says, “In this day and age, good to remain flexible.” Not that any of this is a problem, because the Super Beagle sounds terrific. Everyone in Jamaica seems to sing better than anyone not in Jamaica, and the Super Beagle is at least as good as most of them. Maybe it isn’t Bob Marley in 1968, but it will do.

The next morning, when I go to 56 Hope Road one last time, my cab driver, a man in his fifties wiping the sweat from his face with a handkerchief, provides me with some unsolicited insights: “It’s hot today. In Jamaica, it’s hot every day. Each year a little hotter, with not so much rainfall. When I was a little boy, I remember there was ample rainfall. The water soaked into the ground. You could breathe then. Now there is no ample rainfall, so the earth feels like it is dying. It folds up on itself, and reaches up till it starts to tear the meat from the bodies of human beings, ripping and tearing till there’s only the bones, gleaming in the sun. That’s what’s going to happen to me, to you, and what happen to Bob Marley.”

Over at 56 Hope Road, tourists from Munich pour in; they had their choice of the Marley museum or downtown Kingston for their day’s excursion in the Jamaican capital. Their tour begins with Bob’s herb garden, where the lone spindly marijuana plant is described as “something that is used for smoking.”

“They keep coming,” says Bragga, kneeling on his haunches. “That show even if Bob in his coffin, he don’t die.” Anywhere from fifty to eighty. Bragga has been around for a long time. He claims to remember me from my three-day visit twenty years earlier. This is ridiculous, but who knows? He also claims to have been with Bob when he wrote his first recorded song, “Judge Not,” back in the early 1960s.

“Ya mon,” Bragga says, talking a little slow so I understand half of what issues from his nearly toothless mouth. “In the cemetery yard, the boys were there, and bring fruit from Coronation Market. All the boys want the biggest fruit. One take it, but the big one, it is not sweet. So Bob write ’bout the illusion of that. Judge not, before you judge yourself, judge not, if you’re not ready for judgment, so why talk about me, someone else is judging you.”

“There it is now,” Bragga says, off-handedly. It takes a moment to realize what he is talking about. As part of the Bob Marley experience at 56 Hope Road, Bob’s music plays incessantly on the sound system. Mostly it’s the familiar international hits off the later albums, tunes like “Is This Love,” “Jammin’,” the new version of “One Love.” It doesn’t matter that these often weary-sounding songs, many made when Bob was already dying, cannot compare with the classic political tunes, stepping razors like “Concrete Jungle,” “Mr. Brown,” and “Small Axe.”

Yet there it is, coming out of the loudspeaker. “Judge Not”: the seventeen-year-old Bob, his voice up a couple of registers from where it would settle, innocent and brand-new.

D
uring a particularly brutal period in Jamaican politics, when former record salesman Edward Seaga and People’s National Party candidate Michael Manley fought for control of the island’s political future, the people engaged in gang warfare in the streets of Kingston. By this time, Marley was both revered and feared. On December 3, 1976, at the height of the bitter campaign, several gunmen broke into the Marley compound on Hope Road in Kingston, shot Bob in the arm, his wife Rita in the head, and manager Don Taylor five times. A year later, during the massive One Love Peace Concert in Jamaica, Marley brought both Seaga and Manley on stage during the Wailer’s set and joined their hands together, an act which earned him the United Nations Third World Peace Medal. Though the symbolic gesture’s measurable effects were ultimately fleeting, no other artist could have done this, and no other artist would have dared.

Marley was unlike other musical stars from developing nations. Fela Anikulapo Kuti maintained that he could say he wanted to be president and be carried into office by acclamation. Ruben Blades frequently talks of a possible future in public service in Panama; he also could be carried into office by acclamation. But Bob Marley had a major aversion to “politricks.” He saw himself as a singer. When politicians wooed his support, especially after the attempt on his life, he would have none of it.

Yet that didn’t stop him from being politically relevant, both at home and in Africa. While he never set out to be an icon, with songs espousing freedom, justice, and standing up for your rights, with songs that pointed out that a small axe could fell a big tree (actually a reference to the three big record companies in Jamaica), he was, as he would have said,
woooo
—dangerous.

Within the Third World there is a unique social phenomenon. It was created by one of the terrible diaspora of history. The slave trade, stretching in the main from the 17th to the 18th Centuries, uprooted millions of Black Africans, depositing them throughout the Caribbean, the United States and the more northerly regions of Latin America. There our ancestors were subjected to the most systematic and sustained act of deculturization in modern history. Here was no oppression of a people on their native soil. The slave had no familiar ancestral earth into which to plant his feet and dig his toes while wait- ing for the tide of oppression to recede or the opportunity for rebellion to present itself. The slaves were uprooted, detribalized, de-named, de-humanized. The only thing the oppressor could not take away was their humanity.

Through it all, music was one of the means through which the slave held on to the past and endured the present. Any discussion of the BLUES, the CALYPSO, the REGGAE begins at this point. Like all folk music, it is all essentially commentary; but what is unique about this commentary is it reflects in every thought, in every musical pulse, something to do with survival and accommodation. The children of the diaspora struggle for a place in society to this day. Worse, they struggle for their identities, mislaid as the slave ships made their way to the New World through the MIDDLE PASSAGE. Therefore, their commentaries must deal with these realities.

THE CALYPSO, exclusively Trinidadian, is cynical, satirical, amoral and often savage. The Trinidadian masses survived at least until the 1960’s by a collective disregard of both the laws and the values of the oppressor. The individual spirit endured its degradation and transcended its hopelessness by laughing at everything including itself. But this was not the laughter of gentle good nature, illuminating a comfortable companionship. This was laughter like a weapon, like a rapier or a razor honed in centuries of surviving.

THE BLUES have some of this but are more reflective of the consciousness of oppression. Perhaps, the American black has always known his situation to be closer to the hopeless.

Of them all, the REGGAE is the most explicitly revolutionary. It is commentary; satirical at times; often cruel; but its troubadours are not afraid to speak of love, of loyalty, of hope, of ideals, of justice, of new things and new forms. It is this assertion of revolutionary possibility that sets reggae apart. It has evolved from the original folk form of the MENTO. From this there sprang SKA, which began a sort of marriage between American Rhythm and Blues, Gospel and the indigenous mento form. The mento itself often was driven on the strong beat of the digging song, which helped the workers to survive the monotony of long hours with the pickaxe. It was unlikely, therefore, that the beat of Jamaican music would be more than influenced by Rhythm and Blues and would certainly never entirely succumb to it. In due course, SKA yielded to ROCK STEADY, the entire period of transition providing its heroes like the late great trombonist DON DRUMMOND. But we were still in transition. Then it all came together with REGGAE.

When one listens to everything from mento to reggae, one sees in instant reflection the dilemma of identity. The strong African root is there, particularly in the rhythm and the use of drums. But so great was the act of cultural destruction that all of the infinite subtlety and sophistication, which sets African drumming apart, is missing. I can remember the first time I heard an authentic African drummer, I was astonished and for a while had difficulty in understanding what was going on, so intricate were the variations, so complex the rhythmic embroidery around the central driving beat. In Jamaica, only the central beat has survived. EVEN THIS SURVIVAL IS A MIRACLE IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES.

The most fundamental question that arises about reggae is: how did it become so explicitly and positively political? The greatest of the calypsonians, the MIGHTY SPARROW has journeyed into political commentary; but even he, quintessentially a part of the Trinidadian environment, although born in Grenada, has stopped short of the assertion of rights, has not essayed a positively revolutionary call. BY CONTRAST, THE GREATER PART OF BOB MARLEY IS THE LANGUAGE OF REVOLUTION.

Middle class intellectuals had claimed a future for the Caribbean. But this was not reflected in the spontaneous music of the ghetto.

WHAT GAVE MARLEY THE COURAGE TO GO BEYOND MOCKERY TO HOPE: TO TRANSCEND COMMENT AND ASSERT RIGHT? TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THIS YOU MUST ENQUIRE: DID BOB MARLEY REDEEM HIS IDENTITY BY RE-CROSSING THE MIDDLE PASSAGE AND REENTERING THE KINGDOM OF HIS PAST? HE WHO KNOWS HIS PAST CAN BELIEVE THAT THE FUTURE IS THE TERRITORY OF HOPE. HE WHO KNOWS NOT HIS PAST FINDS THAT IN SPITE OF HIMSELF, HIS FUTURE IS, IN HIS MIND, A BURIAL GROUND. FAITH BEGINS WITH AN ACCEPTANCE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF CONTINUITY. IF YOU CANNOT SURVEY A CONTINUITY INTO YOUR OWN PAST, YOU CANNOT BELIEVE IN A CONTINUITY INTO YOUR OWN FUTURE. MARLEY HAD THAT FAITH.

How did Bob Marley successfully undertake this journey into his past, which released him to a belief in his people’s future? The answer is: Rastafarianism. I enter into no controversy about people and their faith. To each his own. But it is inextricably a part of the psychodrama in which the black of the diaspora are enmeshed that their traditional, Christian faith is visualized in white terms. Inevitably and obviously, a religion that was spawned at the very centre of white civilization expresses its faith through familiar symbols. lf the servants and children of God are white, they will think of both God and Christ in terms of self-image. Therefore, the God that emerges will be imagined to be white. Every church has its sculpture and its painting expressed in white terms. So the children of the slaves begin with a visual contradiction. To compound the problem, the particular expression of Christianity was first the creature of the oppressor. Yet, the children of the slaves need faith and have faith. They are sure there is a God and they are sure that somewhere that God is their God rooted in the land of the past and visualized in terms of their self-image.

Rastafarianism is a true faith in the sense that its believers have taken that step beyond mere rationality into the acceptance of a view of the unknown, unknowable and improvable which is faith. To them Haile Selassie is the symbol of God on earth and God himself is as revealed in the Holy Scriptures. The true Rastafarian, therefore, has traced his identity beyond mere history and geography to the ultimate source of all things, for the believer, the Creator himself. BUT HE HAS ARRIVED AT HIS CREATOR THROUGH THE IMAGES AND THE SOIL OF AFRICA. BY THAT ACT HE HAS RE-DISCOVERED THE SELF THAT WAS MISLAID IN THE MIDDLE PASSAGE.

ROBERT NESTA MARLEY, Order of Merit (O.M.), super star, father and definitive exponent of reggae, was a Rastafarian. He had taken that journey. By that act he had solved his identity crisis. He had become a complete human being. In his completeness he could sing songs of compassion: “No Woman, No Cry”; he could spit revolutionary defiance: “War”; he could embrace proletarian internationalism: “Zimbabwe”—AND HE COULD DO IT ALL WITH AN UNSELFCONSCIOUS CONVICTION THAT MADE HIM A KIND OF SPONTANEOUS, UNCOMPROMISING REVOLUTIONARY, UNTOUCHED BY WEALTH, UNFAILINGLY GENEROUS, ETERNALLY UNSPOILT.

I first knew Bob Marley in 1971, in the days of “Trench Town Rock”. At this stage his music was still like visceral protest carried on the wings of a relatively uncomplicated commentary on the ghetto. Throughout that year, he used to perform as part of a group of artists who traveled all over Jamaica with me as the Party which I led prepared for the General Elections of 1972. Until that time, my own political perceptions had reflected a mutually reinforcing marriage. On the one hand, there was the political theory, which I had absorbed from my Father as a youth and had developed into explicit Socialist doctrine as a student in University. On the other hand was some twenty years as an organizer and negotiator with the Jamaican Trade Union Movement. To this was now added a vital and new ingredient. I could never pretend that the lyrics of the protest music, which were the driving motivations of reggae, taught me things that I did not know. From an intellectual point of view, they were confirmatory of all that I believed as a Socialist, and have struggled against as a Trade Unionist. But I had not myself been born in the ghetto and was not personally a part of that experience. Reggae music influenced me profoundly by deepening the element of emotional comprehension.

I suppose a rough equivalent might be sought by a consideration of the influence of a writer like Dickens upon the sensibilities of English readers in the Nineteenth Century. In highly literate societies, the pen is a mighty instrument. It cannot change the structure of classes, nor the relations between classes, because it cannot, of itself, change the nature and organization of production. But it can pry loose from traditional class attitudes those extraordinary individuals who become a part of the process of political change in a society.

Jamaica had produced a handful of great writers like GEORGE CAMPBELL, ROGER MAIS and VIC REID who had spoken to the issues of suffering and oppression. Their works helped create an awareness of the imperatives of change. But how many people read them? Everybody listened to Marley and his school of reggae protestors. Certainly, I listened and was reinforced in the conviction that we had to STRUGGLE FOR CHANGE.

The invention of the gramophone, the radio and television has created a mass market for contemporary music. Where the symphony orchestra became the principal instrument for the dissemination of the great music of the classical European tradition, simpler forms of music would now have international currency. Technology brought into the market the broad masses of the people virtually everywhere on the globe. So there is no mystery about the means by which Bob Marley’s music, and reggae along with it, have become familiar to the peoples of Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The real issue to be examined however is why has reggae established an audience for itself among the myriad of competing musical forms, which jostle for space in the communication apparatus? Pride of place is held by synthetic, escape music. With its bromides and anodynes it is there to pour balm on the souls that are either damaged by the failure to beat the economic system or bored because they have.

At the other end of the spectrum is the biting but parochial satire of the calypso, which makes no impression on the international system whatsoever. Blues hold a significant place because sadness is a recognizable part of the human condition. In any case, America has produced most of the greatest technical virtuosos who have come out of the non-classical tradition. Clearly, reggae cannot, and is not going to compete with the escape music; but unlike the calypso, it has already carved a significant niche for itself. I can only hazard a guess that this owes much to two factors. Firstly, there is Marley himself: an authentic innovator, a genuine original in the sense that is true, say, of a STEVIE WONDER. Reggae has “gone international”, therefore partly on the back of Marley’s gifts. But it must also be true that the protest of reggae, the positive assertion of moral categories goes beyond parochial boundaries. AMONG OTHER THINGS REGGAE IS THE SPONTANEOUS SOUND OF A LOCAL REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE. BUT REVOLUTION ITSELF IS A UNIVERSAL CATEGORY. IT IS THIS, POSSIBLY, WHICH SETS IT APART EVEN TO THE INTERNATIONAL EAR.