Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (7 page)

Marley fills in holes here and there during this silly press conference, and we do learn: Marley enjoyed the concert, and when he played Cleveland it was good, too. A Rasta is not something you can become; Rastas come from Creation. Grass is an herb, grows in the ground. It is for the healing of the nation because when people smoke grass, they communicate better (ironic titters from the unstoned press). Yes, the Wailers were offered spots on the Stones tour, but they couldn’t make it because of schedule conflicts. Too bad: It would have been interesting to see Jagger and the Stones handle a boogie band just as professional as they are, and maybe even more interesting. And man must be free, music must be free. All this time, Marley is smiling that huge grin and chortling heartily after each response. He likes this game.

Yes, and Babylon travels on one line, free men travel on another. There’s no need to collide. And reggae is a music that has plenty, plenty fight. And Toots is a Rasta, too; Jimmy Cliff is “just a man” and still making music on the Island. And white men really can’t play or produce reggae music. Marley says he never heard of Eric Clapton until he heard Clapton’s “Sheriff.”

His uncle and granduncle, “all dose type o’ people,” played blues, but not American blues—more like gospel, more funky, more a country kind of music. Then Clyde McPhatter’s “What Am I Living For?” was a big song with Marley, and there was Otis Redding and Sam Cooke and James Brown later in life. Now he’ll go to parties in Jamaica and dance all night to “every’tin, every’tin at all.” There’s a man in Jamaica who plays a bamboo saxophone that is “aaaah dangerous!” Marley’s manager, a man who seems to suffer from that peculiar kind of hyperthyroid condition of the mind common to his trade loosens up here to confirm Bob’s assessment of the man with the bamboo saxophone.

And then maybe—yes, definitely maybe—the Wailers will play a “Midnight Special.”

The conference ends with Marley, laid back in his chair, vastly amused. As we depart, he is dancing a soccer ball on his toes.

It is now Saturday night, and the Wailers are waiting in the wings of Manhattan Center while your standard Caribbean dirty comic throws a little schtick to the winds. “Take my wife, man,” says Marley’s press man by way of comment. This Manhattan Center is very odd: It looks like it’s filled with Black accountants, really clean. When Marley begins his act—second exposure confirms that it is an act in the accepted showbiz variety of the term, and not quite a spontaneous burst of Rastafarian exuberance—there is in fact an active degree of boredom at large, as if this is something cooked up by the Tourist Board. There is definitely something wrong. The sound is totally screwed. Klieg lights bathe the multitude in brilliant white light at the most inappropriate moments.

Applause follows each number, nice and sedate. It’s like everyone has a cold. Marley gives up and leaves the stage without so much as a war cry. You remember that he is an outlaw in Jamaica, not exactly your Mantovani of the Island-Paradise. Not polite, not harmless, not even entertaining.

But then, after he’s gone, something else begins to happen. There is, to begin with, a rapid exodus of well-clothed human turkeys, slowly followed by a huge rumble of shouts for more from what is left of the audience: dreadfolk. All of a sudden they’re there, and Marley, vindicated, comes back again for a three-song encore. The joint commences to jump and it’s strange: It’s almost a private party here now, almost like the old Stones or the New York Dolls or a damn good high school dance. It’s a question of a thousand people swaying in unison, far away from home and even further away from talkin’ to the boss. It’s kinky reggae, and it’s hypnotic once again. Marley stretches out his arms and hovers in the flat white light like a crucified bird, feeling the bass notes buzz up through his legs and moving softly to their rhythm as the music thunders on and on.

W
ITHIN the past year Bob Marley has led his band, the Wailers, from relative obscurity to international acclaim. Marley’s volatile personal image and the ragged lope of the Wailers’ music have made them the most exciting exponents of the Jamaican popular music known as reggae. It seemed only logical that they be chosen as the Jamaican headliners for the first international “dream” concert held recently in Kingston, Jamaica.

The concert, which featured Stevie Wonder, came to a tumultuous conclusion as Wonder and Marley joined each other in performing their respective hits, “Superstition” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” And long after Marley had left the stage, people shouted his name.

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.”

T
HE 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.