Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright

by Hank Bordowitz

  Defendants listed in court papers include Marley Boys Inc.; Rita Marley, the widow of the reggae legend; Richard Booker; Cedella Marley Booker; Universal Studios Florida; and three other Universal divisions connected to the theme park.

  Universal Studios Florida announced plans for a Marley entertainment complex in February 1996. The complex, to be named “Bob Marley—A Tribute To Freedom,” is scheduled to open in early 1998 (Billboard, March 2, 1996).

  In the lawsuit, Gaty says he approached the Marley heirs in early 1995 to discuss “ways in which the Bob Marley name and legacy could be exploited for profit.”

  Among the ideas discussed, according to the lawsuit, were a movie and a replica of Marley’s home in Jamaica that would be the model for a restaurant, club, and retail venue. The Marley house venue would have been opened in different locations around the world.

  Gaty then suggested the family take the idea to executives at Universal Studios Florida, according to court papers.

  The lawsuit claims Gaty “sold” the idea of the Marley venue to Universal at a pitch meeting held in April 1995 with all parties present. Gaty, who had no written contract with either Universal or the Mar-ley family, says the parties accepted his idea with the “knowledge and understanding that the idea was the property of Gaty and could not be used without his knowledge or consent,” according to the lawsuit.

  In addition, Gaty was to receive profit participation in the Marley venue concept, the suit claims.

  A spokeswoman for Universal declined to comment on the lawsuit; a representative for the Marley heirs could not be reached for comment by press time.

  II

  MUSIC GONNA TEACH THEM A LESSON

  The Meaning of Bob Marley

  1

  Zion Train: Religion, Rasta, and Revelation

  Marley, largely influenced by his half-brother Bunny “Wailer” Livingston and their acquaintance with Mortimo Planno, became a major proponent of Jamaica’s singular religion, Rastafarianism. As such, he became a spokesman for the movement, an icon within it. Bob’s relationship with Rastafarianism is certainly complex.

  On the one hand, he never saw himself as anything more or less than a mouthpiece, a spokesperson for what he believed. While he mildly derided the gospel music his grandfather would listen to, he was making a kind of gospel of his own, preaching a gospel of Rastafarianism. Marley’s gospel, however, had his own personal bent, one that could be traced from “Simmer Down” through “Redemption Song”: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.” His take on his religion centered on what makes it—and most other religions, properly practiced—righteous: the ability of people to better themselves.

  On the other hand, the power of both his message and his faith inspired millions, not necessarily to become Rastafarians, but to respond to the heart of the message, to improve themselves and the way they interacted with their fellow man. Especially in his later music, his message had less to do with blaming Babylon and more to do with advancing the state of humanity.

  With that message, he could be a modern prophet in any religion.

  Bob Marley—Rastaman, Reggae Musician

  by Rose Blount

  (Source: Black Book Bulletin)

  Africa unite/’cause we’re moving right out of Babylon

  and we’re going to our father’s land

  How good and how pleasant it would be

  before God and man

  to see the unification of all Africans

  As its been said already

  Let it be done right now

  We are the children of the Rastaman

  We are the children of the higher man.

  BOB MARLEY, SURVIVAL ALBUM

  In any discussion of Reggae music in general, and Bob Marley in particular, it is important to address the concept of Rastafari, since it is from this consciousness that Marley lives and creates his music. He has achieved a oneness of purpose that predominates in his existence and his art.

  Reggae music had its beginnings in the 1960’s in Jamaica, and incorporated American R & B sound with Jamaican rhythms. Groups such as Bob Marley and the Wailers (which included Peter Tosh), Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and the Mighty Diamonds became popular. Marley’s early work, then as now, focused on the plight of Jamaica’s poor in Trenchtown, Kingston’s ghetto.

  Reggae became the music of the Rastafarians, a sect founded by Marcus Garvey, which believes in the divinity of Haile Selassie I, former Emperor of Ethiopia. Evidence of Selassie’s divinity is traced through the Bible, as are many other aspects of Rasta culture and consciousness. Selassie, or God, is referred to as Jah, and his followers as Rastafarians, after Selassie’s title—Ras Tafari. Asked what the movement stands for, Marley reveals that, “In 1930 when His Majesty was crowned, the movement get stronger, and it take the name Rasta. This movement deal with Christianity in reality, so this what happening in the world.”

  While the movement does advocate the Christian ideals of peace and love, it is also concerned with bringing about the actuality of unity among all Black people and eventual repatriation to the motherland. These are very strong themes in Marley’s latest album, which features on its cover both the stowage plan of a slave ship and the flags of all African nations. The album includes such titles as “Zimbabwe,” “Africa Unite,” “Wake Up and Live,” and “Survival.”

  As an indication of Marley’s consciousness, he released “Wake Up and Live” as a U.S. single, and “Ambush in The Night” as the Jamaican single, because as he states, “‘Ambush in the Night’ is a reality in Jamaica right now. ‘Wake Up and Live’ is needed up here. People won’t wake up and live up here.”

  As the vanguard of the political movement in Jamaica, the Rasta-farians suffer as much political and economic oppression as U.S. Blacks. They are subject to imprisonment and unemployment; their children are denied an education because of their hair—dreadlocks— symbol of the Rastafari. But they continue to fight for freedom and dignity. Marley feels, “We grow more and more every day . . . the Rasta movement in Jamaica is the movement . . . Rasta is the only one to stand up and fight.”

  “The society in Jamaica is in line with any other society. Like for instance now, we as Rasta in Jamaica. The government is not Rasta government. The government different. That mean, even if you not a Rasta, you going to be an outcast . . . society is not for Rasta . . . Rasta government give people freedom. No terrorization, brutalization. I can run our own life. People in authority carry tradition of the devil. They know exactly what I’m fighting against.”

  Considering the vehemence with which any movement of oppressed people is undermined by the European power structure and its media, it is curious that Marley and Reggae have survived. Even more curious is the fact that Marley’s audiences are predominantly white, and Reggae receives very little airtime on Black radio stations. White artists such as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, and others have experimented with Reggae sound and incorporated it into their acts, once again usurping Black creativity. Marley concedes that the majority of his audiences are white, but notes that “there’s more Blacks . . . listening to the music.” He has recently established his own record label, Tough Gong International, and hopefully can establish more control over the distribution of his music.

  A step in that direction was achieved during his recent tour of Africa. In addition to having his music well received during his tour, Marley was able to define his own opinions of the motherland. “My general impression is that Africa need Black people, all sides of Africa, because Africa need the development that the people of the West know . . . everything we learn that is benefit of community.”

  “Africa is more revolutionized today than yesterday. The real thing is that Africa (doesn’t) unite as Rasta. They unite as Marx and Lenin . . .” Marley notes the case of the Soviet presence in Ethiopia and their attempt to set up Soviet-style government, “they should not be there.” Marley plans to move to Africa himself “as soon as our work is
finished . . . what you have to understand, what’s going on can’t go on too long. Anyway, it just can’t go on too long.”

  Marley tries to bring about positive growth through his music and none of his musical energy is wasted. There is a constant struggle to enlighten, to teach, to revolutionize. In describing his music during a discussion of the labels invariably placed upon that which is different, Marley comments: “You might have people who don’t know—people who can’t play music. And then ones who limit the inspiration of the musician . . . what I deal with, I tell the truth . . . freedom of mankind. Lyrics can be the truth. Even disco, you can sing a Rasta message. I never have anything bad to say about music, but lyrics. . . . In time, make people know the truth.”

  Perhaps one of Marley’s biggest personal achievements was the One Love concert staged in Jamaica in April 1978. This concert was an attempt to bring together the rival youth gangs which were literally killing each other. The message was peace and unity. “It has made a change, youth and youth come together. That is the biggest change I ever make anywhere.”

  Bob Marley has been criticized by some for his use of ganja, or Jamaican marijuana. It is another aspect of Rasta culture, which most outsiders do not fully understand. The use of ganja is considered a sacrament, a form of meditation. “Herb is the healer of the nation. If you smoke, smoke herb. Rastaman use herb for meditation. Especially in our busy world like this, you smoke herb . . . what is going on, it still can’t trouble you . . . keep your meditation.”

  While everyone may not agree with this statement on herb, one can’t deny that Marley’s potential as a moving force behind Black cultural consciousness is great. His music is popular in such diverse areas as the Caribbean, the U.S., Africa, England (especially within London’s large population of Blacks), and Canada (primarily Toronto).

  In any case, it is important that artists such as Bob Marley and other Rasta/Reggae musicians be supported in their struggle to continue producing “music with a message.” With this in mind, representatives of the Progressive Arts Center in Chicago held a reception for Bob Marley and the Wailers in November 1979. Marley was given the Asanti name Osahane, meaning “redeemer.”

  In light of some of the negative statements about Marley, his music and Rasta culture put forth by the white press, he clearly deserves our support. A major Chicago music critic once said of Marley: “With foot-long dread locks flying about with every shake of his heed, and eyes that have probably been at half-mast since puberty, Marley still retains the charisma of a drug-addled tropical mystic.” Such a conception merely indicates the critic’s very limited understanding of Bob Marley and his music, and is, therefore, a thoroughly irresponsible review. It is this type of assessment that undermines progressive attempts by Black people to continue to struggle for survival. Marley’s latest album, aptly titled, Survival, is a testament to both his struggle as well as ours.

  Bob Marley Live: Reggae, Rasta, and Jamaica Fourteen Years after Marley’s Death

  by Mark Jacobson

  (Source: Natural History, November 1995)

  AS I stand in front of Bob Marley’s former home, at 56 Hope Road in Kingston, now the site of the Bob Marley Museum, watching busloads of Japanese and German tourists drive through the iron gate and park on the now blacktopped field where, twenty years ago, I saw Bob, Alan “Skill” Cole, and other Rastafarians play soccer, a perhaps appropriately cynical thought crosses my mind: well, at least the King of Reggae, the Lion of Jamaica, isn’t buried in the backyard like a pet gerbil, the way Elvis is at Graceland.

  Following the musician’s death fourteen years ago (he would have been fifty last February) and other wrenching disasters—including the murder of Peter Tosh (one of the original members of Marley’s trio, the Wailers) and the still unresolved litigation over Marley’s reputed $30 million estate—the Bob Marley fan is thankful for small favors. Even as I walk past the bulbous statue of Marley done in cement, which looms, golemlike, over the front yard, and am led through the museum’s somewhat meager collection of memorabilia inside the two-story, jalousied house (“Dis dere is Bob’s blender, where he mix up healthy ital [‘holy’] drinks. . . . Dis is de tree ’bout which Bob wrote ‘Three Little Birds’. . . . Dere’s Bob’s rusted bicycle. . . . Dere’s a buncha articles written ’bout Bob”), it is not difficult to remember another time.

  This was the early fall of 1975, scant months after the fall of Saigon, when the properly stoned observer might easily have mistaken the small but culturally fecund island of Jamaica in general, and 56 Hope Road in particular, for the temporary center of the universe. Back then it seemed that no one had ever encountered anything as splendid as Robert Nesta Marley (already the most famous man in Jamaica but not yet the huge international pop star he would become), sitting on the front steps of this ramshackle great house, dreadlocks hanging over his face, strumming out a few verses of his most recent local radio smash, “Jah Live.” When he sang, reedily, “fools sayin’ in dere heart/Rasta yar God is dead . . . The truth is an offense but not a sin/is he laugh last, is he who win . . . Jah lives,” it was enough to make me weep.

  I’ll never know exactly why the often irascible-with-white-folks author of “Burnin’ and Lootin’” chose to favor me with this private little concert, unless it was because he’d just saved my life, more or less, by shooing away several of his former associates from Trench Town. (Wielding machetes, they had accosted me in the upstairs hallway of his house, stolen my ticket for the upcoming Wailers concert with Stevie Wonder, and locked me in the room that now contains “The Bob Marley Library.”) It was an emotional time. Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, proclaimed Lion of Judah, alleged 225th direct descendant in a line back to King Solomon, the man worshiped by Rastafarians as Jah, or “the living God,” had recently died. The brethren looked to Marley, the best-known Rastafarian in the world, to comment on this unsettling metaphysical development. “Jah Live” was his rejoinder. “Jah live because you can’t kill God.”

  For me and other ex-hippie press junketeers, thoroughgoing secularists all, sent to Kingston’s scruffy version of paradise to check out this new Big Thing, it was the defiance of Marley’s reply, and its unimpeachable sincerity, that was so thrilling. To Bob, it didn’t matter what the denizens of Babylon (the Rasta term for all that is not ital in the sight of Jah) said. Let them bring their dried-up rationalism, let them slice God’s flesh with their sharp autopsy blades, claim to throw his so-called body in an unmarked grave, it didn’t matter. The wicked cabal of back-stabbing communists, Vatican hypocrites, and corporate sons of pirate, slave-master fathers were all wrong. And Bob, along with his marijuana-smoking, wild-haired, Bible-quoting, prophecy-believing, guitar-playing crew were right: Jah live.

  After all, given the steadfast free association requisite for a small bunch of people on an isolated Caribbean island to come to the fervent conclusion that the diminutive Haile Selassie—the inept and petty autocrat described in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s scathing book The Emperor—was the living God on earth, the denial of the monarch’s death was no big leap.

  To gain a degree of insight into the brilliantly off-the-wall, modernist synthesis that is Rastafarianism, it is useful to know that, as recounted in any number of reggae songs, the cornerstone of the creed rests on a prophecy supposedly spoken by Marcus Garvey, the formidable Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist of the early twentieth century.

  “Look to Africa for the crowning of a black king; he shall be the redeemer,” Garvey is held to have said, thereby playing the John the Baptist role in Rasta cosmology by alerting the brethren to the subsequent crowning of Selassie as the emperor of Ethiopia in 1930. But as detailed in Timothy White’s definitive Marley biography, Catch a Fire, Marcus Garvey not only never made such a prophecy, he was actually publicly critical of Haile Selassie.

  Not that this historical discrepancy would have mattered much to those Jamaicans for whom the beautiful island of the tourist ads was a Kafkaesque limbo-with-banana-trees from which
they craved an exit and a solution. To them the entire slavery experience of their forebears was tantamount to a terrible nightmare from which they had awakened in “a strange land” as tragically misplaced, debased squatters. The prophecy led them to believe that they would be repatriated to a purified and glorious Africa. (Whether this millenarian vision was to come about through divine intervention or practical efforts was up for interpretation.)

  Taking Selassie’s princely name, Ras Tafari, for their own, the Rastafarians went on to find biblical justification for not cutting their hair, never eating processed food, and smoking “the herb of the land.” Herb (which should never be called dope, because “no plant can be a dope”) facilitated for the Rastas the proper state for much subsequent “reasoning.” It didn’t matter if the British-tutored, nose-to-the-grindstone Jamaican middle class berated the Rastas as skylarking layabouts whose philosophies made no sense. It certainly didn’t matter if accoutrements like dread-locks scared people out of their wits.

  That was the thing about Bob Marley: he was a true believer. In 1975, no less so than today, that really was a Big Thing. Plus, the music was unbeatable. The first Wailers’ albums to be released worldwide, Catch a Fire, Burnin’, and the subsequent Natty Dread (made after the breakup of the original trio—Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston), each lyrically seething with revolution, remain in the canon of the greatest pop records ever.

  Best of all, from the down-home music fan’s point of view, was that the Wailers didn’t belch forth from the corporate vacuum. As anyone who saw the vigorous film The Harder They Come suspected, Jamaica was filled with Bob Marleys and Wailers and would-be Wailers. There was an entire hothouse music industry run by producers, players, and singers—seat-of-the-pants capitalists all, outfitted with healthy stacks of scratchy 45s that were peddled from shoe boxes. The special brand of “roots” reggae played by Bob Marley was only the most recent mutation of Jamaican pop, which began with the Louis Jordan/Fats Domino-influenced “blue beat” in the early 1950s. Blue beat became the miraculous “ska” (as pioneered by the invincible Skatalites), which then became the love-man, vocal-dominated “rock steady” of Ken Boothe and Alton Ellis, followed by the angelic early reggae harmonies of the magnificent Heptones, Desmond Dekker, and a hundred more.