Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright

by Hank Bordowitz

  For the continuity-minded, that was another neat thing about Bob Marley and the Wailers: they’d grown up on the indigenous Jamaican industry, played every style (check out Bob’s teenage ska vocal on “One Cup of Coffee,” circa 1962), scuffled and suffered like dem artists must in de ghetto. When, infused by the brimstone idiosyncrasies of Rasta, they broke “wide,” they were wholly themselves. A real Big Thing.

  What no one could have guessed was how big it would become. By 1981, when Marley succumbed to cancer (supposedly the result of a soccer injury to his toe, which he refused to have amputated because “Rasta don’t amputate”), the Wailers were unthinkably huge, with 100,000 people in attendance at a single show in Milan. One of the most eloquent artists of social unrest in the second half of the twentieth century, Marley became an icon in what used to be called the Third World through his exhortation to “Get Up, Stand Up” and his across-the-board condemnation of “de downpressers.”

  These days it is impossible to walk through any major city—from Bangkok to Bamako—without seeing teenagers wearing Bob Marley T-shirts. Legend, Bob’s eternally selling “greatest hits” album, sells on. Tales of the Wailers’ epic concert in newly independent Zimbabwe routinely include spurious details of prisoners breaking down the jail doors just to see Bob. With the passing years, the reputed number of escapees grows.

  A few years ago, as we sat in a café in Lamu, on Kenya’s coast, a dreaded-up Swahili guy in a Bob shirt laughed pityingly when I questioned his assertion that Marley was murdered, his cancer injected by the ruthless Mason-controlled assassins who have ruled the Vatican in the name of Satan for more than a thousand years. As it turned out, this wasn’t just a lone nut spiel; a friend of mine heard a nearly identical saga in Indonesia a couple of years later. Needless to say, many in Jamaica believe the story. Marley iconography will only grow as a result of the recent publication by Marvel Comics of a graphic account of Bob’s life and times (it is contained in three issues: Iron, Lion, and Zion).

  More tangibly, there’s little doubt that without the precedent of Bob Marley, the entire genre of “world beat” (contemporary music of the non-Western world) would have been far slower to succeed internationally, at least commercially. “For me, Bob Marley is very important,” says Paul-Bert Rahasimanana, a.k.a. Rossy, the dreadlocked master of accordion, valiha, and kabosy, who is currently the biggest thing in the vibrant pop scene in Madagascar, home of a local industry not unlike Jamaica’s in its nascent days. “When I heard Bob Mar-ley, I understood people around the world might like my music.”

  This sentiment is echoed time and again by musicians coming out of local pop-oriented industries. Baaba Maal, the noted singer from Senegal, and numerous Zairian “soukous” stars have all paid tribute to Marley, the enabler. Beyond this is the explosion of Jamaican-style reggae itself in Africa. Actively modeling themselves after Marley and other Jamaican stars, people like Alpha Blondy from Ivory Coast and Lucky Dube of South Africa have made international careers playing social-activist reggae. “African reggae, it’s like some 360 thing, mon,” says Neville Garrick, the artist who drew several of Marley’s album covers and now, with Bob’s widow, Rita, administers the Bob Marley Foundation, which runs the museum.

  He notes the transcontinental cross-pollination of Latin rumba, mambo, and so on, which had their beginnings in African rhythms and then returned to the Mother Continent, becoming elemental to the development of soukous and Ghanaian “high-life,” among others. “The music come from there, Jamaicans mix it up, it go back,” Garrick says. Then he watches another busload of tourists drive through the gate at 56 Hope Road. “You know, mon,” he sighs, “if I have known all this would happen with Bob, I would have been a prophet myself.”

  Garrick’s assessment is borne out by a series of huge murals painted on the stone fence inside the museum grounds: Bob in Trench Town with Rita and the children; Bob with fellow Wailers Peter and Bunny as young “baldhead” ska musicians dressed in Vegas garb, their true shaggy-headed Rasta personas looming overhead; Bob at the famous 1978 One Love concert, where he shamed warring political leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga into shaking hands; Bob in Africa—this beside a gigantic picture of a rainbow with the words “give thanks for the birth of Bob . . . February 6, 1945.” All in all, there must be several hundred photographs and paintings of Marley on the museum grounds: the happy Bob, the sad Bob, the triumphant Bob, the brimstone Bob, the sensitive Bob, and the sick, soon-to-die Bob.

  This is the case throughout the country. Once hounded by the island’s police to throw away his “little herb stalk,” Bob, recipient of the Jamaican Order of Merit, is now an official national hero. They sell his T-shirts for $15 at the airport, feature him in the tourist literature. His picture is on telephone poles, inside restaurants, in every club. For sheer lionization, he’s far surpassed the Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie himself.

  “Bob was someone who came along at a certain moment. What he have to say was perfect for that moment,” continues Garrick, his dreadlocks now flecked with gray. “To tell the truth, though, most of what Bob sang about, in Jamaica, things stay the same. They don’t change. That’s why Bob sells better today than ever. So it’s wrong to say time pass Bob by . . . but it wrong too to say that time don’t pass.” As one drives around Kingston these days, it seems so: some things are the same, some not. The town does appear tidier, more well-to-do. The economy, if not booming, certainly seems capable of erecting and supporting any number of shopping centers. Jamaica is not exactly mellow, but the old tension that pervaded even the smallest transaction seems to have fallen away, at least in what’s called uptown and midtown.

  On the other hand, downtown—Rema, Trench Town, and the rest, the corrugated-hut “concrete jungle” where Marley was raised and which was the inspiration for many of his best songs—looks as fearsome as ever. The “posse”-dominated culture of political violence in these slums that spurred the 1976 assassination attempt at 56 Hope Road (Marley was shot in the arm—the tour guides dutifully point out bullet holes left in the back wall) continues, albeit more on a siege level.

  As for the local music industry, it soldiers on, pumping out the vinyl (yes, vinyl!—at least for the “domestic” market) at an unprecedented rate. What they mostly do these days is “dance hall,” which any and every Jamaican will be more than happy to tell you is the “real” rap music, since rap was “invented” in Jamaica by such “dub-kings,” “toasters,” and “deejays” as Big Youth and U Roy. (Dem rob-bin’ American Public Enemies, Tupacs, Snoop Doggy Doggs only stole it to mek dere lowlife tribal gangsta ting.) The justification for such a claim aside, suffice it to say that dance hall covers a sociosexual terrain similar to the harder side of the United States version, except that the Jamaicans, as usual, are more in your face. The late Peter Tosh’s take on the music that has come to dominate the Jamaican market—his streetwise, Rasta take—was that it was “all slackness, talk of bumbaclaat gun play and slamming what’s ’neath lady’s dress, ’bout soiled underwear and whatnot.”

  “The youth listen to what the youth listen to, can’t fight against it,” Garrick says, indicating that these days, the Rasta finds himself in a “pocket,” with “dread” nothing more than “a fashion, like everything else.” Several of the left-leaning middle-class intellectuals who were sympathetic to the Rasta ethos have left the island in disgust at the unchanging social conditions. When some dread artists were reported to have cocaine problems, Garrick tells me, it went a long way to destroying the Rasta community “as the image of the pure Nazareth.” It’s a systemic problem that won’t soon be fixed because according to Rastas around the island, it’s easier to get crack cocaine than ganja. Coke produces a different kind of “reasoning,” to be sure.

  Still, Bob Marley’s shadow is long, pervasive. Gussie Clarke, owner of the Anchor Recording Company, one of Kingston’s most modern 24-track, 24-hour-a-day recording mills, gets a bit misty when Bob Marley’s name comes up. “Bob Marley is literal
ly the single greatest example of what this industry, what Jamaica itself, can produce. Bob, he wasn’t in it for the money; it was something else to him. I don’t care what these kids say now, every Jamaican who thinks of himself as an artist wants to be Bob Marley.”

  Not the Super Beagle, at least not anymore. “Yah, when I came up Bob was what I thought about,” says the Beagle (his real name is Den-zie Beagle), a sweet-looking guy in his thirties in an undershirt who wears a jewel-studded guitar charm around his exceedingly well-developed neck. “Bob can’t be nothing but a hero, you know. But he pass on. . . . I got my own things to say. Today, I’m one of the biggest names on the island.”

  Tonight he’s trying out a few new “roots” tunes at the Centerpole Club, the Super Beagle reports, so maybe I should stop by and check them out. “Sure,” I say.

  That night, it quickly becomes apparent that the Super Beagle is not exactly one of the biggest names of the island, and the club, rather than a straight musical venue, appears more in the go-go/barroom mode. The Beagle and his five-piece band are shoehorned into a stifling six-by-six storage room out back. “Ya, mon,” the Super Beagle says. “Just doing a little practicing, you know.”

  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.

  2

  Babylon System:

  Politics in Jamaica and Beyond

  During 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.

  Reggae and the Revolutionary Faith . . . The Role of Bob Marley

  by Michael Manley

  (Source: The Rising Sun [People’s National Party newspaper], May 1982)

  ROOTS—‘UP ROOTED’

  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.

  CALYPSO

  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.

  BLUES

  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.

  REVOLUTIONARY POSSIBILITY

  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.