Lyrical Prophet
Roger Steffens
During this crucial period, Bob realized that his music was not just for entertainment but had a more elevated purpose: to tell the world of the presence of the Divinity who lived among us here and now. "Coming from the root of King David, through the line of Solomon, His Imperial Majesty is the Power of Authority" ("Blackman Redemp- tion"). Planno and others urged Bob to incorporate the messages he was learning into his songs, and from the late 1960s onward, Rasta livity was the central facet of the majority of Bob's compositions.
Music you're the key,
Talk to who, please talk to me.
Bring the voice of the Rastaman
Communicating to everyone..
Come we go chant down Babylon one more time,
For them soft, yes them soft,
Them soft, me say them soft.6
Curiously enough, at that very time Bob was under the pay of American soul singer Johnny Nash, who had hired Bob as a songwriter and performer. For five years, Nash and his associates groomed Marley as a "soul" singer, based on Marley's own wishes to penetrate the American rhythm-and-blues market and charts. But the experiment failed, and in 1972, Nash sold Bob's contract to Chris Blackwell of Island Records- and the rest is history.
Taking advantage of Nash's rigorous training, Bob produced an international debut album of extraordinary power called Catch a Fire. In it were lines of pure poetic in- ventiveness, haiku-like in their ability to pare down elaborate concepts to their bare es- sentials, as in this couplet from "Slave Driver" about capitalism: "Good God this illit- eracy / is only machine to make money." In other words, keep the masses uneducated, and you can continue to get away with paying them seventeen cents an hour for theit labor. The album was notable for its spare rhythms, being heard for the first time tit places such as America, and for its bold, provocative, postpolitical take "on the sys tem." In America, the hippie-driven movement to combine politics with pop music had been co-opted by the major record companies, interred in a dither of witless disco. Bob's voice was a cry for liberation from the smothering of capitalist divisionism.
Catch a Fire received rave reviews but sold little. Its follow-up, Burnin', garnered sim ilar notices and likewise meager sales. Burnin' would prove to be the final statement of the original Wailers. Told by Chris Blackwell that the Wailers were "nobodies" and that they were going to play only in "freak clubs," Bunny Wailer promptly quit the group in the spring of 1973, just when it looked as if the ten years of work the group had ac complished were finally coming to rewarding fruition. Not long after, the militant Pe ter Tosh, informed that he "owed" the record label more than forty-thousand pounds, quit too.
Marley spent most of the next year regrouping. He added a backup trio composed of three of the most successful female singers in Jamaica: his wife, Rita Marley; Judy Mowatt; and Marcia Griffiths. Natty Dread, the first solo album of his career, emerged at the end of 1974, and if anyone had any doubts about Bob's commitment to the rev- olution, they were erased by such lines as "I feel like bombing a church / Now that you know that the preacher is lying" ("Talkin' Blues") and
Revelation reveals the truth... It takes a revolution to make a solution Never make a politician grant you a favor, They will always want to control you forever, So if a fire make it burn, And if a blood make it run We got lightning, thunder, brimstone and fire. Kill, cramp, and paralyze all weakheart conception, Wipe them out of creation. Let righteousness cover the earth Like the water cover the sea.7
Marley had already recorded a Jamaican single called "Fire Fire" in which he had spoken of the final judgment, a theme that would recur throughout his life. He also spoke of the approaching Armageddon, in "Ride Natty Ride," on his 1979 masterpiece Survival:
Jah says this judgment
Could never be with water,
So no water could put out this fire
Now the fire is burning
Out of control, panic in the city,
Wicked weeping for their gold.
Not by coincidence did rock critics, unnerved by the appearance and demeanor of this
Third World rabble-rouser, begin to refer to Marley as "an Old Testament prophet."
With the help of a new manager, Don Taylor, Marley was on the verge of becoming a superstar as he headed for England in the summer of 1975. The shrewd Taylor had a policy of underbooking Marley, placing him in halls too small to hold the expected mul- titudes of new fans who flocked to see the wiry singer, and the result was the expected pandemonium, making headlines wherever Marley appeared. During his tours, Marley was often asked by the press about his music and his motives. He took every chance he got to turn such questions to his metasubject, Rastafari. "Religionis juvery chance the politics," he told interviewers, "Religion is just war. It's a warfield.... The only good sign I see is Rastafari. Rasta mean head. Fari mean creator. Rastafari is head creator. Head creator is God. What does God mean? Rastafari! Haile Selassie is the Christ who them speak of, Him come again."9
He was particularly fierce in his condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church, an at- titude fostered in Rastafari by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s. In those days, the Jamaican Daily Gleaner newspaper published photographs on its front pages of the pope blessing Italian planes before they flew to Africa to murder innocent people with their cargo of guns and poison gas. This, to the Rasta in Jamaica, was inconceiv- able: How could an alleged man of God countenance such immoral behavior? The pope, they reasoned, must therefore be the Antichrist, the leader of Babylon. Of this Bob was convinced, telling journalist Chris Boyle, "Babylon is a man-made power, evil, put to- gether to rule the people by force. Keep them killing one another.... So where did all the power come from? Rome. The Vatican. That's where they get white power. Pope is white power, represent the Devil. What he is defending is what he is. Show me your company and I'll tell you who you are. By their food you shall know them.... For me, God is living and life. That mean I have to live with God. God create you to be free. Free up yourselves, otherwise you worthless. "10
Marley's uncensored words moved the hearts of people throughout the world. As Jamaican economist Michael Witter has written, Marley's "Rastafarian world view in- cluded faith that justice would eventually, inevitably and necessarily triumph over in- justice. And this was so central a process to the unfolding universe, creation, that the natural forces in their biblical forms, 'fire, brimstone, lightning, [thunder),' would be part of the arsenal of the just. Only reggae seems to embody this peculiar synthesis of the subversive and the seductive. "11 Indeed, it is sometimes impossible to tell whether Bob is singing "Jah" or "joy."
Marley's outspokenness was sure to make enemies, a result he foresaw in a note on the cover of his 1976 Rastaman Vibration album. He had long thought of himself as Joseph, the biblical figure who kept the children of Israel fed through their seven years in the desert. Judy Mowatt says, "Bob was Joseph in these times, bringing us spiritual food during the seven years he toured the world." "Joseph is a fruitful bough," an- nounced Rastaman Vibration's cover. "The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him." Six months later, assassins burst into Marley's compound in Kingston and shot him in the arm and chest, shot his wife in the head, and shot his man- ager five times in the groin. Miraculously, all survived, and Marley went on two nights later to perform at the scheduled "Smile Jamaica" concert before eighty thousand peo ple, revealing his wounds to them, then stepping offstage into a fourteen-month off island exile. "T'ings a come to bump," as the sufferers say.
Exodus appeared in the late spring of 1977, and Bob embarked on what was to have been the largest reggae tour in history. But an old soccer injury, exacerbated by a French player spiking Bob's foot in a Paris match, was found to be infected with melanoma can- cer, and the tour was canceled after its initial European leg. Bob spent the rest of the year recuperating. He underwent a skin graft onto the big toe of his right foot, despite doctors' admonitions that he should go further and have his foot amputated as a pre- caution against the disease's spread.
No comments:
Post a Comment