Buffalo Nation In The Heart of America : Bob Marley

Buffalo Nation In The Heart of America.  

I grew up with Bob Marley music, it seems hard to believe that he  would have turned 75 this year. The king of reggae was only 36 when he succumbed

to cancer in 1981. And when you bear in mind that the album that most people associate with him, Exodus, only appeared in 1977, you realise how fleeting his reign really was.

Bob Marley :  Portrait of the Legend, is the new book on Bob Marley from  Rizzoli, written by Ziggy one of the Legendary’s sons who is a singer-songwriter in his own right. It spans the action in the life of Marley between 1976 and 1980. It was an extraordinarily prolific phase. And today the music of Bob Marley and the Wailers is everywhere — sometimes in the dreamy, hippyish form of the hit anthem One Love, sometimes in the more uncom- promisingly militant shape of Get Up, Stand Up! Recorded long before the advent of Black Lives Matter, the song will provide the title of an eagerly awaited West End musical based on Marley’s life, due to open if pandemic situation permits to release hopefully in the spring next year.

Born to a black mother and an absent white father, Marley was a pioneer in terms of racial reconciliation. He was a symbol of how the black-white divide could be transcended in the most basic way — in bed. In Jamaica, a country that has its own complicated social codes based

Biographers, the journalist Chris Salewicz, put it I think Bob would’ve transcended music and become a father figure to millions’ on skin colour, he experienced another kind of outsider status. As one of his, the singer began life as “a distinct outsider, the quintessential ugly duckling. Bob felt from the start that he wasn’t wanted by either race, and he knew he had to survive, and become tough.”

Many of the photographs in the Rizzoli collection capture Marley in crowd- pleasing mode, dreadlocks swinging in the air as the spirit of the music sweeps him away. Given his religious beliefs, there is a suitably biblical aura to the shot of him performing at the Crystal Palace Bowl in south London in 1980, rapturous fans standing in the water of the lake in front of the stage. There are quieter, more intimate moments too. One shot shows the singer backstage alongside the young Ziggy. It’s a poignant image in retrospect: Ziggy, now 51, is a decade and a half older than his father was when he died.

Ziggy looks uncannily like his father. His face is sculpted in the same sharp features. He married with Israeli-born girl who is an executive with the William Morris , but he still has the laid-back manner of a boy from Jamaica’s lush countryside.

Ziggy calls his Bob but there is no mistaking the reverence in his voice.

And if he is cheerful and upbeat. Bob had his roots in Jamaica. there is still the occasional moment when, as he contemplates what might have been, emotion begins to get the better of him.

Ziggy wrote that if Bob would be in 

Africa., he would  be helping a lot of people through charitable works, and of course he’d be making music, and he would have transcended being a musician and become more of a father figure to millions and millions of people and his status in the world is just as important even though he’s not here.

Ziggy moved to LA 15 years ago, says that he spends little time in Jamaica now. He feels that the energy has changed, the spirituality that infused his

father’s music has been replaced by the raucousness of dancehall, a genre that is full of energy, but notori-

ous too for celebrating brutality, misogyny and homophobia.

There is one more book recently published on Marley The Confounding Island  written by Harvard-based sociologist Orlando Patterson. He is an unabashed fan of Marley’s music and calls out the worst aspects of dancehall. At the same time he makes the provoca-

tive argument that Marley’s music lost some of its appeal to the core audience. There’s a fascinating section on Marley and the rise of reggae and dance-hall . In short, he says, it moved away from straightforward dance rhythms.

“Sad to say, this is what the music of Marley had underplayed, a loss reinforced by the very genius of his melodic lyricism,” Patterson writes. “One is inclined to listen to Marley the way one listens to Schubert’s lieder, to move seamlessly (as I do, any- way) between Three Little Birds and Das Abendrot, both great men’s songs of praise to the calming power of nature. But where was the urge to dance? To black lower-class Jamaicans, that was an

abomination.”

Bob Marley’s songs certainly didn’t air- brush Jamaica’s problems. Violence lurks beneath the surface of Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Road Block) and it’s overt on Bur- nin’ and Lootin’. He was recording some of his most inspired work at a time when the island was riven by political bloodshed. Left and right had their own garrison-like enclaves in the slums of the capital, Kingston. In 1976 Marley — who was seen as a supporter of the left-wing prime minister Michael Manley — was injured in an assassination attempt.

After gunmen shot and wounded him at his home, he temporarily moved to London. In 1978, though, he was back to headline a peace concert, which reached its climax when he persuaded Manley and the leader of the right-wing Jamaica Labour Party Edward Seaga (a former record producer, as it happens) to shake hands on stage. It was, you might say, the equivalent of Mick Jagger getting Arthur Scargill to hug Margaret Thatcher!

It was a moment when Marley became a symbol of national unity. Later on, international audiences bonded around Redemption Song, the last song on the final studio album released before his death. A spartan celebration of black conscious- ness and self-reliance, the ballad turns up on many a Desert Island Discs playlist. It remains Ziggy Marley’s favourite too.

Bob’s life ended only when he was 36 , normally it is age when other performers start their professional career. But whatever he created is still a landmark in reggae.