Bob Marley has been writing moving songs, making vital and innovative music, struggling to the top in the anarchic Jamaican record business and slowly building an international following for almost ten years. Island Records has been trying to break him in the U.S. since the release of Catch a Fire, four albums ago, and the rock press has been pushing the albums, Marley and reggae music with a unanimous enthusiasm that makes even their efforts in Bruce Springsteen's behalf seem equivocal. It's working. Marley's latest tour has been selling out almost everywhere and Rastaman Vibration is probably going to be his first gold album.
force in Jamaica, and not just because he is calling the national elections a rat race and telling the people they can't trust conventional politicians, something they already know. If Bob Marley, with his dreadlocks and funky clothes and deliberately exaggerated patois, can be an international pop hero, then the life of the Jamaican dread-in-the-street has, in a sense, been validated. Average dread may not be able to share Marley's earnings—
People predicts they could add up to a million by the end of the year—but he can share Marley's purpose and pride.
The mushrooming Wailers cult in the States is easier and harder to figure, easier because the publicity surrounding Marley has focused on such exotic items as Rastafarianism and conspicuous herb consumption, harder if you assume that the fans are listening to the words of his songs. "Slave Driver," "Get Up, Stand Up," "Burnin' and Lootin'" and several other earlier Marley works are among the most powerful songs of black rage and politicized exasperation ever written, and the new tunes are only slightly less effective. But for the most part, Marley's fans in the U.S. are either middleclass whites or blacks who want into the capitalist system, not out of it. Do they really enjoy getting high and grooving on images of slave ships, starvation and riots, or are they just dancing to the music? And if the latter is the case, what does it mean in terms of Marley's professed Rastafarian asceticism, his antimaterialist rhetoric, his mission as the bringer of doom to Babylon?
A recent editorial in The Caribbeat, a West Indian entertainment magazine that's been selling like hotcakes at the newsstands in New York's subways, voices a viewpoint that must be shared by a substantial portion of the West Indian community in the U.S. Referring to the numerous articles on Marley which have been appearing in U.S. publications, the magazine's editor writes that "it is no longer Bob's musical talent and abilities that count. Rather, we must endure account after account on 'Rastafarianism,' 'Dreadlocks,' 'Pocomania,' 'Haile Selassie,' 'Shanty Towns' and all sorts of hocus-pocus that is supposedly responsible for the creation and mainstay of reggae. ... The Jamaican sound is going to succeed i
It is hard to believe that in 1976, when Rastaman Vibration was first released in America, it took Bob Marley into the Top Ten alongside disco records and corporate rock. Despite the good cheer of the title track and the upbeat "Roots, Rock, Reggae," Rastaman Vibration contains some of Marley's most intense images of oppression, paranoia and despair. Tracks such as "Who the Cap Fit," "Crazy Baldhead" and "War" are offered by the Wailers with dire urgency as Marley's brutal visions are echoed by his own church choir, the I-Threes. Twenty-six years on, neither Marley's music nor his message has lost its sting. In addition to a grab bag of bonus songs, this expanded edition also contains a real prize: live tracks recorded in 1976 at the Roxy in Hollywood.
RICHARD ABOWITZ
(RS 910 – November 28, 2002)
