9/18/2023 0 Comments Reggy bob marleyBut the Rude Boys would soon receive an unexpected jolt of validation.SEC v. It was called ska (after its scratch-board-like rhythms), and just as R&B and rock & roll had been viewed in America as disruptive and immoral, Jamaica’s politicians, ministers and newspapers looked upon ska as trash: a dangerous music from the ghetto that helped fuel the Rude Boys’ violence. The commentary could be clever and merciless, and the music that Marley first began to play had the tempo to carry such sharp purposes. Jamaica’s popular music - from calypso to mento - had always served as a means to spread stories, about neighbors’ moral failures or the overlord society’s duplicity. It was music that gave a displaced population a way to tell truths about their lives and a way of claiming victory over daily misery, or at least of finding a respite. This new Jamaican music was, like American R&B, the long-term result of how black music survived and evolved as a means of maintaining community in unsympathetic lands. By the 1960s, Kingston was producing its own form of R&B: a taut, tricky and intense music in which rhythms shifted their accents to the offbeat - almost an inversion of American rock & roll and funk. In the late 1940s, Jamaican youth had started to catch the fever of America’s urban popular music - in particular, the earthy and polyrhythmic dance and blues sounds of New Orleans. It was in this setting of grim delimitation that Marley first found what would give his life purpose: Kingston’s burgeoning and eccentric rhythm & blues scene. The Fast Times and High Crimes of a Hip-Hop Grifter Marley understood that the struggle for power might result in bloodshed, but he also maintained that if humankind failed to stand together, it would fail to stand at all. Though he became increasingly devoted in his life to the cause of speaking to the black diaspora - that population throughout the world that had been scattered or colonized as the result of the slave trade and imperialism - he never expressed hatred for white people but rather hatred for one people’s undeserved power to subjugate another people. But Marley’s mixed inheritance gave him a valuable perspective. While mixed-race couplings weren’t rare, they also weren’t welcome, and generally it was the child of these unions who bore the scorn. It took her a long time to record the birth with the registrar she was afraid, she later said, she’d get in trouble for having a child with a white man. Nobody is certain of the exact date - it was listed on Bob’s passport as April 6th, but Cedella was sure it was two months earlier. The couple’s only child arrived in the early part of 1945, as World War II neared its end. It was his ability to describe all this in palpable and authentic ways that sustains his body of music unlike any other we’ve ever known. His songs were his memories he had lived with the wretched, he had seen the downpressors and those whom they pressed down, he had been shot at. His songs weren’t about theory or conjecture, or an easy distant compassion. He knew the conditions he was singing about. Marley wasn’t singing about how peace could come easily to the world but rather about how hell on earth comes too easily to too many. It isn’t simply that his records still sell in substantial numbers (though they do), it’s that his mission might still have a chance. He would be dead in a few months, his body sealed in a mausoleum back in that troubled homeland of his.īut something fascinating has happened since Bob Marley died twenty-four years ago: He has continued. He wanted to speak for a world outside familiar borders - a world his audience didn’t yet know enough about. Now he wanted to find ways to put across truths about people outside Jamaica and America, England and Europe. In the past few years, he had managed to popularize reggae - a music that had once sounded strange and foreign to many ears - and to convey the truths of his troubled homeland, Jamaica, for a mass audience. He was a man with no time, with a mission that no one in popular music had ever attempted before. He had developed a malignant melanoma - an incurable cancer, by this time - that he had let progress unchecked, for reasons that he probably could not fathom at this hour. Bob Marley was already dying when he stood onstage in Pittsburgh that night, in September 1980.
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