Contexts for Bob Marley

February 23, 2006

An interesting article on Bob Marley in Slate yesterday, written by Field Maloney. Most useful to me was the pinpointing of three albums besides Legend—a greatest hits collection—which form part of Marley’s “golden period”: Soul Rebels, African Herbsman, and Rasta Revolution.

It is a short article, but at one point Maloney ventures into the reception of Marley:

…Marley is an international star with a strong following in the Third World, especially in Africa. There, Marley fandom has a different dimension. Say you're a middle-class American white kid. It's spring term freshman year, and you've just discovered pot, Bob Marley, and ultimate frisbee. You really want to drop that organic chemistry course, but you know your parents will be pissed. In such a scenario, Bob Marley's songs, with lines like "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery" and "No chains are on my feet/ but I am not free," seem to be talking to you in a way that's deeply profound. Sure, that's laughable. But let's take a different scenario altogether. What if you're black? Or from the Third World? Then the lyrics take on a lot more historical force and contemporary urgency.

Embedded here is a moral gradation of audiences: American white kid in college below third world soul who can feel the real meaning. But it seems that in either case we find a secondary reception, which will inevitably pull Marley’s music away from its intended sense and embed it in new contexts. This kind of secondary context is among the most interesting of literary phenomena. We are surrounded by it, yet hardly know it.. from the use of the Psalms in personal devotions to the co-opting of the Blues by later Rock ‘n’ Rollers.

The college-age American white kid is the most fascinating of his two cases. Inevitably those college “kids” will be significant decision makers in the American future, and so to know something about how they process revolutionary political sentiment is an important project.. and for the record I do not think it is a process nearly as shallow as Maloney describes it. But clearly there will be some acrobatic mental maneuvering.

I had my own moment of recognition with Marley when I was in the Ethiopian city of Lallibela in the winter of 2003. I was walking up a hill after having visited the rock-cut churches of this sacred city that models Jerusalem in stone, heading for a café for a bite to eat with my friend, when I heard a Marley tune. The song was “Jammin” (or something like that), but I caught the words about Zion. And it struck me right there.. this is Zion. This place—Lallibela—is the exact place to which Marley was referring. One can listen to that music for a long time and not realize that there is something concrete underlying it all.. a religious symbolism lodged in specific references. In fact, I would bet that the Ethiopians playing the music could not have explained clearly how their own cultural heritage had found a secondary context within the Rastafarian religious tradition of Jamaica.