BBC chooses Marley as Icon of the Millenium: Sunday Herald
The following is an article from the Sunday Herald
discussing the BBC choosing a Marley tune as song of the millenium. The article
was unnecessarily harsh, and sometimes plain wrong in some areas, but I thought
it might engender interesting discussion: Roots, Shok. Article is followed by a
few responses.
Simply Dread
[The
Sunday Herald via ProQuest · Rcvd: Dec 13, 02:58 AM EST ]
Publication Date: 1999 12
12
A habitual marijuana smoker with a
background in street crime and a string of illegitimate children by God knows
how many women may not be the obvious choice as the icon of the millennium, but
Bob Marley's character flaws obviously bypassed the
BBC.
Yet when the Beeb opted for the
Wailers' One Love anthem as its millennium tune, that wasn't the Bob Marley they
had in mind. In the 19 years since his death from cancer, the Jamaican musician
has come to be regarded as more of a saint than an artist who presented his
audience with a whole package of distinctly difficult
challenges.
The fact One Love will be
played repeatedly throughout the BBC's welcome to 2000 - please don't allow the
phrase "dreadlock holiday" to even pass through your mind - will further blur
the reality in favour of the sanitised
image.
The trouble with viewing Marley as
a sort of natural mystic, preaching peace, love and a general feel-good ethos,
is that it undermines the relevance and impact of one of only a handful of
artists working within popular music with the ability to transcend the medium
and have an important impact on the bigger world
beyond.
Marley was many things, but a
saint was not one of them. A halo isn't high on the list of requirements for
survival in the Trenchtown ghetto area of Kingston - so called because it was
built over a ditch that drained the city's sewage - where Marley spent much of
his youth.
You don't earn the nickname
Tuff Gong without a certain expertise in taking care of yourself. The young
Marley had a reputation for being more than capable of sticking up for himself.
Although the songs he would later write were steeped in ghetto life, Marley
wasn't born in the city. His mother, Cedella Booker, gave birth in her father's
house in the rural parish of St Ann, in the north of Jamaica, on February 6,
1945, when she was 18. The previous year she had married Captain Norval Marley,
a 50-year-old white quartermaster attached to the British West Indian regiment.
But his family was not overjoyed at the match, and the marriage failed soon
after Robert Nesta Marley was
born.
Captain Marley moved to Kingston,
and although he continued to provide some level of financial support, he rarely
saw his son. An attempted affiliation when the boy was five saw Marley move to
the Jamaican capital to live with his father, but this was short-lived and he
was soon back with his mother. The Marley mythology stretches back even to his
childhood days in St Ann. In Catch A Fire, the best biography of the singer,
Timothy White quotes members of Marley's family claiming the boy had almost
supernatural, visionary powers. Mixed with the magic of Jamaican folklore, the
image of a young Marley foretelling the future as he watched lightning bolts
rent the sky is undeniably potent - if
unlikely.
The boy moved to Trenchtown
with his mother when he was barely a teenager, attracted by the promise of work
and dreams of a new life. They were soon disabused of that notion. By
coincidence, Trenchtown was bubbling with extraordinary music. Jamaicans adapted
the American soul and R&B they heard on the radio, added their own rhythms,
and invented ska. Marley hooked up with Neville Livingston, the son of Cedella's
latest lover, and local singer Peter McIntosh. The Wailers - or the Wailing
Wailers as they were initially called - were thus
born.
So far, so ordinary. Another
Jamaican vocal group, a few duff records, a few minor local hits, nothing to
bother the world about. If the Wailers were ever to make an impression outside
their tiny island, some magical ingredient had to be found. Salvation, in more
ways than one, came in the form of Haile Selassie, the despotic emperor of
Ethiopia and self-styled Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, otherwise known
as Ras Tafari. Ironically, given his later espousal of the Rastafari religion,
Marley himself was out of the country working in America when Selassie flew into
Kingston airport for a state visit to Jamaica in
1966.
His arrival was eagerly awaited.
Decades earlier, Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist preacher, had prophesied
the coronation of a black king who would create a new black state in Africa,
free of the evil influence of the white race. Garvey even formed his own
steamship company, the Black Star Line, to take the descendents of slaves from
Jamaica back "home" to Ethiopia, reborn as Zion for added
appeal.
THE steamship company was a
disaster, but Garvey's ideas took root among Jamaica's poor and dispossessed.
They believed Selassie to be the god king foretold by Garvey and took to teasing
their hair into ropey dreadlocks and smoking unfeasibly large amounts of dope
(something to do with the Bible, but it doesn't do to look for too much logic
here).
When Selassie's jet touched down
in Jamaica, he looked out the window to see an airport packed by stoned, unkempt
Rastafarians, banging drums, smoking large joints and chanting hymns to Jah
Rastafari. He refused to get off the
plane.
Among the crowds was Trenchtown
singer Rita Anderson, a friend of Marley's who wrote to him preaching the Garvey
gospel. It wasn't long before the couple were married and Marley's locks were
sprouting. His songs began quoting the Bible and dealing with themes of social
injustice and simmering revolution. Rastafari gave the Wailers added purpose and
spiritual sustenance but, more importantly, it made them easier to sell to the
white rock audience, which was where the real money lay. The drug link was the
most obviously important. The Wailers became the essential soundtrack to
endless, tedious student debates over the relative strengths of Thai sticks and
Red Leb. Marley's Rastaman Vibration LP sleeve even boasted that it provided the
perfect surface on which to roll
spliffs.
Marley's photogenic looks,
impressive dreadlocks and rebel image were hardly hindrances either. He signed
to Island Records, the premier progressive rock label with a roster that
included King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Traffic. Island boss Chris Blackwell
promoted the Wailers, by this time a fully-fledged reggae band, as a rock
act.
Livingston and McIntosh quit after
being freaked out by the sight of snow on their first British tour. Marley
became the undisputed frontman, and two rapturously received concerts at
London's Lyceum Theatre in 1975 alerted the world to the arrival of a
superstar.
But if his Rastafarian beliefs
made Marley an easily packaged rock rebel, they also presented difficulties. For
a start, a religion steeped in black nationalism seeking an escape from white
man's capitalism is a little tricky to fully sell to teenagers in Ohio - no
matter how stoned they are. Worse, the Rastafarian enthusiasm for repatriation
to Ethiopia won unlikely, not to say unwelcome, support from Britain's National
Front. And, even before the dawn of political correctness, the Rasta attitude to
women - at best that the female's role was to serve men, at worst that women
were evil temptresses who had to be ostracised during menstruation - made the
doctrine increasingly unattractive.
Marley himself was hardly a new man.
Although married to Rita - whether legally or just in name isn't entirely clear
- fidelity hardly figured in their arrangement. He sired at least 11 children,
only three of them by Rita, and his enthusiasm for procreation made a nightmare
of the legal settlement of his estate after his death. For all of Marley's songs
of peace, suggestions of violence emerged throughout his career. In the early
days he and close friend Alan "Skill" Cole were reputed to have threatened local
DJs who had not played Wailers records on air. And there were strong rumours
that Marley administered a severe beating to his manager Don Taylor when he
believed he was cheating the band.
SO he
wasn't a saint - but he was a remarkable man. Marley's music united races in a
way few have managed, and provided spiritual support and inspiration for freedom
fighters all over the world, a fact acknowledged by Robert Mugabe when he
invited Marley to play at a concert to mark Zimbabwe's independence. His finest
moment in Jamaica was during the One Love Peace Concert in 1978, when he dragged
on stage sworn enemies Prime Minister Michael Manley and opposition leader
Edward Seaga, both of whose parties included armed gangs that thought nothing of
gunning down each other's supporters. Marley clasped the hands of both leaders
together in a symbolic show of unity that seemed to signal an end to political
violence and a new way ahead for a country sick of endless killings. It wasn't
his fault it didn't last.
Marley himself
had been the victim of violence two years earlier when gunmen burst into his
home and shot him. He survived, but left Jamaica for 18
months.
The shooting may have been
political. The next day, Marley was due to play a controversial concert that had
been hijacked by the government to boost its election campaign. However, it
could just as easily have been ordered by drug dealers with a
grudge.
Since Marley's death, former
Wailer Peter McIntosh has been murdered during a robbery, and Wailers drummer
Carlton Barrett was shot dead by a mystery gunman. Someone didn't like this
group.
It is almost impossible to imagine
any pop star of 1999 being politically important enough to be an assassin's
target - although there are more than a few acts that make you think that's
unfortunate. Marley's importance and standing have hardly diminished since his
death.
Even the tacky tributes - the
tackiest in Jamaica itself - have hardly tarnished the image or the superb body
of work he left behind. He's back in the singles charts too, with a hip hop-
influenced remix of Three Little Birds featuring rap diva Lauren Hill, the
mother of two of his grandchildren.
The
real pity is that that song doesn't rank anywhere near Marley's best - a
criticism that could also be applied to the Beeb's millennium anthem One Love, a
simple and even simplistic message advising us simply to get together and feel
alright. Bob Marley deserves to be remembered as an innovative, difficult and
radical artist who posed important questions about race, poverty, sexual
politics and the armed struggle against oppression. Simply putting One Love on a
tape loop as we enter the new millennium isn't how to do
it.
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/ Before you
buy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Rastapoodle
Topic: Re:
BBC chooses Marley as Icon of the
Millenium
Message: 2
of 3 (In response to
shokkolat)
Sent: Tue,
14 Dec 1999 16:15:30 GMTOn Tue, 14 Dec 1999 15:43:33 GMT, shokkolat@my-deja.com
wrote:
Hello
all,
the following is an article
from the Sunday Herald discussing the BBC choosing a Marley tune as song of the
millenium. The article was unnecessarily harsh, and sometimes plain wrong in
some areas, but I thought it might engender interesting discussion:
Roots,
Shok
I'm
not familiar with the Sunday Herald, but the obvious 'ax to grind' mentality of
the 'journalist' who penned the article, and the passive aggressive tone of it
are rubbish. Obviously, he/she knew enough of Marley's history to get a lot
right in building the story, but the sophmoric snipping show he/she needs a lot
of maturity.
They could have picked a more
balanced view, or, perhaps, that is the tone of the newspaper overall. One
magazine named 'passive-aggressiveness' as the newest, most widespread mental
disorder, and this article is a prime
example.
What ever happened to good,
old-fashioned reporting?
Still, it is good
that "One Love" was chosen as the song of the millennium, and that Bob got the
recognition.
* *
Anya {{{*_*}}}
http://extra.newsguy.com/~herblady
Reply
to this
message
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: DANSK1ER
Topic: Re:
BBC chooses Marley as Icon of the
Millenium
Message: 3 of 3 (In
response to shokkolat)
Sent: 14 Dec 1999
19:19:29 GMTHello all,
the following is an
article from the Sunday Herald discussing the BBC choosing a Marley tune as song
of the millenium. The article was unnecessarily harsh, and sometimes plain wrong
in some areas, but I thought it might engender interesting discussion:
Roots,
It seems that whoever wrote
this article is well bitter that Marley's 'One Love' was chosen as the song of
the millenium rather than 'Come Together' by the Beatles or some other
politically correct pop icon's music. It would also be nice if reporters did
what their job states, REPORT, and not spew personal opinions and misinformation
as fact, ( that's what I thought editorials were
for.)
BoomShel
Posted: Mon - February 3, 2003 at 08:57 PM