Bob Marley E-Book

Jason Toynbee

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Polity celebrities series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Is Bob Marley the only third world superstar? How did he achieve this unique status? In this captivating new study of one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, Jason Toynbee sheds new light on issues such as Marley's contribution as a musician and public intellectual, how he was granted access to the global media system, and what his music means in cultural and political terms.

Tracing Marley's life and work from Jamaica to the world stage, Toynbee suggests that we need to understand Marley first and foremost as a 'social author'. Trained in the co-operative yet also highly competitive musical laboratory of downtown Kingston, Marley went on to translate reggae into a successful international style. His crowning achievement was to mix postcolonial anger and hope with Jamaican textures and beats to produce the first world music.

However the period since his death has been marked by brutal and intensifying inequality in the capitalist world system. There is an urgent need, then, to reconsider the nature of his legacy. Toynbee does this in the concluding chapters, weighing Marley's impact as advocate of human emancipation against his marginalisation as a 'Natural Mystic' and pretext for disengagement from radical politics.

Leseprobe

BOB MARLEY

BOB MARLEY

HERALD OF A POSTCOLONIAL WORLD?

JASON TOYNBEE

polity

Copyright © Jason Toynbee 2007

The right of Jason Toynbee to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13:978-0-7456-5737-0

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1    How Do You Solve a Problem Like Bob Marley?

2    Nesta Marley and Colonial Jamaica

3    Bob Marley at the Reggae Conjuncture

4    Standing Up and Finally Being Counted

5    Up On the Rock, Chanting Down Babylon

6    After Bob

Discography and Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Celebrities series

Series Editor: Anthony Elliott

Published:

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Charles Lemert: Muhammad Ali

Lee Marshall: Bob Dylan

Chris Rojek: Frank Sinatra

Nick Stevenson: David Bowie

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank warmly everyone who has helped in the production of this book, though with the usual rider that all the faults are mine. Anthony Elliott invited me to write it, and then had to put up with long delays in its delivery. His patience and support are much appreciated. Andrea Drugan at Polity guided and encouraged me through the difficult process of drafting the manuscript. Thanks Andrea. Max Toynbee was an excellent research assistant. Massively knowledgeable about reggae of all periods, he provided crucial insights into rhythm patterns and changing reggae idioms that informed analysis across the whole book. In Kingston I need to thank the music makers I interviewed, namely Derrick Harriott, Winston Riley and Bob Andy. I’m also in the debt of two members of the Skatalites, Lloyd Knibb and Lester Sterling, who talked to me while on tour in the UK. As well as caring passionately about the tradition that they helped to create, these Jamaican musicians are also acute commentators on it. Through meetings at conferences, in email correspondence and via his published work I have borrowed a good deal of insider knowledge about reggae from independent scholar and journalist Klive Walker, based in Toronto. Among academics, thanks go to Sonjah Stanley-Niaah and Annie Paul at the University of West Indies, Mona, for their hospitality, introductions and crucial observations about Jamaican music and culture. To Dave Hesmondhalgh, my good friend and former colleague (now at the University of Leeds), goes gratitude for constant encouragement, endless lively discussion and the reading of two chapters at a point when I was ready to give up. Finally, I have to mention the support of the Sociology Department at The Open University. A department travel grant enabled me to spend eight days in Jamaica in July 2005.

INTRODUCTION

Defeated in the 1990 Peruvian presidential election on a neo-liberal ticket, Mario Vargas Llosa banished himself to Europe and resumed his former career as a writer. Among the pieces of journalism which he began to produce for the Spanish newspaper El País was an account of a journey to Jamaica in search of the spirit of Bob Marley (Vargas Llosa 2002). Years ago, he admits in this article, Bob and the Rastas were repugnant to him. His son and some friends had taken up the cult, seduced by ‘the picturesque theological syncretisms of the Rastas, their marijuana communions, their horrible dietary laws and matted locks’. Now, though, looking at the squalor and destitution of Trench Town he revises his opinion. Bob’s music and faith, it seems, encompass a primitive spirituality which is utterly appropriate in this shanty town. As Vargas Llosa concludes: ‘One doesn’t have to be religious to realize that without religion, life would be infinitely emptier and grimmer for the poor and downtrodden, and that societies have the religions they require’ (p. 56).

What’s interesting about the article is the way it shows how even a right-winger like Vargas Llosa can fall in love with Bob Marley. Never mind that he advocated revolution, that he urged poor people to stand up for their rights, this staunch conservative wants to claim him as an icon of saintly and eternal poverty. That points towards a key attribute of Bob’s celebrity: its extraordinary breadth. For there is surely something of the prophet about Bob which sets him apart from other popular music stars, and enables diverse constituencies to grab him. Partly this has to do with his sense of mission, an intense drive to make music and in doing so tell the truth about the world. Partly, it comes from his poetic vision, derived in equal measure from the King James Bible and patwa, the creole language of Jamaica.1 There is also the enigma of his life. Born of a black mother and an absent white father in a colonial island in the Caribbean, he nevertheless became a global superstar. More than twenty-five years after his death, he is still the only such star from the third world. All these factors are important no doubt. But what has been most significant in the creation of a Messianic aura is the systematic repackaging of Bob by the culture industry in the period after his death – the careful selection of ‘marketable’ traits in the form of tropical beatitude, spliffedout sincerity and so on (Stephens 1998).

Over the course of this book it will be argued that to reduce Bob to the status of third world mystic is both to belittle him and to miss his true significance. There are several aspects to this. First, Bob was indeed an extraordinary performer and songwriter, but his musicianship emerged from the creative networks in which he worked, first in Jamaica and then in the international rock industry. We cannot make sense of Bob without locating him in these musical worlds. That will involve considering the nature of celebrity, creativity and performance as well as the relationship between music and industry. But it also means locating these themes, not to mention Bob himself, in the history of Jamaica and the capitalist world system beyond. Quite apart from the fact that this is the system under which we all live, and therefore that any study of a life ought to consider its impact, there is the crucial point that Bob was a strong opponent of it. He called it Babylon, and devoted the major part of his song writing to attacking it on the grounds of its brutal racism and exploitation.

While close attention is paid to social reality, that does not mean the music itself will be ignored. In fact the aim here is to understand Bob’s music making as a part of social reality. This calls for analysis of music as organized sound, as a cultural form with its own historically changing codes and conventions. One way of doing such analysis would be through conventional musicology, which uses methods derived from the Western classical tradition, chiefly to analyse scores. But the author doesn’t have the skills to do this, nor does he think it would be much use to try even if he did.2 The approach taken instead is a hybrid one. A few musicological concepts are brought in, but also terms from semiotics where the emphasis is on music as something which means. Generally, the aim is to analyse Bob’s music in a way that is accessible to people who are not music makers themselves by using plenty of adjectives as well as attending to form.

Some readers may have noted the reference to social reality in the last paragraph. In most academic writing about popular culture reality hardly figures at all. This is because the dominant approach, cultural studies, has been centrally concerned with issues of representation. In other words the problem has been to examine how and why things are expressed in culture.3 However, the question of what in the social world culture might be about is often ignored. Indeed in a strong version of cultural studies there is no existence of the world beyond its representation in language, discourse, genre and so on.

Here, conversely, we approach Bob as a real person, and on the basis that the social world that he inhabited, and in which his work still reverberates today, is a real one.4 Unfortunately, this formulation is not going to be enough on its own; trying to understand the real Bob will call for rather more reflection on the nature of reality. One reason is that Bob’s music, like all cultural practices, is a part of social reality as well as being about it. Another is that reality is not inert, but rather generative and historical. Stuff changes. Connected to this is the question of structure and agency; how are human subjects (such as Bob) able to act independently in a social world that is heavily structured by relations of power. These problems mean we will need to set out a theory of realism.

That is the topic of chapter 1, which takes Bob’s life as a case study in the multidisciplinary approach known as ‘critical realism’. The chapter dips into its philosophical foundations, so readers who do not feel comfortable with social theory might choose to skip it, and move on to chapter 2. Here something like a chronological narrative of Bob’s life begins. Still, there are good reasons for sticking with the first chapter, not least because Bob himself was a realist, who believed that the world exists independently of our knowing it, and who wanted to change it so that people might be free. Arguably, to try and work out what conditions could validate such beliefs is an important task.

Chapters 2 to 6 are organized chronologically in the sense that key episodes in Bob’s life and subsequent celebrity are presented in sequence. But there is also a strong emphasis on themes. As a result, rather than giving a rounded account of his progress through a given period, each chapter explores particular aspects of Bob’s life and work, together with the social world in which he was embedded. That makes the book more fragmented than a biography, but perhaps (if it has been done successfully) more illuminating too.

So, chapter 2 focuses on Jamaica, colonialism and resistance to colonialism, and deals with Bob’s life from his birth in 1945 up to his early teenage years. It evaluates the significance of the new Jamaican religion, Rastafari. Chapter 3 then examines the reggae conjuncture – that moment in Jamaican history around the pivot point of independence in 1962 when reggae emerges both as a structure of feeling and as a distinct musical form. Bob and his group the Wailers play a central role in the research and development of the new music in this period. Chapter 4 tracks Bob in the years between 1967 and 1973, examining his ‘translation’ from the collective/competitive Kingston music scene to the new setting of British rock. Attention is paid to the transformation this brings in both mode of production and reception of his work. Chapter 5 deals with the eight years up to his death in 1981, as Bob becomes a global star. Here the focus shifts from his ambiguous involvement in Jamaican politics during the ‘democratic socialist’ experiment of Michael Manley’s PNP (People’s National Party) government, to Bob’s performances as an international rock star in concert. Understanding the performative dimension is key to making sense of his massive global appeal it is argued. Chapter 6 treats the posthumous Bob. What has he come to mean around the world? How far and in what sense might he be considered the herald of a postcolonial world yet to be created?

Mostly, these chapters are written in the sort of passive voice traditionally used in academic work. However, in places, the first person singular ‘I’ form is used. Here (and I need to use that form now) I speak more personally, most often to recall some episode in my life which touches on Bob or reggae music, or sometimes to describe the field trip I made to Jamaica in 2005. These passages are not meant to be more authentic in their representation of reality just because they display the subjectivity of the author. Rather the intention is twofold. First, the ‘I’ form provides a second point of view, an oral historical one, to augment the more dispassionate hidden narrator who recounts most of the book. That in turn enables a degree of ‘triangulation’. By approaching something from two positions perhaps one can show more of its shape – more of its reality. Second, writing in the first person has a shamelessly rhetorical aim, which is to keep readers reading. I hope that strategy works.

1 Creole languages are hybrids in which African retentions, including syntax, are mixed with European verbal forms. In the Caribbean they are still mainly spoken by the working class and peasantry, the descendants of slaves. ‘Patwa’ is expressed here in a phonetic spelling that is becoming increasingly standardized in Jamaica as patwa begins to assume a written form.

2 The main problem with relying on traditional musicology is precisely its emphasis on the written score. Reggae music is not produced through the writing of notes on a staff, but rather directly through recording. Thus a score is inevitably a ‘thin’, post hoc interpretation of the primary, recorded text. That said, scores can be useful in more rounded analysis of popular music. See for example Brackett (1995), Moore (2001), Tagg and Clarida (2003).

3 For a concise, critical examination of cultural studies see Mulhearn (2000). For a comprehensive discussion by an exponent see Barker (2000).

4 This should not imply wholesale rejection of cultural studies – far from it. A good deal of use is made in the book of the innovative concepts and methods of analysis developed by people working in that field. It is just that its premises about being in, and knowing, the world are not accepted.

1

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE BOB MARLEY?

If celebrity depends on amount – the more people who know about you, the more famous you are – then Bob Marley is a very great celebrity indeed. Years after his death in 1981 he is still listened to and passionately admired by millions of people across the world. In fact he is probably the best-known secular figure in the contemporary period. That ‘probably’ is crucial though. For straight away it has to be admitted that we do not have the sort of evidence to make such a claim without qualification.

Of course in the west and north of the planet market information does provide some indication of Marley’s celebrity. Take cumulative record sales. In the United States alone 16.5 million of his albums had been sold by 2005. This was enough to put him in joint seventy-second place alongside artists as diverse as Neil Young and Destiny’s Child. Meanwhile the Beatles at the top of the league had achieved 50 million US sales by the same year (RIAA 2005). Another useful index comes in the shape of ‘Forbes Top-Earning Dead Celebrities List’ (Kafka 2005). For 2005 it shows Marley in twelfth position, sandwiched between Irving Berlin and Ray Charles, and some distance behind Elvis Presley at number one. The Forbes list is based on total annual revenue, which includes earnings not just from record sales but also from the exploitation of copyright, licensing deals, merchandising and so on. That makes it a more rounded measure of celebrity than record sales alone. It also reflects international, rather than just US, earnings.1

Yet the ‘international’ dimension of these figures from the cultural industries hardly gets at Bob Marley’s standing in the peripheral regions of the world.2 Here most people listen to him on cassettes, generally copied and distributed outside official music industry channels. No statistics are available for this activity.3 Nor is there a way to quantify the circulation of images of Marley in the form of posters and drawings, or the spread of stories about him.4 And we do not have a figure for the number of local musicians who play his songs, or have simply taken him as inspiration in their own musical careers. This suggests that celebrity among the poor is a poor sort of celebrity indeed. To be well known by people without buying power, even in their millions, counts for little in the cultural industries of the core of the world system.