I and I

By Crispin Sartwell

What painting and engraving were to centuries past - a primary vehicle of analogue information - popular music was to the twentieth. And of all the feats of the power of music in the century - starting with the practically universal diffusion of music originating in the styles of African America - one of the most remarkable was the career of Bob Marley, Rastafarian messiah and revolutionary truth-teller.

In the nineteen twenties, Marcus Garvey's African nationalist movement emerged from Jamaica. In his home island, which was at that time still a British colony, Garvey's message resonated, and though no religion grew up around his person during his life, he came to be seen as a sort of John the Baptist figure, who had the gift of recognizing the messiah. Garvey supposedly prophesied a black, African emperor who would lead black people out of bondage and oppression and call them home. When Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari Makonnen) was crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, some Jamaicans (and others in the African diaspora) regarded that to be the fulfillment, and they regarded Selassie as Jah Ras Tafari, God incarnate. The news of the movement was greeted by Selassie as flattering, but surprising. When he toured the Caribbean in 1966, he was greeted by literally adoring crowds, many of whom (including Bob's future wife Rita), lining the parade route, claimed to have seen stigmata in his hands. Rastafarians preached dietary restrictions (emphasizing unprocessed foods), and predicted the destruction of "Babylon," the system of western oppression that had brought the slaves out of Africa and that still controlled the world, including, perhaps, Jamaica itself.

By the sixties - as a teenage ska singer named Bob Marley emerged from one of the poorest areas of Jamaica: Trenchtown, the Kingston slum built on the town dump - Rastafarianism had matured. Adherents withdrew into rural collective compounds and attempted to establish an undisturbed and undisturbing direct and peaceful existence in a back-to-nature movement, grew dreadlocks, smoked ganja as a sacrament, and played reggae music. Reggae itself was the inheritor of popular music styles that had emerged largely since the 1961 independence. Putting it too simply: ska was a propulsive, horn-dominated, syncopated dance music; rock steady was a slowed-down ska, and "roots" reggae was a slowed-down rock steady, which better served the contemplative and dance needs of heavy smokers of marijuana. All these styles - which are still in use - have in common not only a rhythmic structure (though the hypnotic emphasis on the afterbeat is emphasized more and more as reggae matured in the seventies), but also originate in a synthesis of American rhythm and blues, European folk music, African vestiges, Caribbean styles such as calypso and salsa, and something sheerly Jamaican.

Marley made this transition as a very young men, and was one of the instigators of the systematic slowdown. He quickly emerged as the style's pre-eminent artist; indeed, in the seventies most Americans knew reggae only through Marley's music and the soundtrack of The Harder They Come, along with covers or imitations by, for example, Eric Clapton (who hit in 1974 with Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff"). In part, this was because Marley had some quality of universal accessibility: a tuneful voice, and an almost painful resolution to speak with power and honesty about his life, his religion, and the liberation of his people, with songs like "Trench Town Rock," "Burning and Looting," or the absolutely transcendent final moment: "Redemption Song." Other excellent Jamaican reggae artists, including Marley associates such as Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer and lesser-known bands that seemingly emerged out of every Rasta community on the island and by the dozen in Kingston, were less easy to grasp for one reason or another. Marley was at once a writer of excellent popular songs and a messenger of something within which people immediately found themselves. He was in essence an unprecedented figure: the gospel singer as pop superman, the messiah as rock star. He managed to convey the essence of Rastafarianism to much of the world, and since his death from cancer in 1982 his effect has spread even further, and there are Rastas in Africa - where Marley-stylee reggae has become a dominant musical form - in Europe and the US, including among white people and the Hopi Indians. As much as anything else, this spread was due Marley's incredibly intense and open expression of political and spiritual longing. One longs for, through, and as Marley as one listens to his records. And as affective political documents, Marley's recordings have few equals (though one might think of Bob Dylan at a certain moment or Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet).

Marley was the first international pop music messiah, and his arrival was made possible by recording and broadcasting technology which allowed everybody to hear his actual voice rather than just, say, read his texts. That experience is powerful, especially when it comes with a volume switch and a dedication to liberation of oppressed peoples all over the world. With Marley, one suddenly realized that the mass dissemination of specific performances was a medium as powerful as the one invented by Gutenberg; it was, for one thing, a victory for the accessibility of scripture: for that is what both the Bible in vernacular language and the works of Marley are. Indeed, the Lutheran hymnal might be historically as important as Luther's translation of the Bible into German, but the hymnal displays a structure that can be reproduced in your own voice and that only becomes powerful when it is embodied in voices. Marley's music exists essentially first as recording, as something that drives rhythm into religious experience and displays that explicitly, or gives it to you totally. Of course Marley's music is a variety of gospel: it is essentially religious, religious in its inception, religious all the way down. And it is a music that arises from and gives rise to contemplation.

All music makes use of repetition. The fugue structure, for instance, is a structure of growth within repetition. But the structure of reggae is extremely repetitive, as repetitive, probably, as any musical style that has ever existed. A song structure such as the blues, for instance (which has had a fairly direct effect on reggae) is twelve bars long, with repetitions, and possibly a bridge structure two-thirds of the way through the song. And this structure itself is repeated across songs and across repertoires, to the point at which Elmore James, for example, could essentially make a career out of slight variations on a single song: Robert Johnson's "Dust My Broom." But the progression from ska to reggae is a serial divestiture of influences and adornments, intended to leave nothing but the repetitive gesture. By the time that "dub" arrived in the late seventies, there was almost nothing left but drum and bass, along with studio effects. And by that time the idea was to use rhythm tracks from previous recordings, over which poets and djs would "toast." DJ Kool Herc migrated to New York, and hip hop - which was also at the beginning characterized by extreme emphasis on bass and repetition - came into existence. That ended up giving rise to hip hop, another international style. But reggae consists essentially - the whole song, but also every song: the whole history of the style - of a single skank. In this sense it is a chant or mantra, which is thematized explicitly in the music (some of the music is indeed based on Rasta chants that were already traditional, as the songs made evident: "We gonna chant down Babylon kingdom, yeah, chant it down, Jah man. We're gonna chant down Rome in pieces.") The chant is, first, a contemplative form; it is a religious form in which concentration leads to transcendence, and the form is restricted inversely to the dilation of experience it engenders. But it is also a "work" rhythm or a march or a dirge: something that shapes a social as well as existential unity. As ska becomes rock steady becomes reggae at the end of the sixties, the beat slows down and collapses into an almost pure repetition; it becomes mesmeric.

Producing or tolerating repetition is an expression of seriousness; you're sticking to your guns or saying over and over: "no, I'm telling you": you're insisting. Nor is this incompatible with the hedonic functions of repetition, its sexual hint or "pumping": in fact sex or pleasure can be serious. But repetition expresses resolution, whether to pain, contemplation, or love, or all three together. But then, each possible structure of repetition over time is also a template for development, and each run-through takes on a different significance. Even each perfect repetition in music achieved electronically represents a decision, and a different decision than its neighbors. The length of the whole is also something made as meaningful. And in a structure of a few repetitions each is differently significant; it possesses a definitely unique place in the unfolding structure. But where the periods of repetition become very short as the overall structure of repetitions enlarges, each repetition becomes more predictable, and each thus becomes somewhat harder to invest with distinctive significance. It is at that point that the sound becomes a mantra, at which it begins to mesmerize, to lull one over the lip into something else. As every rhythm is a structure of repetition, repetition is itself the very principle of unity for beings who are condemned to live in time. A unification is something that has always to be renewed, and as identity swings around through its days again it develops structure, becomes rhythmic. What is spiritual in music is above all tempo: the structure of its development and return through time that becomes our own development and return. Thus music itself is an exemplar, an agent, and an element in unifications: it is always a return, and always a sequence of returns. But when these returns are as emphatic and as a heartbeat and almost as simple, we get the sensation of seeing the center of unification itself, and of coming to be, moving or dancing with it.