marcus garvey, rastafarianism, reggae, bob marley, augustus pablo

By Crispin Sartwell

Popular music was perhaps the dominant art form of the twentieth century. 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 (ragtime, blues, jazz, soul, disco, hip hop) - 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 widely, and he came to be seen as a sort of John the Baptist figure, who had the gift of recognizing the messiah. Garvey supposedly prophesied the coming of 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 of this prophecy, and they called Selassie Jah Ras Tafari, God incarnate. When Selassie toured the Caribbean in 1966, he was greeted by literally adoring crowds, and many people (including Bob's wife Rita) 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.

By the sixties - as a teenage ska singer named Bob Marley emerged from Trenchtown, the now-legendary Kingston slum built near the town dump, Rastafarianism had matured. Adherents withdrew into rural collective compounds and attempted to establish an undisturbed, direct, and peaceful existence in a back-to-nature movement. They grew dreadlocks, smoked ganja as a sacrament, and played ceremonial nyahbingi drum music, one of the sources of the reggae, a style that developed by the end of the decade. Reggae was also inheritor of popular music styles that had emerged since the 1961 independence. Putting it too simply: ska (1961-68) was a propulsive, horn-dominated, syncopated dance music; rock steady (1968-69) was a slowed-down ska; and "roots" reggae (1969-82 or so) was a slowed-down and lilting rock steady which served the contemplative and dance needs of heavy smokers of marijuana. These styles - all still in use all over the world - have in common not only a rhythmic structure (though the hypnotic emphasis on the afterbeat was emphasized more and more as reggae matured in the seventies), but also an origin in a synthesis of American rhythm and blues, British folk and religious music, African religious festival, Caribbean styles such as calypso and salsa, and something elusively, indigenously Jamaican.

Marley made the transitions between these styles as a very young recording artist, and was one of the instigators of the systematic slowdown. He quickly emerged as the reggae'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 had a hit in 1974 with Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff"). Marley had a quality of universal accessibility: a tuneful voice, a deeply touching vulnerability, and a resolution to speak with power and honesty about his life, his religion, and the liberation of his people. Songs such as "Trench Town Rock," "Burning and Looting," or the transcendent "Redemption Song" are some of the greatest achievements of twentieth century music. Other excellent Jamaican reggae artists, such as Burning Spear, Augustus Pablo, and Culture - as well as lesser-known performers who seemingly emerged out of every Rasta community on the island and by the dozen in Kingston - were less easy to accessible for one reason or another. Marley was at once a writer of excellent popular songs and a messenger of something within which people immediately recognized something that connected to their own lives.

Marley was an unprecedented figure: 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. There are Rastas in Africa, where Marley-style 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 is due to 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's advent 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 expresses 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 re-embodied. 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 as well as celebration.

I bought "East of the River Nile," a reggae instrumental suite by Augustus Pablo, around when it came out, maybe 1978. I probably didn't listen to it more than a few times, but it has waited for me for a quarter-century. The melodies are simple, serene, meditative, profound with just a touch of half-speed klezmer. This became known as the "far east" style. Pablo was a melodica player - the melodica being a keyboard wind instrument with harmonica reeds that was in the 1960s used to teach music to Jamaican schoolchildren. In fact, Augustus Pablo is perhaps the only professional melodica player I've ever heard, or heard of.

Pablo was a deceptively basic sort of player, and there were never any technical fireworks, only a studied simplicity and naivete. I'd compare Pablo's melodica work to the trumpet of Miles Davis or the voice of Billie Holiday, for which the point is not technical facility, but expressive intensity achieved by constriction of means.

If you don't think instrumental music is capable of embodying a spiritual message or creating a spiritual atmosphere, go back and listen to Bach. "East of the River Nile," like the other best Pablo records (notably "Original Rockers") is so quiet in its intensity, so still at its heart, that it embodies a rigorous rasta religious discipline. And to listen to it is to recapitulate the spiritual experience that created it. Pablo, like a Shaker, creates without a trace of ego; the point is never to impress you, only - quietly - to affect you. And that makes you realize how rare egolessness is in music, or among professional musicians. Pablo plays with tremendous restraint, with a kind of thorough spareness that is meant to create a place of the spirit. And so his is an ascetic and beautiful music.

Each song seems somehow to have begun at an arbitrary place in an infinite progression, and to stop just as arbitrarily, and so becomes an access to eternity. That's the stillness at the music's heart: every song sounds like a sample of infinity. [pic 3:2]

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 "dub" arrived in the late seventies, there was almost nothing left but drum and bass, along with studio effects. Usually the idea was to use rhythm tracks from previous recordings, over which poets and emcees would "toast." DJ Kool Herc migrated from Jamaica to New York, and hip hop - which was also at the beginning characterized by extreme emphasis on bass and repetition - came into existence, and hip hop is also an international style. But reggae consists essentially - the whole song, but also every song: the whole history of the style - of a single rhythm. In this sense it is a chant or mantra, which is thematized explicitly in the music. Some of the music is 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 in which concentration leads, ideally, 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 throb; it becomes mesmeric.

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 quality: in fact sex or pleasure can be serious. 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 meaningful. And in a structure of a few repetitions each is differently significant; it possesses a definite 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 a distinct significance. It is at that point that the sound becomes a mantra, at which it begins to mesmerize, to tip you 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. As life swings around through its days again and 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 union, showing its beauty. It is always a return, and always a sequence of returns. But when these returns are as emphatic as a heartbeat and almost as simple, we get the sensation of seeing the center of unification itself that we long for, and of coming to be, moving or dancing with it.

Perhaps every culture uses music as part of its ceremonial cycle. And any music has a spiritual aspect when it concerns or effects unions of the hearer with the world, other persons, God. Social union can themselves be political, or religious, or celebratory. But unification is also possible between human beings and natural objects; in fact such mergings take place continuously on a mundane level with foodstuffs and the other objects and conditions of perception. At bottom, too, the rhythms of our bodies, the patterns of our repetitions, as waking and sleep, are coordinated with the rhythms of the world, as day and night. And the ecstatic unification with god (if any) is effected also through perception invested with repetition, a repetition of ritual and season, and the repetition of holy phrase in chant.

Indeed, if repetition is always musical, then perhaps all of our spiritual pursuits- our prayers, our cycle of holidays, our rituals, and our ecstasies - are, in the end, music.