Bob Marley

Bob Marley: How an Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Imperialist Singer’s Legacy Has Been Commercialised

The artist’s popular songs and lyrics have also been adopted as marketing tools to sell products that bear little relation to Marley’s music and message.

The long-awaited Bob Marley biopic One Love will highlight important moments in the musician’s life – his adolescence in Trench Town, his spiritual growth, the attempt on his life. But as a music industry scholar, I wonder if the film is yet another extension of the Marley marketing machine.

Marley died in 1981 at the age of 36. He’d achieved a level of mainstream success unrivalled by other reggae acts, and he did so while challenging global capitalism and speaking to the oppressed.

This image, however, is fundamentally at odds with what has happened to Marley’s name and likeness since his death.

Now you can buy Bob Marley backpacks, Bob Marley jigsaw puzzles – even Bob Marley flip-flops.

The accusation of “selling out” could once seriously threaten an artist’s credibility; the insult wields far less power in an era when an artist’s survival often depends on sponsorship and licensing deals. Meanwhile, a deceased artist’s ongoing earnings are left in the hands of others.

Nonetheless, when a musician as revered as Marley – and whose songs were suffused with messages of liberation, anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism – becomes so commercialised, it’s worth wondering how this happened and whether it threatens his artistic legacy.

On and off the record

In its 2023 list of highest-paid dead celebrities, Forbes placed Marley in the ninth slot, right behind former Beatles front man John Lennon. According to the publication, Marley earned US$16 million – or rather, his estate did.

Marley’s business affairs are now controlled by family members – the estate – who have made deals with various merchandising and marketing partners, with all parties sharing in the profits. The commercial power of Bob Marley’s name generates the royalties earned by the estate, though precise percentages are not publicly available.

One posthumous musical release, in particular, has been a gold mine: Marley’s Legend compilation album.

Released in 1984 and featuring mainstays like ‘Could You Be Loved’ and ‘Three Little Birds’, it’s the most successful reggae album of all time. It has sold over 15 million copies in the US and has spent more than 800 non-consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200.

Collectively, its tracks have accounted for well over four billion Spotify streams, and its phenomenal success is a key reason that the private music publishing company Primary Wave, which is backed by investors such as BlackRock, spent over $50 million to buy a share of Marley’s publishing catalogue in 2018.

A series of other albums have been released after Marley’s death. These include Natural Mystic (1995); the pop and hip-hop crossover Chant Down Babylon (1999); Africa Unite (2005); Uprising Live! (2014), which features his final concert appearance; the polarising electronic mashup Legend Remixed (2013); Easy Skanking in Boston ’78 (2015); and the curious Bob Marley & the Chineke! Orchestra (2022).

The Legend album has earned more than these later releases combined. But the material absent from that record speaks volumes.

In his 2022 autobiography, Chris Blackwell, the former head of Island Records, the label that brought Marley’s music to mainstream listeners, revealed that Legend had been carefully tailored for white mainstream audiences.

Legend is the most successful reggae album of all time. Photo: emics/Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

It achieved this by prioritising songs centred on themes of love and peace, rather than those about Marley’s revolutionary Afrocentric politics and Rastafarian worldview, which appear on records such as 1979’s Survival.

On that album’s second track, ‘Zimbabwe’, Marley commends the country’s freedom fighters in their battle against the oppressive Rhodesian regime, declaring, “Every man got a right to decide his own destiny”; he rails against the forces of exploitation and division in ‘Top Rankin’’ and ‘Babylon System’; in ‘Survival’, he hails the African world’s “hopes and dreams” and “ways and means”; and ‘Wake Up and Live’ is a clarion call to spiritual and political awakening.

These tracks don’t appear on Legend. In fact, none of the tracks from Survival do.

And so four decades after his death, Bob Marley remains the world’s top reggae artist. But it’s his lighter, less controversial fare that’s established him as a global superstar.

Merchandising the mystic

In an era of minuscule music royalties, a large portion of that $16 million in earnings also comes from merchandising, which has further watered down Marley’s revolutionary politics and spiritualism.

Thanks to what two writers called “the Disneyfication of all matters Marley”, you can now buy Bob Marley-themed coffee, ice cream and body wash. There’s sustainably sourced, Bob Marley-branded audio equipment, in addition to a line of Bob Marley skateboard decks.

Also read: Reggae’s Sacred Roots and Call to Protest Injustice

The cannabis brand Marley Natural shows how the Marley name has become commercially intertwined with corporate America.

It’s funded by the American private equity company Privateer Holdings, which the Marley family had approached to gauge their interest in collaboration for the product’s release. The creators of the Starbucks logo were hired to design the logo for Marley Natural, further underlining the venture’s commercial ties.

Aside from the obvious fact that these associations pay no heed to Bob Marley’s anti-capitalist messages, I find it bitterly ironic that the private equity firm calls itself “Privateer”. Privateers were commissioned ships involved in plundering and murder across the Caribbean. They are among the “old pirates” Marley sang about in his mournful ‘Redemption Song’.

While the Marley family claims that Bob would have approved of the cannabis enterprise, critics see indiscriminate mass-marketing.

The artist’s popular songs and lyrics have also been adopted as marketing tools to sell products that bear little relation to Marley’s music and message.

In 2001, his daughter Cedella, who runs parts of the estate, released a fashion line called Catch a Fire. The name comes from the Wailers’ first international album, which the group released in 1973. On it, tracks like ‘Slave Driver’, ‘Concrete Jungle’ and ‘400 Years’ connect the poverty of the present to the injustices of the past.

Can T-shirts and other apparel help spread these messages? Perhaps.

But it’s hard to argue that Marley-themed hot sauce does.

The reel situation of One Love

Critiquing any aspect of Bob Marley’s legacy can elicit defensive responses. The estate has long portrayed the rampant commercialisation of the Marley name and image as an important way to sustain and spread the artist’s ideals.

However, I think it’s important to ensure that the artistic and cultural values embedded in his music do not become clouded in a haze of rampant commercialisation.

While many of the commercial enterprises tied to his name reportedly raise money for Jamaican youth, I’d hesitate to say that this serves as a complete counterbalance to the erosion of Marley’s messages.

The One Love movie backed by Paramount Pictures – with four Marleys listed as producers – will certainly extend the mythologies and harsh realities of Bob Marley’s all-too-brief life, which was cut short by melanoma. But it’s also a massive international marketing vehicle for the sale of even more officially branded merchandise.

On the one hand, the fact that people so eagerly buy products plastered with Marley’s face and words reflects the profound connection he continues to have with his listeners. But on the other hand, it’s difficult squaring Marley – a symbol of post-colonialism and anti-capitalism – with branding collaborations and private equity firms.

His music means so much more. And his anti-imperialist messages, as warmongers threaten basic human rights around the world, are perhaps needed now more than ever.

Mike Alleyne, Professor Emeritus of Recording Industry (Popular Music Studies & Music Business), Middle Tennessee State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The British Royals’ Trip to Jamaica Has Backfired

William and Kate’s visit to Jamaica was designed to strengthen the British monarchy’s links to the Caribbean. Instead, it has reinvigorated Jamaicans’ campaigning to make the country a republic.

The second leg of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s much-anticipated Royal Caribbean Tour got off to a turbulent start the moment that the government’s £75 million “Brexit jet” left Belizean airspace. Their imminent arrival in the next “Commonwealth realm,” Jamaica, was not popular and soon sparked outrage among Jamaicans both on the island and in the diaspora — which spilled out into social media. Photos of William and Kate greeting Jamaican children through a fence have hardly helped.

Soon, there were widespread calls for reparations and a republican fervour sweeping Jamaican politics. The Queen remains Jamaica’s head of state, with her duties carried out by a colonial governor-general, but this has long been controversial. The latest visit has sparked significant resistance — influential Jamaican leaders in academia, music, and law have expressed their anger at the institution responsible for overseeing the enslavement of over one million Africans on the island of Jamaica in an open letter to the British Monarchy: “We see no reason to celebrate 70 years of the ascension of your grandmother to the British throne because her leadership, and that of her predecessors, has perpetuated the greatest human rights tragedy in the history of humankind.”

Britain’s Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, leave the RAF Voyager aircraft at Norman Manley International Airport, Kingston, Jamaica, March 22. Photo: Reuters/Toby Melville

It is widely believed that William and Kate Windsor’s tour of the Caribbean came in response to Barbados’s shock decision to replace Queen Elizabeth II with a Barbadian president in November 2021. If so, it is a decision that has backfired spectacularly. Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness confirmed on Wednesday in a short meeting with the royals that Jamaica will be “moving on” to fulfill its ambitions as an independent, developed, prosperous country. But why is Jamaica keen to cut ties with the monarchy after nearly sixty years of political independence from the United Kingdom?

A Jamaican Republic

Republicanism in Jamaica can trace its origins back to the 1972 general election, when the newly elected left-wing president Michael Manley and his People’s National Party established a constitutional reform commission with the aim to move Jamaica towards republic status by 1981. However, Manley’s defeat in the following election resulted in this goal being deprioritised by the next administration amid a decade of political conflict backed by numerous foreign powers.

But this did not quell the grassroots movement quickly gaining ground on the streets of Jamaica, as reggae icon Bob Marley touched the minds of millions, waking many up to the realities of imperialism through the power of his music. In the decades since, this has become a consensus. While Jamaica’s two main parties have ideological differences, they are at least nominally united in one thing: the eventual removal of the British monarch, and the installation of a Jamaican president.

At the turn of the 21st century, Prime Minister P.J. Patterson renewed calls for a republic following a 2002 decree by the Jamaican parliament dropping the requirement for MPs to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen. Though these renewed calls gathered cross-party support, the cause once again stalled. This time, the failure to change Jamaica’s constitutional status was a result of contention over the role of a president in a prospective republic.

Politicians often make their commitment to a republic a campaign pledge. But how do Jamaicans themselves feel about the British monarchy? There is a general apathy among the population when it comes to the British royals. Most people simply do not feel a connection, and this was the sentiment shared by Dancehall legend Beenie Man on Tuesday’s GMB broadcast:

We are just here, controlled by the British, ruled by the British law when you go in the court. It’s all about the Queen and the Queen this and the Queen that, but what are they doing for Jamaica? They are not doing anything for us.

Colonial history

Jamaica is a nation acutely aware of colonialism and the role the monarchy has played in advancing British interests at the expense of people in the Global South throughout its history. Last year’s declaration of a republic in neighbouring Barbados was a seminal moment for the region, with the country’s prime minister Mia Mottley pledging to “fully leave our colonial past behind”. But, in truth, these sentiments have been present in Jamaica for some time.

A 2020 poll commissioned by the Jamaica Observer found that 55% of Jamaicans would support ditching Queen Elizabeth II, with just 30% supporting the status quo. As well as Britain’s brutal colonial legacy in Jamaica, part of this is attributable to the royals themselves. For decades, the Firm has prioritised the white Anglosphere (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) in matters of engagement. Records show that the Queen has visited Jamaica some six times in her 70-year reign, a figure which pales in comparison to the twenty and sixteen visits to Canada and Australia respectively.

More controversially, the British government and monarchy has thus far failed to apologise for the horrific crimes committed against enslaved people on the island of Jamaica, as well as in the wider Caribbean. Charles “acknowledged” the stain that slavery and colonialism left on British history while speaking at Barbados’s transition ceremony last November but fell short of a full apology, something that lawmakers and diplomats across the CARICOM (Caribbean Community) bloc — an intergovernmental organisation of fifteen Caribbean member states — are keen to address with the Caribbean Reparations Commission. In the open letter addressed to William and Kate, the Advocates Network listed 60 reasons why reparations must be paid in order to right the wrongs of the past. They include treating ancestors as chattel, acts described as genocide, and theft of the country’s resources.

Closing the chapter

It isn’t only historic issues that inform Jamaican opinion. On matters of diplomacy and immigration, Britain is also seen in an increasingly negative light. In 2003, Jamaicans saw their visa-free access to the UK revoked by the Tony Blair government, driving an immigration wedge between the Jamaican population, its head of state, and the British diaspora. Jamaicans are currently the only citizens within the Commonwealth realm that require a visa to visit the land of their head of state.

In 2015, a foreign policy blunder by Conservative prime minister David Cameron sparked outrage in Jamaica when he offered to sponsor the building of a new Jamaican prison in lieu of reparations. But arguably both of these pale in comparison to the widely condemned Windrush Scandal, which saw British-Jamaicans wrongly deported by the Home Office. In November of last year, as Barbados declared a republic, the British government started deporting Jamaicans with no criminal record once again, for the first time since the scandal.

The scandals associated with the royal family itself haven’t helped. This trip seems likely to become another, following the controversy surrounding Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein. Before, it was the image of a downtrodden Meghan Markle discussing how her baby’s skin colour had been poorly received by the family. This remains fresh in the minds of the social media-savvy millennials and Zoomers throughout Jamaica, cementing the view that — in the words of former PM Portia Simpson-Miller — “I think [the] time [has] come.”

Throughout Jamaica’s post-independence history, the republican cause has been a popular one. Every Jamaican prime minister since Michael Manley has promised to deliver this to the people. There is, however, one challenge — it may be constitutionally tricky. Sections Forty-nine and Fifty of the Jamaican constitution only allow for the removal of the British monarch after a referendum has been held and popular support has been obtained. Andrew Holness’s mission from here will be to provide a realistic time frame for how soon this can happen, and to close this chapter of Jamaica’s history at the ballot box.

Ashley Rouen Brown is a writer, social commentator, and advocate of republican forms of government in the twenty-first century.

This article was first published on Jacobin.

Even in Death, Men Are Able to Earn Far More Than Women

Records show that while men continue to ear in royalties and sales after their death, women’s posthumous earnings are mostly confined to their bodily image or sexual value.

Death is no excuse for celebrities to stop working. James Dean, despite being dead since 1955, has recently been cast in a new Vietnam war movie, Finding Jack. His co-starring role will be computer generated from old footage and photographs and voiced by another actor. The dead are now rivals with the living for parts in movies.

This controversial casting decision has been met with outrage by many actors on Twitter. Complaints have circulated about puppeteering as well as being disrespectful to the dead movie idol.

Dean is by no means the first dead celebrity to continue to perform after death. Nat King Cole sang with his daughter Natalie on her 1991 Grammy Award-winning album, Unforgettable … With Love, and performed on stage with her via a video screen.

Meanwhile, Tupac Shakur sang on stage with Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre in 2012 and Michael Jackson performed as a hologram at the Billboard Music Awards in 2014.

If, as Dean stated: “Immortality is the only true success,” then success is achievable for a growing number of high profile dead celebrities who have remained productive and valuable after death.

But some dead celebrities are more valuable than others.

Dead reckoning

Both in life and death, celebrities wield significant power as a catalyst for cultural meaning. They possess symbolic and economic value that extends into death through the traces they leave behind. These traces continue the dead star’s celebrity power as a brand and include such things as photographs, films, signatures and recordings of their voice, as well as their celebrity persona (the character or personality they presented to fans).

But this posthumous celebrity varies in value. For many high profile celebrity women, the traces they leave possess sexualised value, much as they had in life – related to their youth, beauty and sensuality. A great deal of their symbolic and economic value is about their bodies, so the way in which their traces are put to work after they die reflects gendered inequality.

Dead women celebrities are put to work selling feminised products such as chocolate or perfume. Meanwhile, Steve McQueen sells Ford Puma cars and Einstein promotes Genius Bread.

Making the list

The way in which gender inequality reaches beyond the grave is clearly revealed by Forbes magazine’s publication of its Top Dead Earning Celebrities List every October since 2001. Affectionately referred to as the Dead Rich List, it reveals distinct gender inequality. Of 52 celebrities who have appeared on the list in nearly two decades, only five have been women: actresses Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, 1950s striptease artist and pin-up model Bettie Page, and singer-songwriters Jenni Rivera and Whitney Houston.

Men – including Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and Charles Schultz (of Peanuts fame) – consistently dominate the top positions on the Dead Rich List. Their earnings after death are staggeringly high compared to those of the women who appear.

Highest-paid dead celebrities of 2018. Source: Forbes Magazine.

First place has been held by Michael Jackson every year since his death (excepting 2009 and 2012) helping buck the trend of the under-representation of black and minority ethnic performers. Jackson’s earnings have been immense, rising to US$825 million in 2016 due to the sale of his half of the Sony/ATV Music catalogue which owned much of the Beatles’ music, before dropping to their lowest point in 2019 with US$60 million.

In contrast, Monroe was the highest female earner with US$13 million in 2019, allowing her to maintain eighth place on the list for a second year.

Forbes’ suggests that to achieve a financially successful posthumous career it helps to be a white man from either the US or UK, although black and minority ethnic people (BAME) are more likely to make the cut now than in 2001 as illustrated by Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Prince and Whitney Houston making recent lists.

Building posthumous value

But even if they make the rich list, the posthumous career earnings of Monroe, Taylor, Page, Rivera and Houston illustrate how women and black and minority ethnic people continue to be underrepresented among those who achieve high incomes after death. They reveal that celebrity value, in terms of symbolism and economics, is heavily gendered after death.

Dead celebrity women’s posthumous careers are limited by being valuable due to their bodily capital. Men have a good track record of making wealth through the books they write or the music and lyrics they compose and own. In contrast, celebrity women are less likely to be a source for the production of wealth but a means for generating wealth for others.

But the 21st century, in particular, is witnessing the emergence of perceptive and well-informed celebrity women who own the sources of production of wealth and are not restricted to their bodily capital. Women such as Oprah Winfrey, the Kardashian sisters and JK Rowling are in firm control of their economic and symbolic value – which is something they can take forwards into death.

Pretty much all of the possible women candidates for future lists have long lives ahead of them – hopefully, barring illness or accident – meaning it will be many years before this gendered inequality in death is properly challenged. As it stands, gendered inequality of bodily capital means that for celebrity women, death is not the last great equaliser – inequality continues in death.

Ruth Penfold-Mounce is a Senior Lecturer in the University of York.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

UNESCO Declares Reggae a Global Cultural Treasure

Born in the poor neighbourhoods of Kingston in the 1960s, reggae gave voice to the Rastafari movement and the struggles of the oppressed but was also a joyous dance music with a distinctive off-beat.

New Delhi: UNESCO has declared reggae – Jamaican music that spread across the world with its calls for social justice, peace and love – to be a global treasure that must be safeguarded.

Born in the poor neighbourhoods of Kingston in the 1960s, reggae gave voice to the Rastafari movement and the struggles of the oppressed but was also a joyous dance music with a distinctive off-beat. Reggae also went on to influence hip=hop in the US. Postwar immigration from Jamaica led to the genre flourishing in the UK.

Its most famous songwriter and performer, the late Bob Marley, became a global superstar with hits like No Woman, No Cry and Get Up, Stand Up. Other notables include Jimmy Cliff and Toots, Trojan and the Maytalls.

Artists such as the Clash incorporated its chunky beat and its politics into their own music, bringing it to a wider audience. It caught on from Britain to Brazil and Africa.

Jamaica had applied for reggae’s inclusion on the list this year at a meeting of the UN agency on the island of Mauritius.

Also Read: Reggae’s Sacred Roots and Call to Protest Injustice

According to UNESCO, “the music is now played and embraced by a wide cross-section of society, including various genders, ethnic and religious groups.” It also stated that Reggae’s contribution to “international discourse on issues of injustice, resistance, love and humanity underscores the dynamics of the element as being at once cerebral, socio-political, sensual and spiritual.”

? BREAKING#Reggae music of #Jamaica?? has just been inscribed on the #IntangibleHeritage List! Congratulations! ?

ℹ️ https://t.co/1SDzLr4U5F #LivingHeritage pic.twitter.com/7t1jkD2Z8n

— UNESCO (@UNESCO) November 29, 2018

UNESCO’s protected list began in 2008 and after a UN’s convention to safeguard ensure respect and raise awareness for intangible cultural heritage. Also on the list is an ancient form of Egyptian theatre that uses traditional hand puppetry, called Al-Aragoz, the art of dry stone walling in several European countries, Ramlila and the Chhau dance from Eastern India.

The Paris-based UNESCO, the cultural agency of the UN, made its ruling at a meeting this week.

(With inputs from Reuters)

Reggae’s Sacred Roots and Call to Protest Injustice

Reggae is the musical expression of Rastafari, a belief system of migrants to Jamaica. A popular song, ‘Rivers of Babylon,’ offers a window into their spirituality and longing for their homeland.

July 1 is International Reggae Day – a time to celebrate the popular music of Jamaica with dance parties exhibitions, presentations and even tree planting.

Reggae is universally associated with Bob Marley, its most influential artist. However, it was ‘Do the Reggae,’ by Jamaican musical group Toots and the Maytals that in 1968 first used the word “reggae” in a title and helped define the genre. Two years later, another Jamaican band, the Melodians released “Rivers of Babylon,” with lyrics adopted from Psalm 137, a Hebrew poem that is the subject of my most recent book, ‘Song of Exile.’

This hugely popular lyric opens a window into Rastafarian spirituality.

Who are the Rastafari?

Reggae is the most popular musical expression of Rastafari, a belief system that took hold in the 1930s among poor, rural Jamaicans of African descent, who had immigrated to Kingston, where they felt alienated from roots and traditions.

Rastafari emphasizes the connection of people of African descent to Ethiopia and was inspired principally by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, who founded the influential United Negro Improvement Association in 1914. He taught that blacks should reject their subjugation in North America by repatriating to Africa.

Garvey preached that blacks were the authentic biblical Jews. Based on his reading of the Bible, Garvey predicted the appearance of a black king and messiah in Africa. Like Jews, Christians and Muslims, Rastas worship a supreme being, referred to as Jah, short for Jehovah.

A mural depicting reggae music icon Bob Marley, right, and former Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie decorate a wall in the yard of Marley’s Kingston home, in Jamaica. Credit: Roslyn Russell/Flickr

The word Rastafari comes from the Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie, crowned in 1930 and considered by most Rastafarians to be divine. Although Selassie himself was Christian not Rasta, his title was “Ras,” meaning “prince,” and his given name was Tafari – hence his followers called themselves Rastafari.

Numbering roughly a million adherents worldwide, Rastafari forbids practitioners to cut their hair. A meat-free diet of local, naturally produced fruits and vegetables without additives is encouraged, contraception and abortion are typically proscribed, and homosexuality is shunned. Taking its cue from verses in the Bible, in which the leaves of trees serve for the “healing of the nations,” Rastafari prescribes cannabis use in sacramental rituals for healing and meditation that center on drumming and chanting.

Reggae and ‘Rivers of Babylon’

Reggae music was fed by diverse musical sources. Its rhythmic underpinnings were laid by African drum rhythms. Syncopated patterns created by the drums were enhanced in the 1960s by a prominent electric bass line and off-beat guitar riffs.

Reggae also drew on earlier traditions of Jamaican popular music as well as American genres like big-band jazz and rhythm and blues. North American gospel hymns influenced some of the lyrics and tunes.

The spirituality of Rastafari appears vividly in the song ‘Rivers of Babylon.’

First recorded in 1970, ‘Rivers of Babylon’ takes its text from Psalm 137, the only one out of 150 psalms to be set in a particular time and place, the Babylonian exile or the period between 587-586 B.C. in Israel’s history, when Jews were taken captive in Babylon and the Jerusalem temple was destroyed.

Its nine verses paint a scene of captives mourning ‘by the rivers of Babylon,’ mocked by their captors. It expresses a vow to remember Jerusalem even in exile and closes with fantasies of vengeance against the oppressors.

Why Psalm 137 is important

The Babylonian exile compelled Israelites to rethink their relationship to God, reassess their standing as a chosen people and rewrite their history. This episode has obvious appeal to Rastafarians, who consider themselves in exile from their African homeland (Zion) and living under an oppressive European power system they refer to as Babylon.

Like Psalm 137, the ‘Rivers of Babylon,’ is divided into three sections.

The first stanza offers a modified version of the Psalm 137:

    By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,
    And there we wept, when we remembered Zion.
    Cause the wicked carried us away in captivity
    Required from us a song.
    How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land?

The reggae version replaces “the Lord’s song” with “King Alpha’s song,” a reference to Ras Tafari, the Ethiopian king and messiah.

The second stanza diverges from the psalm, offering a Rasta-flavored exhortation to protest injustice through shouts and song:

Sing it out loud
Sing a song of freedom, sister
Sing a song of freedom, brother
We gotta sing and shout it
We gotta talk and shout it
Shout the song of freedom now

The final stanza of ‘Rivers of Babylon’ embodies the historic connection between Rastafari and Christianity. Rastafari developed in a colonial society shaped by British Protestants and indigenous African Jamaican traditions.

The song’s final stanza is taken from Psalm 19 and is a familiar Christian benediction, ending with a familiar Rastafari salutation:

Let the words of our mouth
And the meditation of our heart
Be acceptable in
Thy sight O Fari

Psalm 137 has also inspired numerous political leaders and social movements, and immigrants, as varied as Irish, Korean and Cuban, have identified with the story. Its verses capture succinctly the ways people come to grips with trauma and the desire for justice. There is a good reason, in other words, why this particular psalm continues to resonate.

David W. Stowe is professor of English and religious studies, Michigan State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Review: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Marlon James
A Brief History of Seven Killings
London: OneWorld, 2015

In Middle Passage (1962), V S Naipaul’s account of revisiting the Caribbean, the author is swept up by the voices of its inhabitants. As one taxi driver tells him: “Is only when you live here as long as me that you know the sort of animal it is.” Understanding exactly what sort of “animal” Jamaica is also lies at the heart of Marlon James’s Booker-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Like Middle Passage, James’s book is a whirlwind of different voices, intertwining and separating as the novel proceeds. Yet unlike Middle Passage there is no artful attempt to spare the darkness of what was once the heart of the slave trade. As one of James’s characters says when talking about Naipaul’s travelogue, “the beauty of how him write that sentence still lie to you as to how ugly [West Kingston] is”.

Ostensibly A Brief History of Seven Killings is about the failed assassination of Bob Marley, immediately before a peace concert organised by the socialist People’s National Party (PNP) in 1976. Marley was wounded but went on to play the concert. He left straight afterwards and did not return to Jamaica for two years. The gunmen were never brought to justice and their identities remain a mystery.

The fog of uncertainty surrounding these events has elevated them to mythical status. James takes the few facts that are known and runs with them, as any novelist worth his salt would. We have seven assassins, perhaps drawing on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954); but in James’s tale these guys are certainly not on the side of the angels. The novel follows their fictional deaths over the coming years, a gruesome catalogue of violence fuelled by cocaine and guns, with the truly demonic Josey Wales at its centre.

The novel has a formidable cast list of 75 characters. Although some have only walk-on parts, a large number speak to us directly, forming a bewildering collage of voice. Pretty much all of them are fictional although some, such as the journalist Alex Pierce, are based on actual people. Perhaps the most interesting is that of Sir Arthur Jennings, a murdered Jamaican politician, again fictional, who becomes a sort of one-man Greek chorus narrating from the grave. As he says right at the beginning of the novel, “dead people never stop talking”.

It is through these different voices that we get the garbled, fractured fates of the gunmen. But we also get much more. Slowly we begin to see the murky involvement of the CIA, desperate to prize Jamaica away from its growing infatuation with communist Cuba. As Papa-lo, the don of Copenhagen City, implores fruitlessly, “save order from chaos”. Yet if there’s a message in James’s tale, it’s that the scars of slavery and oppression run deep. And with such a heart of darkness, chaos will never be far away.

Marlon James. Credit: David Shankbone

The success of James’s novel ultimately rests with the strength of these voices. The Jamaican characters are particularly compelling. Less successful are the middle-class Americans, the journalist Alex Pierce and the CIA chief, Barry Diflorio.

Yet the ambition of the novel can’t be denied. James in his acknowledgements cites the importance of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) although perhaps a stronger comparison can be made to the earlier work The Sound and the Fury (1929). Like Faulkner, James uses the full range of first-person trickery, including long single-sentence stream of consciousness and even a poem.

Yet, famously, even Faulkner had to switch to third person right at the end of The Sound and the Fury to bring the story together. James’s novel doesn’t do this but it does suffer from the weaknesses of his enforced solipsism in other ways, the need for artificial summary, for example, and the crow-barring in of historical context. As a consequence A Brief History of Seven Killings has a curiously old-fashioned feel to it, a return to the experimentalism of the early 20th century. Recent novels such as Will Self’s Umbrella (2012) and David Peace’s Red or Dead (2013) have shown how the great Modernist project can be pushed forwards in new and exciting ways.

This is not to say that what James is doing isn’t exciting and important in its own way. It’s rather that the experimental part of the novel is less the bravura of its form and more the forensic exposition of its subject, the deep emotional scars of the Caribbean. It looks like Naipaul’s taxi driver was right all along.

Spencer Jordan, Deputy Director for Creative Writing, University of Nottingham

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.