The legend of Bob Marley, resurrected and reissued

By Jason Tedjasukmana

JAKARTA (JP): I first heard Burnin' on my mom's old Marantz turntable, the record crackling and popping like a smoldering spliff. A slow, hypnotic groove saturated the room and yet another reggae disciple emerged.

The many inflections of reggae music today -- dub, dancehall, ragamuffin -- are testament to the influence that Bob Marley and the Wailers have had since that 1973 classic, though few will have the same staying power. Musical trends now shift as frequently as geo-political boundaries, but Marley's music seems to rise above them both. And while millions continue to bob and sway to his music, much about the singer's life remains in the shadows.

Successful musicians with short careers are typically mined for their back catalogs of music, and Marley tributes, collections and anthologies have far outnumbered his ten-album oeuvre on Island Records. Thus, with each new release of Marley material, one hopes to gain a slightly better understanding of this Jamaican legend that elevated reggae music from the clubs of Kingston to the international arena.

Taking the 50-year anniversary of Bob Marley's birth on May 22, 1945, as the occasion, Island Records, whose founder Chris Blackwell first signed Bob Marley in 1972, has released a new CD entitled Natural Mystic: The Legend Lives On.

The new compilation, on Island's Tuff Gong label, is a timely reminder of Marley's brilliance, though much of his music's characteristic warmth has been washed away in a sanitized digital remastering of some old classics. The days of warm vinyl are essentially gone, having succumbed to a marketing-driven era, with the bottom line fueling the latest trend of CD reissues.

Natural Mystic is mainly a collection of poppier tunes which includes two singles previously unavailable on LP (Iron Lion Zion and Keep on Moving). The choices are not surprising as many of the same cuts catapulted Marley to European stardom in the mid- 1970s. Looking to the most accessible selection of Marley's music, however, is to underestimate the powerfully cynical beliefs that shaped his music.

Here comes the conman Coming with his con plan We won't take no bribe, we got to stay alive We gonna chase those crazy Chase those crazy baldheads out of town

-- Crazy Baldheads (1976)

Raised a Christian in a small town on Jamaica's north shore, Bob Marley quickly left behind the church and his mother, a local Jamaican who had married a white colonial stationed on the island when she was 19. (The father, British army Captain Norval Sinclair Marley, abandoned them both shortly after Marley was born). As an adolescent Marley left for Kingston, where he would meet Rita Marley, his soon-to-be wife and mentor in the teachings of Rastafari, as well as Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, the original members of the Wailers.

From these introductions, his music began to give voice to the dark mysticism of Ras Tafari, the pre-coronation name given to the Ethiopian Emperor Halie Selasie I, who died in 1975. The Rastafarians of the Caribbean worship Ras (prince) Tafari as the personification of Jah, or God, as he was meant to lead his children out of Babylon and back to their African homeland. Marley's reggae music carried Rastafari's message of salvation, but it was equally steeped in a distrust of the system and an obligation to alert those in earshot to the negative forces at work.

"Politicians, they are devils; devils who corrupt. They don't smoke 'erb, because when y'smoke, y'think alike, and them don't want that..." (1975)

Self dignity and black unity are the Rastafarian's weapons against the establishment and all of its lascivious trappings. Deliverance from the baldheads of Babylon was a message Marley preached to the masses everywhere, many of whom came to regard the singer as a prophet.

Certain forces in his homeland, however, sought to manipulate his status and Marley's death may have stemmed from the wound to his arm that he sustained in 1976, when armed thugs raided his Kingston home in an act of political intimidation. While others allege that his cancer began with an old football accident, the cancerous toe that was amputated a year later was only the beginning of a slow demise. Robert Nesta Marley would die of cancer a few years later at the age of 36.

Don't ask me why Things are not the way they used to be I won't tell no lie One and all got to face reality now

-- Natural Mystic (1977)

Even after his death on May 11, 1981, in a Miami hospital, the same cadre of hourly devils did not relent. This time, however, it was not in pursuit of the Marley aura but the Marley estate. His life-long disdain for lawyers and accountants resulted in much post-mortem uncertainty surrounding his $30-million estate, the Wailer name and hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalty payments. Marley refused to leave a will and subsequently much fell into the hands of the very lawyers that he spent a lifetime trying to avoid. Rita Marley, the singer's wife of fifteen years and mother of four of his seven children, has since weathered a litany of lawsuits and legal actions, tasks she no doubt never anticipated in her early days as one the I-Threes, Marley's dancers and back-up singers.

Unlike Elvis, Kurt Cobain or other musicians cut down in the prime of life, Marley's legend is not confined to a generation or even to popular music. Marley was a messenger addressing the human condition, using reggae as a vehicle to reach the critical masses. From the Trenchtown ghettos of Kingston to the splintering communities of America, Africa and South Asia, his message will indeed continue to live on.