A MISUNDERSTOOD MUSICAL LEGACY

 -->STRAIT AWAY I would like to explain a  term embedded throughout the writing and emphasize the definition of the term as I am using it in this thesis.  "White-heart" is NOT a term i am using synonymously with "white person" but rather a term that codifies the attitude of entitlement and privilege - as well as fear - in the psyche' of many so called "white" people. 

Not to long ago, I heard a segment on public radio about the late great Bob “Nesta” Marley OM and the song he co-wrote with the original Wailers (Bob, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer, Junior Braithwaite, and Beverly Kelso) entitled “One Love”. The segment explained that the song had gone through a stark interpretational change from the time of its original conception.

Bob was a Rastaman: a visionary, a son of Africa and a “son”  of the Emperor Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia – (Rastafari people first declared Him to be the Black “God” /Messiah), and he was as well a visionary of the late Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey.

Garvey, a Jamaican born son, was the most prominent and perhaps the greatest man in history to have mobilized and motivated black African people throughout the world towards emancipation from white rule. Garvey was one of the first and most outspoken scholars of black emancipation, redemption and repatriation otherwise known at the time as “Ethiopianism”, Garvey stated in a now popularized phrase that natural order of nations was to maintain their integrity as “Europe for the Europeans, China for the Chinese, India for the Indian, and Africa for the Africans (both at home and abroad)”; it was an order which Marley also emphasized and repeated throughout his career.

In 1962, Jamaica was awarded her “independence” from England as a colonial subject and became an “autonomous” nation. This occasion marked the end of nearly four centuries of colonial rule (albeit the country has yet to recover from a crippled economic infrastucture due to among other things, trans-national economic policies which maintain large multi-national corporate interests to the detriment of the struggling local economy)*, and was seen at the time as the dawn of a new era of freedom and progress for the nation.

The Wailing Wailers were just embarking on their musical careers; a young group who were keenly in tune with the spirit of this renaissance out of which they produced several hits, one of these was entitled “One Love”

The segment described how the tune was later reproduced once Marley had reached his prominence as a world class musician and how it had now become a major worldwide hit song - though it was now translated in the minds of many into a work of a new interpretation;

What had happened over time as Marley’s infectious popularity grew within   the white populations was that the tune became viewed as a peace movement mantra, settled in the mind of whitehearts who now sing it’s lyrics with a philosophically color-blinded resolve towards repairing race relations, while maintaining a non-conscious daze towards the reality of racial inequality and the black struggle for truth and rights.

“One Love

 One heart –

 Let’s get together and feel alright”

Whitehearts could definitely palette that brand of message, or at least the brand they thought they were getting.

“Have pity on those whose chances grows thinner…”

Another passive note; not implying any fault or malice by anyone, just appealing to sympathy, invoking ideas of those who are labeled “under-privileged” or “less fortunate”;  this is uncharacteristic of the majority of Bob Marley’s lyrics from later in his career.  There is no implication of race or injustice anywhere in the lyrics, as for example one will find in the songs “Buffalo Soldier”, “Slave Driver”, “ Guiltiness, or “The Heathen”-

For those who maintain a tourist mentality in regards to reggae, those songs would be unsuited as anthems for their portable vacation spot. It’s here, in “One Love” paradise, that Bob Marley can take them anytime they tap it. (usually it’s that beach where “island dreads” [somehow happy, “no problem mon”, “transcendent” blacks] and whites can drink Red Stripe and love “One Love” together) –

The problem, the BIG problem, is that white-hearted society has revised the terms of Bob Marley’s work by claiming to have received this soft and fuzzy version of oneness and love that supposedly asks us all to be colorblinded, color-muted, ergo unresponsive to the implications of color in a color/class profiled society; let’s just “get together to feel alright”.

I chose Bob Marley's work in question as a glaring point of departure by which to reexamine and arrest white-heartedness.  In this example, we’ve been able to expose the society at large’s inclination to find the unarguably most universal cause of shared experience - “love”-  and reduce it to a level of “feeling” and non-commitment. This was just one particularly vivid example which illustrated the chasm - indeed perhaps the very definition of love - between the Blackheart and the Whiteheart.

The major attraction to these lyrics by whites-hearts reveals the conciousness-repelling from within the concept of “whiteness” which has caused a mis-aligned respect for Bob Marley.

Whitehearted sentimentalities coddle a particularly benign, myopic image of Bob: a rebellious (but safe like a hippy)  half black/half white Rastaman who is as a reggae super-hero,! This fabricated Bob Marley is a costume being in the same sense as the “I have a dream” MLK Jr. is;  the real man’s contention with and open rebuke of the system and definitive calls for justice is muted/substituted in society’s irreverent reaction to facing accountability, that is, facing the task of uniting in a significant way against the mental/physical dominant class power structure.

Real love and oneness is something that needs to be strove for, not simply turned to as a token delight.

“One love” – NOT the anthem for a colorblinded society at large that does not strive for the basic components (equity and justice) of that loving oneness;

“One Love”, as a matter of fact, had been written to fellow Jamaicans as a rally for solidarity as a black “emancipated” nation struggling with senseless class divisions; despite how it later became marketed to the world, “One Love” was in the mind of its authors a strong statement to Jamaicans, a tool of black emancipation - an extension of Garvey's mantra projected to the black nation, i.e. "One God, One Aim, One Destiny". Even if we a whites are to derive a parallel meaning from “One Love”, then it is certainly not one that tells us to “get together” for a day or a few hours. Sustained togetherness would logically require work; the work of mutual care, honor and overstanding

We will be bound, if we are honest as we check out all the lyrics of Bob Marley, to come to the conclusion that he was not the appeasing, happy-go-lucky nor hippy type of song writer.

If we look with objectivity at the man’s whole musical legacy, we then afford ourselves the chance to have not only a richer experience of the man’s spirit and genius, but then and only then do they do justice to the memory of this Son of Africa, to respect his prerogative as a black man and his contribution to the world and his Black people in right context.

We ask of ourselves now  "Who was Bob Marley?"

and by the same token who is it in society that Bob wrote about saying:

“some people think life is a dream, so they – making matters worse….”

                                                                                     (BM, “Crisis”)

Bob was not here as a minstral.  He wasn’t dancin’ with fools, But it’s not enough to say who he was or was not; It is more important that we, the adoring fans, look inside ourselves to see who we are -  to root out spiritual wickedness, negating the privilege accounting of our lives for something more real and live a circumspect, fulfilling life, despite the nature of self and what others may think, and despite an evil system which provides wealth, leisure, and worldly comfort -  that which the masses chase everyday. Now that would be SHOWING heart -  disgracing  the source of oneself's or one's constituents pleasure and ignorance for the sake of what is just for others.

Unfortunately, privilege based on racial hierarchy has caused many to presuppose from a very deeply engrained level of ignorance - a symptom of a multigenerational conditioning through a lens of recycled status quo - a most powerful psychological motivator of human behavior. A “do not disturb sign” attitude towards this status quo blinds most whites to the offensive and horrendous extent of our historical pre-fabricated privilege, and that has produced justified anger, justified suspicion and justified unwillingness within many non-europeans to view whites as brothers and sisters within the world community.

As white-hearted society begins to remove the self-imposed mental barriers that privilege affords, (a state of mind which is a strong incubator of institutional racism) aligning our relative experiences and communications and activities with absolute truths, transformative healing will take place; on the other hand, simply hearing messages which come with a compulsion to dance won’t drive the issues forward. Taking ACTION, taking hold of the sword Bob Marley wielded IS the tantamount requirement for becoming part of the great Bob Marley-Rastafari-black liberation legacy.

Remember I, Rhedda J and the Iricals, deliver this message of truth/power

to the entire reggae community the world over