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3.13.2005

My friend Dan wrote a great blog on his recent trip to Paris.

Are there ways to measure quality in medical care — and can they cut costs? (It's free and easy to register for nytimes.com; you only have to do it once.)

Ate here on the weekend. Drank WildAss Wine from here. Excellent, both of them.

He hit 12 3-pointers against the Sixers.

My brother Duncan wrote an excellent essay on the history of Hamas (which I had to edit for him at 11:00 last night). Here is more context in this week's NYTimes.

Woody Allen has a new movie being released soon. It stars Will Ferrell. ?

Talk Cinema threw another curve ball this weekend.

VANCOUVER

Vancouver's natural assets and temperate climate make it one of the best cities in the world in which to live, a new survey says.

The annual quality of life survey released by Mercer Human Resource Consulting placed Vancouver third out of 215 cities, the same as last year. The only two places that beat the West Coast city were Zurich and Geneva in Switzerland.

Toronto edged up one spot in the rankings to 14th place. Montreal was 22nd, up two spots, Ottawa was unchanged in 20th spot, and Calgary was 25th, down one. All five Canadian cities in the survey were praised for their relatively high levels of "personal safety and security" and for being in a politically stable country.

Baghdad was deemed the world's least secure city because of ongoing civil unrest and threats of attack in the city. Luxembourg was ranked the top city for personal safety and security. In the United States, the highest-rated cities were Honolulu and San Francisco, tied in 25th spot with Calgary, while Houston, in 68th spot, ranked lowest.

BOB MARLEY

Bob Marley was already dying when he stood onstage in Pittsburgh that night, in September 1980. He had developed a malignant melanoma -- an incurable cancer, by this time -- that he had let progress unchecked, for reasons that he probably could not fathom at this hour. He was a man with no time, with a mission that no one in popular music had ever attempted before. In the past few years, he had managed to popularize reggae -- a music that had once sounded strange and foreign to many ears -- and to convey the truths of his troubled homeland, Jamaica, for a mass audience. Now he wanted to find ways to put across truths about people outside Jamaica and America, England and Europe. He wanted to speak for a world outside familiar borders -- a world his audience didn't yet know enough about.
He wouldn't see that dream fulfilled. He would be dead in a few months, his body sealed in a mausoleum back in that troubled homeland of his.

But something fascinating has happened since Bob Marley died twenty-four years ago: He has continued. It isn't simply that his records still sell in substantial numbers (though they do), it's that his mission might still have a chance. It isn't a simple mission. Marley wasn't singing about how peace could come easily to the world but rather about how hell on earth comes too easily to too many. He knew the conditions he was singing about. His songs weren't about theory or conjecture, or an easy distant compassion. His songs were his memories; he had lived with the wretched, he had seen the downpressors and those whom they pressed down, he had been shot at. It was his ability to describe all this in palpable and authentic ways that sustains his body of music unlike any other we've ever known.

Bob Marley made hell tuneful, like nobody before or since. That's what has kept him alive.

Robert Nesta Marley was born in a small rural Jamaican village called Nine Miles. His father was a white man, Capt. Norval Marley, a superintendent of lands for the British government, which had colonized Jamaica in the 1660s. Marley's mother, Cedella, was a young black woman, descended from the Cromantee tribe, who as slaves had staged the bloodiest uprisings in the island's plantation era. Capt. Marley seduced Cedella, age seventeen, promising her marriage, as he re-enacted an age-old scenario of white privilege over black service. When Cedella became pregnant, the captain kept his promise -- but left her the next day rather than face disinheritance.

The couple's only child arrived in the early part of 1945, as World War II neared its end. Nobody is certain of the exact date -- it was listed on Bob's passport as April 6th, but Cedella was sure it was two months earlier. It took her a long time to record the birth with the registrar; she was afraid, she later said, she'd get in trouble for having a child with a white man. While mixed-race couplings weren't rare, they also weren't welcome, and generally it was the child of these unions who bore the scorn. But Marley's mixed inheritance gave him a valuable perspective. Though he became increasingly devoted in his life to the cause of speaking to the black diaspora -- that population throughout the world that had been scattered or colonized as the result of the slave trade and imperialism -- he never expressed hatred for white people but rather hatred for one people's undeserved power to subjugate another people. Marley understood that the struggle for power might result in bloodshed, but he also maintained that if humankind failed to stand together, it would fail to stand at all.

In the 1950s, Cedella moved to Kingston -- the only place in Jamaica where any future of consequence could be realized. She and her son made their home in a government tenant yard, a crowded area where poor people lived, virtually all of them black. The yard they settled in, Trench Town, was made up of row upon row of cheap corrugated metal and tar-paper one-room shacks, generally with no plumbing. It was a place where your dreams might raise you or kill you, but you would have to live and act hard in either case. To Cedella's dismay, her son began to come into his own there -- to find a sense of community and purpose amid rough conditions and rough company, including the local street gangs. These gangs evolved soon enough into a faction called Rude Boys -- teenagers and young adults who dressed sharp, acted insolent and knew how to fight. Kingston hated the Rude Boys, and police and politicians had vowed to eradicate them.

It was in this setting of grim delimitation that Marley first found what would give his life purpose: Kingston's burgeoning and eccentric rhythm & blues scene. In the late 1940s, Jamaican youth had started to catch the fever of America's urban popular music -- in particular, the earthy and polyrhythmic dance and blues sounds of New Orleans. By the 1960s, Kingston was producing its own form of R&B: a taut, tricky and intense music in which rhythms shifted their accents to the offbeat -- almost an inversion of American rock & roll and funk. This new Jamaican music was, like American R&B, the long-term result of how black music survived and evolved as a means of maintaining community in unsympathetic lands. It was music that gave a displaced population a way to tell truths about their lives and a way of claiming victory over daily misery, or at least of finding a respite.

Jamaica's popular music -- from calypso to mento -- had always served as a means to spread stories, about neighbors' moral failures or the overlord society's duplicity. The commentary could be clever and merciless, and the music that Marley first began to play had the tempo to carry such sharp purposes. It was called ska (after its scratchboardlike rhythms), and just as R&B and rock & roll had been viewed in America as disruptive and immoral, Jamaica's politicians, ministers and newspapers looked upon ska as trash: a dangerous music from the ghetto that helped fuel the Rude Boys' violence. But the Rude Boys would soon receive an unexpected jolt of validation.

Cedella Marley was worried that her son had grown too comfortable with ghetto life and was too close to the Rude Boys. There were frequent fights, even stabbings, in the Trench Town streets and at ska dances. Marley, though small and slight, was known as a force in Trench Town. He even had a street name: Tuff Gong. But he had no aspiration for a criminal life. "Don't worry," he told his mother. "I don't work for them." The truth was, Marley found qualities of ruthless honesty, courage and rough beauty in tenement-yard community, and he didn't necessarily want to transcend or escape it -- instead, he wanted to describe its reality and to speak for its populace, which was subject to not only destitution but easy condemnation as well. He had already written a song about cheap moralism, "Judge Not," recorded it with one of Kingston's leading producers, Leslie Kong, and released it in 1963 -- the same year that the Beatles and Bob Dylan were making their music felt. That year, Marley also formed a vocal group with his childhood friend Neville Livingston (the son of Cedella's boyfriend, who later became known as Bunny Wailer) and Peter McIntosh, a tall guitar player who would shorten his name to Peter Tosh. The group spent considerable time sharpening its vocal harmonies with singer Joe Higgs. Higgs had done some work for Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, Kingston's dominant record producer, who also ran the scene's most successful recording house, Studio One. In addition, Dodd presided over the island's most popular sound system -- a sort of DJ booth on wheels that played the new American and Jamaican sounds at makeshift dance halls, until the police would bust them up, breaking heads and looking for Rude Boys who might be carrying knives or marijuana.

Marley and the others auditioned several original songs for Dodd in 1963, including one that he had written out of deference to his mother's concerns, called "Simmer Down." It was a plea to the local gangs to back off from violence before ruling powers stepped into the situation, and it was set to an aggressive beat that might well excite the sort of frenzy that the song's words disavowed. Dodd recorded the tune the next day with his best studio musicians, the Skatalites, and that same night he played the record at one of his sound-system affairs. It was an immediate sensation, and for good reason: For the first time, a voice from the ghetto was speaking to others who lived in the same straits, acknowledging their existence and giving voice to their troubles, and that breakthrough had a transformative effect, on both the scene and on Marley and his group, who would call themselves the Wailing Wailers and, finally, the Wailers. (The name was meant to describe somebody who called out from the ghetto -- a sufferer and witness.) Marley had already found one of the major themes that would characterize his songwriting through his entire career.

Dodd was so impressed with Marley's work ethic that he entrusted him with rehearsing several of Studio One's other vocal groups, including the Soulettes -- a female singing trio that featured a teenage single mother and nursing student named Rita Anderson, who had a dream of becoming Jamaica's Diana Ross. Marley had eyes for other women during this time -- he always would -- but he was drawn to Anderson for her devotion as a mother. In turn, she felt a need to protect Marley, who now lived alone in the back of Dodd's studio, after his mother had finally tired of the Kingston life and moved to Delaware. Rita and Marley married in 1966, just days before he gave in to his mother's insistence that he come visit her and try to establish a home in America.

He didn't stay long. Marley didn't like the pace of life in America, nor the circumscribed job opportunities available to black men. He missed his wife and home. While he'd been gone, though, something significant happened in Jamaica that would utterly transfigure Marley's life and destiny: A Living God had visited Marley's homeland and walked on its soil.

The living god's name was haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, and the product of a complicated strand of history that marked the lives of Marley and Jamaica. Selassie's importance for Jamaicans began in the life of another man, Marcus Garvey -- an early-twentieth-century activist who encouraged blacks to look to their African heritage and to create their own destinies apart from the ones imposed on them by America and by European colonialism. According to a persistent myth, Garvey instructed his followers in 1927 to look to Africa for the crowning of a black king, as a sign that a messiah was at hand. In point of fact, Garvey never uttered such a prophecy, but the claim remains attributed to him to this day. In 1930, when a young man named Ras Tafari maneuvered his way onto the throne of Ethiopia, the prophecy that Garvey never proclaimed took on the power of the word made flesh for many. Selassie was the Living God, the reinstatement of the rightful Jehovah to the earth and a beacon of hope for the world's long-suffering black diaspora.

In Jamaica, a cult called Ras Tafari sprang up around this belief in the 1930s. Rastafarianism developed as a mystical Judeo-Christian faith with a vision of Africa, in particular, Ethiopia, as the true Zion. The Rastafarians never had a true doctrine but rather a set of folk wisdoms and a worldview. One of their beliefs was that marijuana -- which the Rastas called ganja -- was a sacramental herb that brought its users into a deeper knowledge of themselves. More important, Rastas had an apocalyptic vision. They saw Western society as the modern kingdom of Babylon, corrupt and murderous and built on the suffering of the world's oppressed. Accordingly, Rastas believed that Babylon must fall -- though they would not themselves raise up arms to bring its end; violence belonged rightfully to God. Until Babylon fell, according to one legend, the Rastas would not cut their hair. They grew it long in a fearsome appearance called dreadlocks. The Rastas lived as a peaceful people who would not work in Babylon's economic system and would not vote for its politicians. Jamaican society, though, believed it saw a glimmer of revolt in the Rastas, and for decades they had been treated as the island's most despised population.

In 1966, while Marley was visiting his mother in Delaware, Selassie made an official state visit to Jamaica. He was met at the Kingston Airport by a crowd of 100,000. Rita Marley saw Selassie as his motorcade made its way through Kingston's streets, and when he passed by, she believed she saw the mark of a stigmata in his palm, signifying that he was God come to earth. After that, she adhered to the Rastafarians' belief system and ways of life, and she let her hair grow. When Marley next saw his wife, he said, "What happened to your hair?" He was put off by her sudden change. Indeed, one of the more interesting questions about Marley's life is just when exactly he too became a Rastafarian. According to some accounts, he adopted the religion soon after his return to Jamaica, as early as 1967 or 1968. But according to Timothy White's meticulous biography, Catch a Fire, Marley's conversion wasn't complete until the early Seventies.

This much, though, is certain: In the years that followed Selassie's visit to Kingston, Marley would not only grow into Rastafarianism but would also come to exemplify it. In turn, his faith would help Marley find new depths in his music. Rastafarianism -- and especially its beliefs in social justice, and its critique of the West's political, economic and class systems as a modern-day Babylon -- would play a key part in Bob Marley rising to meet his moment and to address the world he lived in.



Songs to download:
Waiting in vain
Lively up yourself
I'm hurting inside
Time will tell
No woman no cry
Is this love?
Slave driver
Stir it up

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