Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright by Hank Bordowitz

Author:Hank Bordowitz [Hank Bordowitz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

One Love

by Robert Palmer

(Source: Rolling Stone, February 24, 1994)

MEMORY pictures coming in: two snapshots of Bob Marley. In the first, the Wailers are playing one of their mid-’70s New York City concerts to a theater thick with ganja and dreads. The music unwinds from the first note like an impossibly sinuous Slinky, the groove steady, one song shading into the next without pause or change of key. Marley is a blur of motion, bobbing, weaving, dreadlocks flying, never seeming to quite touch the stage. It’s as if the thick clouds of smoke and the rapt concentration of the mostly Jamaican audience are somehow buoying him up; he’s hovering. No matter how much I squint and stare, his feet seem to be floating a few inches above the boards. Maybe it’s the ganja. Maybe not.

In the second picture, Marley is sitting on the couch in a posh midtown hotel suite, surrounded by protectively huddling brethren and sistren, looking pale, drawn, severe. It’s 1980, and the Wailers—now playing Madison Square Garden—have taken over an entire floor of the hotel, muting the lights in the hall to perpetual twilight, filling their stuffy, carpeted precinct with the unaccustomed smells of ital cooking and, of course, ganja.

There’s been a disquieting change in Marley’s demeanor. In the past, he would deliver even his most biting critiques of Babylon with an unmistakable generosity of spirit, his face friendly and open, his body language expansive. Each toss of his head set his mane of dreadlocks flying.

“It take many a year, mon, and maybe some bloodshed must be, but righteousness someday prevail,” Marley would say. And it would come across more like a prayer than a warning.

This time, Marley sits very still, his head almost swallowed by the knitted cap he’s wearing. His critique of the “politricks” of exploitation is as trenchant as ever, but now it’s straight on, lacking the warmth and humor that were once such outstanding signifiers of his Rasta state of grace. Warmth? Humor? In less than a year, Marley will succumb to the cancer that only his inner circle knows is eating him alive.

The world Bob Marley came from, the Third World of the political philosophers, is a dog-eat-dog world: Trenchtown, a chaotic maze of shacks and dirt and footpaths and concrete jungle slung precariously along the edge of the 20th-century abyss. His life story has many of this century’s most characteristic and horrific leitmotifs—the New World Order’s rape of the planet’s organic and spiritual resources; the obscenity of plenty and poverty living cheek to jowl under the gun; naked force opposed by visionary religion and deep cultural magic.

There really is only one way out, as Marley sang in “Trenchtown Rock”: “One good thing about music/ When it hits, you feel no pain.” With his induction this year into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he is being honored for his music, which celebrates life even as it embodies struggle. But the music will not let us forget that this is a dog-eat-dog story and that even the big dog gets eaten in the end.

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