Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/101992/10199939.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 4KB | 80 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 77

MUSIC

Legacy with A Future


By JAY COCKS


    PERFORMER: BOB MARLEY
    ALBUM: Songs of Freedom
    LABEL: Tuff Gong/Island

    THE BOTTOM LINE: This is a Jamaican bumper crop of the
last great soul music -- and some of the best ever.


    If this were just a 78-song greatest-hits package, it
would be fine enough. If it were only an intense musical
biography, it would be one of the most magical and darkly
lyrical stories in the whole mythology of contemporary music.
But beyond packaging, beyond biography, Songs of Freedom is a
legacy -- of a past that still permeates the musical present and
points at the same time toward the future. It is also a memory
of a time when music could be soulful, political, brutally
honest, never divisive, and could still keep the beat.

    In many ways, Bob Marley was the beat. He was the first
superstar from the Third World. He popularized, even
personified, the rhythm of reggae and its roots in the pitiless
poverty and mystical spiritual aspirations of the black Jamaican
underclass. His voice sounded like sugarcane but cut like a
switchblade. His love songs, like Guava Jelly, Stir It Up and
Three Little Birds (included here in a previously unreleased and
altogether ravishing alternate version), were lighted with a
sexual fervor suggesting that passion itself is a kind of
temporary redemption. His political songs, whether metaphorical
(I Shot the Sheriff) or straight-out and out-front (War, with
its lyric from a speech by Haile Selassie, and still one of the
most devastating assaults on racism in all of rock), were sung
with pride, without compromise, but from a musical spirit he was
proud to share. His music could challenge the conscience, soothe
the spirit and stir the soul all at once. Stir it right up.

    Stir It Up, written to his wife during an eight-month
separation, was typical Marley: seductive, soulful and coolly
intemperate. The rhythm is easy but the lyrics insinuate,
cajole, insist: sexual congress as hip sacrament. It was
Marley's unbridled and unapologetic partaking of this and other
devotions, in fact, that gave him a kind of enigmatic, outlaw
cast. In Jamaica he was not only a star, he was a political
hero, a status that was confirmed by a medal from the U.N. and
by the Jamaican Order of Merit, which he received in 1981. But
long before that, back in 1966, his wife Rita had had a vision
of stigmata on the palms of Haile Selassie and had begun to
tutor Bob in Rastafari.

    This religion had a deep impact on his music. For those
outside its mysteries, Rastafari seemed to combine Old Testament
mysticism and a kind of pan-African call to arms with a liberal
indulgence in sacramental ganja, or pot. Ganja has a fearful
potency, but it isn't as strong as Marley's music. Rastafari
remained arcane to most off-islanders, but Marley's devotion to
it produced the last great soul music.

    This definitive introduction to -- or reaffirmation of --
Marley's greatness ends with a live recording from his last
concert in 1980, made a little more than a year before he died
of cancer at 36. Redemption Song is about betrayal and
forgiveness, repression and rebirth; it is a hymn of hope. That
commodity may appear to be in short supply just now, but Songs
of Freedom offers something close to a lifetime supply. And it
doesn't stint on the rhythm either.