COMMENTARY : Marley’s Ghost : The Reggae King’s Social Idealism Lives On in Today’s Activist Rock Events

It was finding out that Amnesty International’s “Human Rights Now!” tour was starting off each show on its five-continent tour with its five principal artists together on stage singing “Get Up, Stand Up” that clinched it for me: We are living in Bob Marley’s historical moment.

The reggae king died of cancer in 1981 at 36. Had Marley survived, it’s almost staggering to imagine how powerful a force he would most likely be today. The issues and audience--part of what is being termed rock’s new social idealism--have come around to what Marley once represented more than any single figure on the current pop music scene.

Try to picture any of these pop mega-benefit concerts without Marley in the lineup:

The 1985 Live Aid to benefit the starving victims of famine in Ethiopia? Fat chance when reggae artists were the only ones singing about Africa for years before the famine and when Ethiopia was the promised land for Rastafarians such as Marley. The reason that Bob Geldof reportedly gave to popular British reggae performers who were denied a place on the Live Aid bill--that they weren’t big enough stars internationally--simply wouldn’t have applied to Marley.

What about this summer’s anti-apartheid/Free Nelson Mandela concert in London? Unlikely without the man whose band was invited by the Zimbabwean government to play at the country’s Independence Day festivities.

The Amnesty International tour? Kind of doubtful they’d leave off a man who wrote songs such as “Ambush in the Night” and “Three O’clock Roadblock” and co-wrote (with Peter Tosh) “Get Up, Stand Up”--perhaps reggae’s most enduring anthem.

The potential impact would have been overwhelming because Bob Marley wouldn’t have been just a pop star donating his services to a worthy cause for a day. Bob Marley would have been singing the same songs and addressing the same themes that had informed his music since the mid-’60s.

Johnny Clegg of the South African pop group Savuka related at a recent concert here how he felt that young people around the globe were searching for some non-political, moral force. Enter Bob Marley, because for him the issues being addressed were not second-hand news gleaned from media reports. And Marley, with a veteran band tightened and hardened by years of international touring, would have been striking full force on an emergent, young audience at precisely the time they appear to be looking for inspiration.

Can you imagine the electrifying jolt of Bob Marley--indisputably one of the most mesmerizing live performers the pop world has ever produced, a man whose stage persona was fashioned on the model of the prophet delivering the word--on stage at an event such as Live Aid when he knew that the eyes of the world were zeroed in on him?

The likely effect would have been the kind of charismatic imprint that Jesse Jackson has left on the current political process--and this in an arena where the phrase “It ain’t what you say / It’s the way that you say it” holds even truer than politics.

And who could compare with him today? Michael Jackson and Prince are apparently apolitical, and not to slight U2, but would anyone seriously want to measure “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” against Marley’s “Redemption Song” for emotional and moral force?

Springsteen--well . . . maybe, but he’s really playing to only the white rock ‘n’ roll world, whereas Marley and reggae’s impact was truly international. And Springsteen’s music--just like rock ‘n’ roll itself these days--is fundamentally conservative, an attempt to recapture and revitalize good old American virtues for the present day more than outlining any new vision for the future.

Marley’s music was fundamentally about the future--remember the “In this great future, you can’t forget your past” line from “No Woman, No Cry”? His chief concern was pointing the way toward a positive new world that would rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the current one, which reggae artists typically called the Babylon system.

“Born in the U.S.A.,” and its accompanying images of baseball caps, bandanas and blue jeans, could be--and was--misinterpreted as a patriotic anthem. There’s no way that Marley would ever be anything but the outlaw playing rebel music; not this black man with dreadlocks and a faith bizarre to many, playing message songs such as “I Shot the Sheriff” or “War” (not the Edwin Starr tune but an adaptation of a speech by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, the Rastafarians’ deity, denouncing racial prejudice).

I’ve felt that much of Jesse Jackson’s growing political constituency--aside from civil rights-era holdovers--is fundamentally Bob Marley’s as well. And it would have been interesting to see how Marley would have related to the hip-hop crew and vice versa, because they successfully adopted a rebel stance against the same black pop world that rejected Marley and reggae.

Crucially, the popularity of strongly political groups like the rap band Public Enemy suggests that it’s a generation with a sense of history and one plugged into the unabashedly pro-black spirit that first surged forward in the ‘60s . . . the same history and the same spirit that Marley had been drawing on since that time.

I don’t mean to denigrate the rock artists who have participated in these benefits or to fuel the Marley personality cult that has often reached alarming proportions in reggae circles. But it’s important to recognize the undeniable power and timeliness of his music now, because pop history has a funny habit of passing over artists, particularly black ones, who don’t sell millions of albums for American record companies.