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But he did and it was not distracting at all. He played Marley as a man with a mission; a man with a true calling.  He was not just a musician, he was a messenger with a message for the world, not unlike a Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or a Rosa Parks or  Nelson Mandela. His medium was music. That was the only difference, and in many ways,  one could say that the medium of music is more universal and common to all.

For me as a Jamaican born US citizen, the film was deeply moving.  It reminded me of a short story I wrote once about the time I rediscovered Bob Marley’s music.  In short, I discovered his music while on a study abroad scholarship in Paris, of all places!  There it was a new friend and longtime fan who lent me the LEGEND record.

All at once, I found that this familiar background music (like elevator music ) of my childhood was so profound–so profound yet I had never truly listened to the words.

I wondered then as now if even his greatest and longtime fans had listened to the words. Let’s take the lyrics of his song, “War” which is based on Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s iconic speech before the United Nations General Assembly on  October 4, 1963:

Until the philosophy which hold one race
Superior and another inferior
is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war.

That until there are no longer first class
and second class citizens of any nation
Until the color of a man’s skin
is of no more significance than the color of his eyes
Me say war.

Sound familiar?   This was 1976  and we are in 2024 and according to the Geneva Academy that monitors these things, there are 110 armed conflicts   going on in the world right now…and counting.  And many, if not all, are about ethnicity or color or resources.

Or his song, “Rastaman Chant”  in which he decries Babylon — there is a world of meaning there, too much to go into right now but let’s just say that Marley  would have agreed with Martin Luther King Jr. when he warned us that “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Especially materialism. There is a great scene in the movie when Marley finds out that his manager was on the take with promoters –specifically an African promoter- and he is livid. Having sung about Africa for so many years, he was desperate to go and as he said, “it was not a money ting.”  In other words, he would have done it for free. In fact, that was just not Marley’s thing. He was not into money.

That’s when I really wonder if those of us who listen to his music, blast it at our uptown parties and wear the t-shirt — do we get this message?  He was a downtown, not an uptown man. He was a Rastafarian at a time when Rastas were not respected in some quarters, as the great Jamaican griot of our time, Mutabaruka, reminds us. Quite the contrary.   He became wealthy, but he did not forget the poor, and in his mind, by all accounts, did not really need all the trappings of wealth.  Yet he was not virtue signaling. These were his core beliefs. Contrast that to now when all we read about in our daily news feeds are the opinions of billionaires and we have shows like “Who wants to be a millionaire?” They, not the Marleys of the world, are the oracles of our time.

There is a related scene in the movie when a reporter asks if he is a rich man — and he says yes,” rich in life.”

It is a beautiful important message for a world that, even after the evils of slavery and colonialism have been exposed, is still putting profits over people.

Jamaica, like so many places in the world, is at that crossroads. How do we –many of whose ancestors were bought and sold–  ensure that we don’t sell ourselves short  (as the Good Book says, “a workman is worthy of his hire”) while not selling away things that should NEVER be for sale – our heritage, our natural resources and our sense of self in a world that cares little for any of those things.  That is what activists like Emma Lewis and biologist, Wendy A. Lee, and NGOs like  Jamaican Environment Trust (JET), the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica and Green Team International have been saying for so long and in so many ways.

But back to Babylon,  and the last song of the film, “Rastaman chant.” I had not heard that one in a long time and it was really welcome. Again, so familiar those beats of my childhood, but now I listened to the lyrics:

You hear, “Babylon your throne gone down, gone down,”  and you can’t help but think about the decline of the West and we are not talking about decline in resources because there are still plenty of those, but a moral decline. Babylon symbolizes extremes of a negative sort and it was always something that then as now Rastas railed about.

In a world that privileges millionaires and billionaires, (including those that topple college presidents), a world where violence is not just on the battlefront, but at home in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our grocery stores, and even in a sports parade, something has gone terribly wrong…Babylon your throne gone down.  Marley ,even in death, is asking us to ponder how and why and do something about it before it is too late.

Yes, I am listening to the lyrics now and have much to learn.

Anne C. Bailey, author of The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History. (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Marley Photo courtesy of Photo by Bill Fairs on Unsplash

Below, author visiting Imperial Palace of Emperor Haile Selassie in Unity Park Museum, Summer 2023

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