IN THE LAND OF THE REGGAE MESSIAH
By Remo Fernandes, March 7, 2005. For Tehelka, India.

When I finally visited Jamaica last year, there was only one thought in my mind: Bob Marley. And of course other satellite thoughts, all centred around Marley: Reggae, Rastafarianism, dreadlocks, marijuana.

Flying into Kingston and driving to my hotel late that first night seemed like a surreal, jet-lagged drift across time. More thoughts: "Marley frequented this airport, walked down these very steps, probably held this hand rail I'm holding …"

But when I went looking for Reggae music the next day, reality hit me right in the face. Had Marley been alive, he'd have been around 60 years of age. When an icon dies young, his youth remains forever frozen in our minds. I mean, if Elvis and Rajiv Gandhi turned up alive today, we probably wouldn't recognise them.

Like a whole lot of other lost-in-time souls, I too subconsciously thought that Jamaica would still be grooving to Reggae. But this was 20 years later, maahn. They were grooving to Dancehall, which was nothing but Rap.

Rap?! Oh no, said I, this tiny island which consistently coughed up new styles which the rest of the world gratefully followed, has finally bowed down to the American onslaught and been demoted from trendsetters to copycats.

Until I was corrected in no uncertain terms by a Professor at the University of the West Indies specialising in Jamaican Culture: Dancehall came first, she said, and American Rap is the copy. I couldn't believe it. Jamaica, nothing but a tiniest fraction of the size of India, was still leading world music. To speak nothing of their Nobel Prize, Booker Prize and Grammy winners, plus other international awardees in diverse fields. How could a tiny island produce such people? Was it the air? The water? The meat they gobbled like carnivores, shunning the accompaniment of vegetables? The fabled, mystical grass? Whatever it was, it showed in their attitude: they seemed certain that the world revolved around their tiny protrusion in the ocean. And in many ways, it does.

American Rap, a copy of Jamaican Dancehall! Of course, given half a chance, America would have appropriated Reggae as its own too, the way they tried to do Basmati rice. But they couldn't, mainly because Marley first became a huge hit in England, among the underground Jamaican community there. I was living in Paris at the time, and news was filtering through across the Channel that this new music was not just music, but a whole religious/political movement, that the people who followed it were an extremely serious sect, grew dreadlocks, wore yellow, green and red colours, and smoked Kaya. And that for the first time in the United Kingdom, the black man was making himself heard and respected. It was a boost of pride for all of us brownies everywhere in Europe, however much reflected and refracted the light might have been.

When I first heard Reggae I thought, "This music is meant for Goa. The laid-back beat for the laid-back Goan lifestyle. Just meant for each other." But when I returned two years later, it hadn't caught on at all. A friend said, "Reggae? You mean that music which threatens to go one step forward but recedes two steps backward? Nah… it's boring." And he shoved another Boney M cassette into his stereo.

But about a year later [yes, late as usual], Goa caught on—and with a vengeance. At every concert, dance or wedding, the audience would inevitably break into a chant of demand, accompanied by the stomping of feet and clapping of hands, which became de rigueur: "Reggae! Reggae! Reggae!" And every Goan band had to play 'I Shot the Sheriff'at least 10 times a night.

But now it was 2004 in Jamaica, and there was no Reggae anywhere in sight. Dancehall music ruled everywhere: hyper-energetic, dance-oriented, extremely and explicitly sexual in text and dance movements, totally programmed, sampled and DJ-centric, it was the perfect anti-thesis to Reggae. Jamaicans have a totally unique relationship with their bodies, and males and females [of all ages, shapes and sizes] walk around the streets half naked. Not to be provocative, but because to them that is as normal as wearing a sari or kurta pyjama is to us. Now, to this half nakedness, add Wining—the dance step which emulates the sexual act, front against front, back against front, back against back, with quite a few other highly imaginative and acrobatic combinations and permutations thrown in for good measure, and you get a picture of what happens in clubs, university gatherings, family weddings, and in the streets during the carnival.

Was Reggae dead? No, it wasn't. It lived in concerts and clubs meant for adults and oldies. Reggae was the music of nostalgia, of an era gone by. I went to a concert of old Reggae stars, and when I heard their near-banal romantic lyrics, realised just how incredibly radical and political Marley had been, even by Jamaica's standards. And when I saw all those greying dreadlocks sported by the great Jamaican artists who had been Marley's contemporaries, I realised just how old Marley would have been today.

To the whole world, though, he will always remain the young man looking through rather yellowish ganja eyes from the covers of his albums.

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I made my way to the Bob Marley Museum. The exhibits are nothing but huge posters with photos and printed material—things you can read in a book, so you wonder why you have to go to a museum to read them.

But it's the museum itself that is the temple. Because it is his own home, the handsome old colonial house he bought from his British manager when he had made money. Big, airy, sunny, and comfortable, as a true home ought to be. In the front yard which one crosses to reach the house, Marley played football with his band members and sons in between recording and rehearsal sessions. Marley was a total football freak, and he carried one and played it everywhere, including in hotel corridors around the world, I guess after he started booking whole floors for himself and his crew and their families. No wonder the statue they built in his front garden shows his football as prominently as it shows his guitar. In the surprisingly tiny rehearsal room [more of an open veranda] in the back of his home/museum, bullet holes in the wall act as a grim reminder of an assassination attempt on Marley's life by the then ruling political party—the protest in his songs was too strong and popular, his worldwide fame too dangerous for their liking. In this same house, to this day, lives Georgie in a back room. An old man now, so I didn't want to disturb him as though he were a tourist attraction. Marley fans know his name, immortalized in 'No Woman No Cry'as the man who would cook the porridge in empty cans—often about the only thing they had to eat, sitting around a fire and blowing huge smoke clouds into the night.

Bob Marley lived on vegetables, nuts and fruits, and the kitchen table still holds the old blender where he blended them all together every so often in the day. And a huge shed built later behind the house displays yet more huge photographs and text hanging on walls—but here one finds two memorabilia gems: his old, battered and scratched Gibson guitar, and a huge ancient recording mixer on which a lot of his legendary hits were produced.

And at the back of this shed is a projection room where a video on Marley's life is played back in a loop. A treat. It documents not just his life, but the Jamaica of those times, the people, the towns and the villages, the back streets of Kingston, in short all the ingredients which went to create Reggae and its legendary King.

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