Can't Stop Won't Stop (5 page)

The gospel of Rastafari offered faith, history, prophecy and redemption, a people's nationalism that countered the official nationalism. Rastafarians followed in the tradition of the Black nationalist Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Born in 1887 in the northern town of St. Ann's Bay, Garvey's mother had wanted to name him Moses. His followers in the Black diaspora of the Caribbean, North and Central America, and Africa—which, at the peak of his powers, likely numbered in the millions—called him the Black Moses.

Inspired by Booker T. Washington's
Up From Slavery
, and moved by the debased condition of Black farmers and canal workers he met on a visit to Panama, Garvey returned to the streets of Kingston to preach Black redemption and repatriation to a united Africa. He founded the United Negro Improvement Association in 1914 to formally spread the message. “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” he told his followers. “Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed, and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.”

Two years later, Garvey left for Harlem after followers discovered he had used organization funds to pay for his living expenses. In the United States, Garvey's fiscal weaknesses were further exploited when he became the political target of a young Justice Department official named J. Edgar Hoover. But while his reputation had been sullied, his words remained the stuff of prophecy. He had said, “We Negroes believe in the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God—God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the one God of all ages.” And by the mid-1930s, former Garveyites found that God in the figure of Ethiopia's newly crowned emperor, born Ras Tafari—”Ras” meaning “Duke” in Amharic and “Tafari” the surname of the royal family—and renamed Haile Selassie, “The Might of The Trinity.”

To the followers of Rastafari, Selassie was god made flesh, the King of Kings, the conquering lion of Judah, the redeemer and the deliverer of the Black masses who had come in accordance with Garvey's prophecy. Rastafarianism was an indigenous fusion of messianism and millenarianism, anticolonialism and Black nationalism, and it gave the cause of “Black supremacy” spiritual, political, and social dimensions. The religion found a fast following in the impoverished western Kingston ghettos, especially in the yard called Back-O-Wall, where Rastas constructed a camp of wood and tin. Through the mid-1960s, amidst frequent and constant run-ins with the colonial authorities, their influence over the tenement yards grew.

Under a musician named Count Ossie, Rastafarians learned Burru drumming, an African art that had survived from the days of slavery and had come to the Kingston ghettos after slavery was abolished. Burru centered on the interplay of three drums—the bass drum, the alto
fundeh
, and the repeater. The repeater was reserved for the best drummer, who imbued it, in the scholar Verena Reckford's
words, with color and tension, protest and defiance.
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DJs, the Jamaican term for rappers, would later mimic the play of the Burru repeaters over reggae instrumentals, echoes across time.

Count Ossie gave the Rastas a medium for their message, and the drumming spread with Rastafarianism across Kingston from camp to camp. Ossie would receive and mentor many of the most important Jamaican ska, rock steady and reggae musicians at his haven on Wareika Hill. Due in no small part to his efforts, Jamaican musicians began to blend the popular New Orleans rhythm-and-blues with elements of folk mento, jonkanoo, kumina and Revival Zion styles into a new sound.

But while Rasta thought—first in coded forms, then gradually more explicitly—spread through popular music, the authorities portrayed Rastas as bizarre cultists. Many of Jamaica's Black and brown strivers held the same opinion. As a child in Kingston, DJ Kool Herc recalls, he was told that anyone who had their hair twisted up was, in local parlance, a badman. In 1966, Rastas began to move from the margins to the mainstream of Jamaican society. On April 21, Haile Selassie came to Jamaica and was greeted by a gathering of more than a hundred thousand followers. As the plane landed, the rain stopped, which all gathered took for a sign.

“I remember watching it on TV,” DJ Kool Herc recalls. “They took buses and trucks and bicycles and any type of means of transportation, going to the airport for this man who they looked upon as a god. That's when Jamaica really found out there was a force on the island.

“When that the plane came down, they stormed the tarmac,” he continues. “Haile Selassie came out and looked at the people and went back on the plane and cried. He didn't know he was worshiped that strongly.” The Rastas were exuberant, and their ranks swelled with new converts.

But three months later, history took another sharp turn. Seaga—then the Minister of Community Development and Welfare—was in need of a new political base. The JLP leader, former music exec, and cultural patron was an ambitious man with dangerous connections. He once faced down some hecklers at a political rally by saying, “If they think they are bad, I can bring the crowds of West Kingston. We can deal with you in any way at any time. It will be fire for fire, and blood for blood.”
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Now Seaga fingered the Back-O-Wall ghetto, the west Kingston yard where the camps of the Boboshanti and two other Rasta sects thrived. It was an area that had voted for the opposing political party, the democratic socialist People's National Party (PNP), and Seaga wanted it cleared. So on the morning of July 12, armed police filled the air with tear gas, and dispersed the residents with batons and rifles. Bulldozers rolled in behind the police, flattening the shanties. “When the first raided camp was demolished,” Leonard Barrett reported, “a blazing fire of unknown origin consumed what remained to ashes while the fire company stood by.”
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On the site, Seaga built a housing project named Tivoli Gardens and moved in a voting constituency of JLP supporters. He recruited and armed young badmen to protect the area and expand the JLP turf, a gang that called itself, appropriately enough, the Phoenix.
⁴
The lines were now drawn for generations to come.

“And I can see it with my own eyes,” Culture sang a decade later on “Two Sevens Clash.” “It's only a housing scheme that divides.” Politics, apocalypse—some reasoned—was it a coincidence the two words sounded so similar?

In 1973, Jamaica's record industry was on the verge of a major international breakthrough. Up until then, the island had produced occasional novelty hits, like Millie Small's “My Boy Lollipop,” that crossed over from Britain's growing West Indian immigrant community to the Top of the Pops and the American top 40. But with the twin vehicles of film and music, the Third World roots rebel made his global debut.

Debuting in Jamaica in 1972, with wider global release the following year, Perry Henzell's movie
The Harder They Come
was a portrait of the Jamaica few yankees would ever trod. The movie opened with a country bus navigating a narrow northern road, the coconut trees of the stormy coastline eerily headless, their fronds and fruits sheered off by plague. Singer Jimmy Cliff played Ivan O. Martin, a peasant making the well-worn trip from rural parish to concrete jungle, the metaphoric journey of a newly freed nation into modernity. But this was not to be a narrative of progress.

Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin was a real-life fifties Kingston outlaw who renamed himself Rhygin and summoned Jamaica's Maroon pride.
The Harder They Come
updated his story for a nation defining its postcolonial identity in and through its
homegrown popular music. Cliff's Ivan was to be exploited by a greedy music producer, reviled by a Christian pastor, and eventually tortured and hunted by corrupt police. A country
bwai
innocent remade into the urban renegade Rhygin, he shoots down a cop and goes underground. A picture of him posing with two pistols hits the papers and his song controls the airwaves. “As sure as the sun will shine, I'm gonna get my share now, what's mine,” he sings, “and then the harder they come, the harder they'll fall, one and all.” The new legend of Rhygin would frame the island's turbulent seventies.

In another landmark 1973 film,
Enter the Dragon
, Jim Kelly's African-American activist character Williams had gazed at Bruce Lee's Hong Kong home from a sampan and said, “Ghettos are the same all over the world. They stink.” Like Bruce Lee, the Third World reggae heroes seemed to First World audiences an intriguing mix of the familiar and fresh. The soundtrack to Henzell's film, and the debut album by Bob Marley and the Wailers positioned reggae as a quintessential rebel music, steeped in a different kind of urban Black authenticity.

The Wailers' album,
Catch a Fire
, would be a product of the sometimes giddy, sometimes halting dialogue between Third World roots and First World pop. When Bob Marley delivered the rough master tapes to the Island Records offices in London in the dead winter of 1972, a lot was riding on the getting the mix right.

Just months earlier, the Wailers had been stranded in Britain, abandoned by their manager after a European tour failed to materialize. Island Records head Chris Blackwell, a prominent financier of Henzell's film, bailed them out by signing them, advancing them £4,000, and sending them home to Kingston to record the album. They took their opportunity seriously—it was a chance for the boys from Trenchtown to bring the message of Jamaican sufferers to the world.

Blackwell, a wealthy white descendant of Jamaican rum traders now living in London, was beginning to have success in the rock market, and knew he might be on a fool's mission in trying to cross reggae over. But, emboldened by the success of
The Harder They Come
, and embittered by Jimmy Cliff's snubbing to sign a deal with EMI, he was eager to see how far reggae could be taken into the mainstream. He gave the Wailers fancy album packaging and put them on tour with rock and funk bands. Most importantly, he sent the music back for over-dubs by rock session musicians, keyboardist Rabbit Bundrick and guitarist Wayne Perkins.

The album's leadoff track, “Concrete Jungle,” illustrated the perils and promise
of translating Jamaican music for First World audiences. The opening notes drifted into a disorienting key, Robbie Shakespeare's bassline seemed to omit more notes than were played, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh's harmonies floated and attacked like rope-a-dope boxing. Marley's lyrics described the unrelenting bleakness of the west Kingston yard. “No chains around my feet,” the Wailers sang, “but I'm not free.” It was utterly brilliant, but the music, Blackwell decided, sounded far too Jamaican.

When he first played the music to Perkins, the Muscle Shoals guitarist couldn't understand the riptide of riddims. But as the song built to the break, Perkins cut loose with a bluesy torrent, culminating in a ringing sustain. Blackwell and engineer Tony Platt hit the echo machine and the note fed back, soaring up two octaves. “It gave me goosebumps, it was one of those magical moments,” Perkins says.
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Marley, who had spent long, cold, destitute years in America pursuing his pop dream, thought so, too.

Their album would only sell 14,000 copies in its first year, but the Wailers had taken the first step in turning their local music into an international phenomenon.
Catch a Fire
was a landmark moment in the globalization of Third World culture. Fulfilling the destiny the elder Rastas in Trenchtown had long seen for him, Marley was on his way to becoming a worldwide icon of freedom struggle and Black liberation—the small axe becoming the first trumpet.

The pop audience demanded heroes and icons, but reggae, perhaps more than any other music in the world, also privileged the invisible music men, the sonic architects—the studio producer and the sound system selector. Together, during the seventies, these two secretive orders emerged as sources of power in Jamaica.

One center, though it may not have seemed so at the time, was an odd backyard studio in the Kingston suburb of Washington Gardens. Lee “Scratch” Perry, its eccentric owner, was a diminutive man with a feverishly large imagination. Beginning in December of 1973, and continuing night and day for five years, Perry recorded an unceasing parade of harmony groups, singers, and DJs in the tiny, stuffy, concrete structure that he called the Black Ark. The music emerging from the Ark—including Junior Murvin's “Police and Thieves,” The Heptones' “Mr. President,” and The Congos' “Children Crying”—was mesmerizing and shocking, and would soon reverberate across the globe.

It was a gloriously weird place, this Black Ark, another autonomous zone. Its exterior walls sported a blue, red, and white image of Emperor Haile Selassie and the Lion of Judah, surrounded by purple handprints and footprints like a child's finger paintings. The interior walls were painted red and green, and were crammed with Rasta imagery, Bruce Lee posters, Upsetters album jackets, Teac equipment brochures, Polaroid shots, record stampers, horseshoes, and other ephemera, all covered over by a dense layer of Perry's obscure, signifying graffiti.

Behind a cheap four-track mixing desk, which by the standards of the time was hopelessly outdated, Perry whirled and bopped and twiddled the knobs, imbuing the recordings with wild crashes of echo, gravity-defying phasing, and frequency-shredding equalization. Influenced by his work with Osborne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Perry used aging analog machines like the Echoplex to turn sounds over and back into themselves like Möbius loops. Melodies became fragments, fragments became signs, and the whole thing swirled like a hurricane.

Upon his arrival in Kingston from his native northern countryside in 1960, Perry had headed straight for the powerful sound systems to try to find work, eventually becoming a songwriter for Duke Reid, then moving on to become a scout and operator for Reid's competitor, Coxsone Dodd. According to dancehall historian Norman Stolzoff, sound system culture had evolved in Kingston after World War II when the ranks of live musicians dramatically thinned due to immigration to the United Kingdom and the United States and the rise of the North Coast tourist industry.
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By the time Perry came to Kingston, sound systems had largely replaced live bands.