Marley & Me: How Reggae Allowed Me and My White Friends to Never Feel Guilty About Lighting Up Again Ever

The last thing I ever want my faded ears to hear at the end of a grueling and sweat-sticky workday outside is:

“So, do you like reggae?”

Hyperbole sure, but you don’t know the full scoop yet!

The part of this question that causes me to twinge has absolutely zilch to do with my opinions I hold about reggae music. I am still new to this earth and have barely figured out whether or not to turn in my entire CD collection and start over again. No, these types of harmless inquiries startle me in the same way as a frozen Bogart-esque character in a film-noir is startled - the moment after turning his back to walk out a door and catching “where do you think YOU’re going?” (One day I will be famous and have a team of fact-checkers to make sure lines like these exist)

The gist of what I’m getting at is the split second before the guy in these scenes turns around to face his tormenter, there is a pause long enough for the audience to see THAT LOOK that let’s you know that they recognize the incident at hand. He turns around, but he doesn’t need to. The image is in his mind already, it could be the arch-nemesis who has been trailing just a step behind for the entire story or a loutish henchman who is hired by the villain simply for having obscenely cretinous jowls. In any possible case, a profile is created in this poor guy’s mind. Characters in noirs don’t have surprise parties thrown for them (back to the fact-checkers again....). This is what happens to me when I hear “So, you like reggae?” except when I have my shuddering moment with my head slightly cocked to one side, I see some white jackass prick whose ultimate frisbee team is probably one man short, and like the movie star who just once wants to see that his initial impulses were misled, this hope usually dissipates with the turning of my head.

During my moment of clarity on this occasion, the prior events and exchanges of the work day zipped past my mind like watching a shattered bong slowly being pieced together in reverse-motion, arising from its death on a linoleum kitchen floor to its original prestigious state on the edge of a cheap formica countertop, its space already having been invaded by a garage-sale turntable playing some retired uncle’s scratched-up copy of Disraeli Gears:

“You smoke, Cramer?” he asked.

“Smoke what?” I was being sly.

“Ha ha! I knew it!” True stoners have a kind of clairvoyance yet to be topped by any known drug test.

This hedging between myself and this 20-year old co-worker occurred on our way up a fire escape to where we would work closely together for two days - fixing up the inside of an apartment small enough so that the ineluctable struggle over music selection on our single boombox would become significant. Always the passive one, I decided to wait and see what my fellow laborer’s choice would be and prepare myself to endure. I halted my scrubbing as I heard the adjusting of the FM dial. The signal became narrower and I felt I was leaning in to hear the outcome of a photo-finish horserace. The result was a classic rock station, probably something I should have been grateful for. Maybe I had more enthusiasm for the Fleetwood Mac selections than the cuts from Creedence Clearwater Revival, but all in all this was a very endurable setting for monotonous labor. I had, during that week, heard “I Kissed a Girl” as much as I had heard “Down on the Corner” in my lifetime and was willing to call it a draw. If I can recollect, we made a few indifferent comments at the beginnings of some songs and during long commercial breaks, but my acquired familiarity with pot-smoking, oldies-obsessed college students informed my actions wisely and I made sure my commentary never treaded past “Dylan, man....good stuff.”

It was because of this exaggerated dullness that I felt protected from generating any further musical dialogue, but once the mention of marijuana use crops up, the antennae of the alpha-user must feel out just how green the presumptive tenderlung actually is (I have always found that playing down one’s marijuana use gets the best results – from cops, parents, school faculty, and freeloaders who want to smoke your weed).

And thus the reggae inquisition.

When asked about reggae by a white American college-aged suburbanite, the question takes on entirely new conditions. The context of the music for teenagers and dorm-dwellers in America and citizens of Jamaica is as distanced as the physical countries themselves. The qualifications for being a reggae fan in the United States rarely extend beyond having heard a Bob Marley greatest hits CD. Unfortunately for Marley, his catalogue has become the soundtrack to ganja-enhanced cookouts for upper-middle class white kids across the country instead of the impetus for revolution in a Jamaica suffering through poverty, racism, and government oppression.

It is hard to fault Marley for heading to England midway through the 1970s in (a successful) effort to reach more ears with his music and message. Clapton’s cover of “I Shot the Sheriff” provided even more urgency to this move, but the astute publicity maneuver would have a dire denouement for white America. The music and message had both mellowed by this time, and so the loudest figurehead for reggae in the late 70s and early 80s was really only producing reggae-lite by standards of the musical evolution of dub and dancehall occurring across the ocean in his native country. At any rate, Marley sold more records than ever with cuddly albums like Exodus that hippies waking up from counterculture hangover were happily slurping up.

I know right now you’re asking yourself “why does this prick feel the need to burst into some polemic against one of music’s biggest icons and all cause some harmless kid was just trying to shoot the shit about some tunes and where does marijuana enter into this picture anyway” but put up with this for just a minute longer because I want to show you a characteristic of boring young white people that needs to be dealt away with so badly and it’s an astounding ability to avoid evolving with the times (older white folk have trouble evolving too, but this mostly involves stuff like race and fossil fuels), and since young people are above all concerned with entertainment and getting soused off of cheap lager, this phenomenon impinges on music more than just about anything.

I would rewind back to Bob Marley’s death in 1981 to show just how much the face of reggae has changed since then, but it hasn’t, at least not in the U.S. Legend, Marley’s posthumous greatest hits album, was released in 1984 and has subsequently been bought 10 million times, more than any reggae album ever. It is no act of Jah that America has lost its perspective of reggae after that kind of circulation, abdicating the fanged messages of militancy and violent revolution but befittingly embracing the feel-good themes that fill a guilt-ridden American conscience with all the fog of a gargantuan drag from a kush joint. Wearing a Bob Marley tee-shirt in Jamaica would be the equivalent of blasting “Houng Dog” from your car stereo in the high-school parking lot. Sporting this same shirt in America creates a brilliant self-identity: “I am somewhat globally conscious. I only wear cotton clothing. I am worry-free. I would like to see the end of social injustice. I am consumed with love. I wouldn’t say no to taking a drag off your spliff if you asked me.”

Which brings me to another point: instead of people finding out about sub-genres of reggae through Bob Marley, they are simply finding out about Marley through sub-genres of getting stoned. The system usually resembles this: First, discovery of pot. Second, discovery of Bob Marley. Third, discovery of the hacky sack. The latter two of these epiphanies may be switched, but never one and two. Every college poster sale is flooded with door-size depictions of Bob Marley with....a guitar? No, of course not – a lit blunt inches away from his lips, smoke billowing in far-out undulations. Redemption, mon!

This whole psychotic development hurts all the more because it’s hardly the fault of reggae as a genre and every bit the fault of boring white kids who like Bob Marley’s diluted brand of reggae post-1977 and suddenly feel they have a grasp on the entire genre – oblivious to all developments before or since Bob Marley. I not railing against anyone for liking his songs, far from it. His music has been hijacked and the aftermath isn’t anything that any fan of music can be proud of. Marley’s lyrics have great force if you are black or from a third-world country, but not if you are sunning on the quad contemplating the shackles of mental slavery your college professors have you chained with. I mean, when he says “Them belly full but we hungry,” the them is you, whitey! Listening to music for the sake of the auditory stimulus is all peachy when you leave the fallacious cherry-picking of personal slogans to be spewed later, with the phrase “Marley gets all of us” inevitably following. Maybe you can dance to it (probably not better than a Jamaican, but they’re not watching), but there’s a lot more to reggae than getting high and if you’re using “do you like reggae?” as a follow-up question to “do you like weed?” you may as well be the wolf that didn’t bother to get the sheep’s clothing out of the car.