Author: George Marsden is a graduate of Glasgow University, where he read English and Classics. His writing has appeared in IM-1776, The Mallard, and Sublation Magazine, among other outlets. As song writing is the only form of modern poetic expression with a mass audience, George thinks it merits special critical attention. He also aims to counter the nefarious influence that Oasis have had on British culture.

Weed was made illegal in Britain because Richard Nixon feared its consciousness-raising potential. It’s surprising how few people know that. I do, thanks to being at the right place at the right time; namely, 3am at the fag end of a student party. The guy who told me that slept under a Bob Marley poster and swore that being stoned was spiritual, political—anything other than merely recreational. I countered by saying that the bottom of my lukewarm can of Stella housed twice as many insights as his joint, but he fell asleep before I could hear his response. But what was I really hoping to learn? These days, you put up a Bob Marley poster because it would be a little too on-the-nose to walk around in a t-shirt that says “Be Patient: I Can’t Read And I Struggle With Wiping My Own Arse.”

Which is unfair to old Bob, who would have been 80 today. And it has to be, given his prominence in music history. However, I’m probably one of the few people who doesn’t feel it to be unfair: I must admit to never having managed to enjoy Marley. It’s the reggae beat—plodding along to the songs is too much like being stuck behind a slow walker when you’re rushing for a train. I feel the need to hurry Marley up just as sharply as the urge to sweep doddering pensioners from before me when I’m late for work.

Even when Marley’s writing is at its most “sulphurous” (as the critics put it) the man himself never seems more than lackadaisical. Take ‘Zimbabwe’, from 1979’s Survivor: though ostensibly protesting racial inequality in the then white-ruled Rhodesia, all it encourages in me is the desire to doze on a beanbag. And his composition is often simply disappointing. ‘Soul Rebel’ starts excitingly before falling away into the expected reggae slough; while the melody and lyricism of the classic ‘Three Little Birds’ are pleasant enough, but the song is never more than anodyne.

But 80 would have been a venerable old age, so I do feel a little dirty slagging off the old man. There has to be something in Marley’s back catalogue for me; if not, the fault is surely mine and not his. So I started with Exodus. This seemed like a sensible choice because Time magazine called it the best album of the 20^th century; but having since listened to it and a few others, I’m quite confident in saying it’s not even the best Bob Marley album of the 20^th century. That decision from Time conjures the image of a white critic doing his best to make up for having no black friends despite having publicly asserted the opposite a few dozen times.

The most interesting thing about Exodus is its Rastafarianism. The title track is a pan-African refashioning of the biblical story. Central to Rastafarianism is the belief that black Africans are descendants of the original Israelites; however, their journey to Zion is a return to Africa rather than a reclaiming of the Holy Land (an admirably politic compromise, given the strong feelings of its present occupants). This belief, and the song that Bob Marley has written about it, is poetically bold; I admire it greatly for that. But that beat. No, I’m afraid this doesn’t jive with me either. Upper in Marley’s mind is the part of Exodus where the tribes meander through the desert for forty years; had it been the rush through the Red Sea, he’d have written a better song.

‘Heathen’ is another matter. Like those parts of the Old Testament detailing the destruction of the Israelites’ enemies, it delights in the bloody retribution being meted out to those who offend Jah (Jehovah in Jamaican pidgin). Consider this:

…Di heathen back deh pon di wall

Di heathen back, yeah, pon di wall.

Rise up fallen fighters

Rise and take your stance again…

Thrilling stuff. And in this song, the reggae beat is actually successful. It works like a metronome, giving the song a chant-like quality. The effect is almost narcotic; a paradoxically gentle way to coax one into belligerence.

To be quite plain, this is a song celebrating religious violence—so quite different from the banal ‘One Love’ stuff upon which Marley’s international reputation is based. Importantly, though, it’s a much better song because of that. I like Marley the religious lunatic more than Marley the pacifist; there’s more poetry in the former. Then again, I don’t know about any acts of Rastafari terrorism: if it was steel drummers who crashed planes into the World Trade Centre maybe I’d be less enthusiastic about a song that includes the lines “But the harder the battle/ A the sweeter Jah victory”. But now I’m interested in the connection between religious extremism and art. I encourage my readers to direct any Zionist or Hamas marching songs they might know to the Decadent Serpent inbox.

So I’m inclined to end on a more praising note than I began. An album of Marley’s I did enjoy was Burnin’: again, Marley seems to have been inspired by a fiery spiritualism here. Although he gave up on Rastafarianism and converted to Ethiopian Orthodoxy before his death, at this stage of his life his faith was strong enough to afford it a vibrant expression. And if anything, the fact of his later conversion suggests he was a more tentative and thoughtful religious writer than he’s often given credit for. Give it a listen today. And not just because it’s good music, but because the next stoner idiot you meet probably won’t have heard it. I promise you’ll get a kick out of knowing more about Marley than he does.