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Reggae deserves better

MUSIC LEGEND: Bob Marley

I WAS watching French TV the other day and saw trailers for a couple of teen movies that they would later premiere on the channel. One of the movies was a teenage love story, the other was a rebel without a pause story of teenage drug taking and juvenile debauchery. Guess which one of these films had a heavy metal soundtrack? Now guess which one of them had a reggae soundtrack?

Marley, the new cinema documentary about the late reggae king, is a timely reminder that (as well as all the wonderful things he did), Brother Bob also burdened reggae with the ganja whiff of illegality.

I don't give a stuff about the stereotyping of French film directors, but Marley, for all his wisdom, spent too much of his career promoting the virtues of a good spliff and his right to indulge in it. He dedicated a whole album, Kaya, to weed smoking, and many songs besides. In fact, the first thing he said to me when I first met him in a hotel room in Stockholm in 1978, was 'Scuse me whilst I light my spiff.'

I got the joke, and laughed, but couldn't have imagined that it would result in my being subjected at Heathrow Airport to a humiliating and extremely intimate internal examination by customs officers six months later. I'm talking rubber gloves and all.

I can't entirely blame Brother Bob for it, though. My friend and mentor, Peter Tosh, was more directly responsible. The customs guys admitted as much, demanding: "Come on, where is it, where's the ganja? We caught Peter Tosh as he flew in just the other day."

Alas, poor Peter, I knew him well. What could have been a blistering career to parallel the success of his former Wailers bandmate, Bob Marley (listen to Tosh's Equal Rights album if you don't believe me), became a worldwide campaign of human rights for ‘spliffheads’, to the detriment of what was ultimately a part-time musical career. That is Tosh's legacy, and to some extent Marley's too.

That's all good and well for these two reggae icons. No amount of filmmaking will succeed in obscuring that part of the legacy. But why should the whole of reggae be obscured by it?

The reggae/ganja connection has stigmatised an entire cultural expression. The great singers and songwriters of reggae would give their counterparts in the rock field a run for their money, but they are not taken seriously because of the ganja factor. Nobody takes you seriously when you're a spliffhead. Not even your own people.

I remember this one time when I went to a party in north London. Some of the top buppies in the country were there. It was a dry party until I walked in, dreadlocks a-flowing. The buppies took my entrance as some kind of permission for them to all spark up. It was like "Phew, the dread's here, let's get this party started."

That's why I cut off my dreadlocks that last time. I couldn't take it any longer. As far as my own people were concerned, I was a joker smoker.

Sadly, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh died too young to be able to re-address their legacy. So now nearly all the clips of Marley on YouTube is with him stoned out of his mind. I don't think I have ever seen any clips of him sober, talking about his great music and his gift of songwriting and his militancy. Have you? Please let me know if you have, because those are the ones I want to play to my children.

Just one clip of Marley when he's not stoned is all I need. Until we find one, reggae will be the music of the spliffheads, and all these great reggae creators will not be taken seriously. All those great singers, those fantastic songwriters and that magical beat will disappear in a puff of smoke down the annals of musical history.

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