For a man walking down the beach here, any innocent query for Wi-Fi or directions can win a reply proffering something else: “Nice girls!” The dreads peddling shell bracelets or Red Stripes say, “Yuh need nice girls? Nice and clean.” If you’re sitting in a nearby beach bar to use the internet, the hustling women aren’t shy. “I need to get back to Bog Walk,” says a buxom young woman with sad eyes. “You sure you don’ wan a massage?” The attention from local males toward foreign women is even more overt. The swimsuited youths playing football in the sand, all bouncing pecs and sidelong glances, always keep an eye on passing quarries. They’re players in an elaborate pantomime in which tourists and natives both play their part, their “yah mon”s and “no problem”s sounding less like their countrymen’s and more like those spouted by vacationing white boys in dreadlock wigs. But on this beach where “rent-a-dreads” flourish, so does the trade in the ra-moon bark and ginger juices meant to fortify the “big bamboo.” I stopped by a shop advertising “shot glasses, T-shirts, sunglasses,” and, less predictably, “Bob Marley.” Inside, the man himself wasn’t for sale. Nor was the stuff for which his name was code in tourist Jamaican. (“Bob Marley!” the weed sellers crow. “You need some Bob Marley?”) The place’s shelves were stocked with the typical panoply of Marley T-shirts and Jamaican-flag towels. But against a back wall stood a wooden statue, four feet high, that made a rather succinct point about another aspect of Bob’s memory and the crucial aid it’s been to the many thousands of Jesus-haired men it has helped get laid. A smiling fetish fashioned from dark brown wood, the figure had ropy hair hanging to his shoulders. He was a wild-eyed all-purpose “ethnic.” He had sculpted muscles and, protruding from his middle, an immense erect cock.
Subtle, Negril isn’t. There’s something to be said, though, for the place’s way of stripping culture’s transactional uses, and the tourist trade’s full-contact aspect, down to the essence. Sipping a Red Stripe at Alfred’s, one of Negril’s seedier beach bar/guesthouses, one wins a new sense of what the wag who wrote a book on Las Vegas called The Last Honest Place in America may have meant. There is, at least, a certain clarity of motive emitting from the characters plying this VD-breeding dish, from the rent-a-dreads and sex tourists to the hustling taxi men and working girls who convene each Friday night at a Canadian-owned hotel, the Seastar Inn, where a local troupe of dancers perform for hotel guests and debauched local expats who know it’s the best show in town. The Seastar Dancers worked out a mélange of West African moves and beat their djembes with expert force, leaping and spinning in loincloths for the only people—horny foreigners—who’ll pay to see them. After the show, I complimented one of the dancers and asked her how, as a performer plainly devoted to her craft, she felt toward her gig here. “Dancing is my passion,” she said. “And here, I get paid to dance.”
The built-in tension between art making and the often tetchy exigencies for artists of earning a living is hardly unique to Jamaica. But that tension perhaps finds extra force here, as in other places where performing for tourists is one of the few reliable ways musicians and others have ever had to make a living. The homegrown record industry, now such a symbol of the Jamaica brand, began the same way. The first musicians to be recorded for sale here, by island impresarios, were the mento and jazz men who made their living playing by the pool at the Myrtle Bank in Kingston or Mo’ Bay’s Half Moon Hotel. Years before Bob Marley strode into Chris Blackwell’s London office, the latter had captured the tinkly stylings of a Bahamian piano player named Laurel Aitken, who spent three months each winter playing at the Half Moon. From that first effort, Blackwell grew Island Records—whose roster eventually included Nick Drake, Roxy Music, and U2—into “music’s greatest independent label.” What he understood about Marley’s rebel allure—“He looked like the real character from The Harder They Come,” Blackwell recalled—was both rooted in Jamaican culture and always crucial to his genius for pop. Since selling Island for $300 million in 1989, Jamaica’s greatest entrepreneur has dabbled in producing films and distilling rum (his Blackwell’s brand of tipple is delicious). But it makes a kind of sense, given where he began, that now he pours the bulk of his energy into building Brand Jamaica’s other key industry: tourism.
Among the properties Blackwell owns with his company, Island Outpost, are Strawberry Hill, a Georgian-style retreat high over Kingston, and the Caves hotel, in Negril, a Tolkienesque warren built into Negril’s coral cliffs by some of his old hippie friends who escaped here in the ’70s. But Blackwell’s greatest passion, and general home base, is the place he’s developing on a property he’s known even longer. In the quiet village of Oracabessa and near the old banana port of Port Antonio, that property—GoldenEye—was named by its first owner: Ian Fleming. When Patrick Leigh Fermor visited the elegant clifftop home Fleming built there, he dubbed it a “model for new homes in the tropics.” This is where the famed spy novelist wrote all fourteen of his novels about that suave agent for the MI6, James Bond, whose name he borrowed from the author of a 1936 guidebook, Birds of the West Indies. Blackwell’s mother, the noted island socialite Blanche Lindo, belonged to an old Portuguese Jewish family whose forebears came to Jamaica in the seventeenth century to make their fortune, during the era of slavery, in sugar and rum. Blanche was a close friend of both Fleming’s and Noël Coward’s. It was from her family’s old lands that Blanche carved out a plot for Coward to build his famous Jamaican retreat, Firefly, and it was Blanche, too, who found Fleming the splendid sea frontage on which he built GoldenEye.
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I FOUND BLACKWELL on his teak deck by the lush green lagoon. There down below the original Fleming villa, I watched a pair of resort guests paddle up, mistaking their host’s stoop for a bar, and ask for a beer. “Some people did that earlier,” Blackwell chuckled. “I just gave them a drink, and off they swam.” Dressed in his daily uniform of bright T-shirt and shorts, he looked years younger than seventy-six; he could as easily have been GoldenEye’s well-sunned barkeep as its boss. His delight in his guests’ occasional error was grounded in something important to him. Forging a relaxed vibe is as crucial to resort making, in his eyes, as it was in making records. During his thirty years running Island Records, he said, “we never tried to appeal to the majority. You don’t want the 80 percent. You want the 20 percent who get what you’re going for. That’s all you need.”
He should know. These days, though, the great tastemaker had largely moved from promoting pop stars to touting a place. Intent on marketing the island where he grew up, Island Outpost’s hotels are “like artists on a label,” Blackwell told me over tall glasses of coconut water. “Each with its own feel.” All of them, though, were meant to serve a larger passion. Chris Blackwell, the man once responsible for bringing Jamaican music to the world, was now driven to bring the world to Jamaica. “Jamaica isn’t a country that can manufacture plastic chairs, you know, and compete with anyone,” he explained. “But what it has . . . it’s such a beautiful country, with incredible people—funny, smart. And it has its own soundtrack!” His eyes shone. “A country with its own frigging soundtrack! Imagine that.” Blackwell’s first experience with that soundtrack came in childhood. “I was a sickly boy,” he said, smiling at a housekeeper as she refilled his glass, “so I spent a lot of time inside, with the staff—I got to know them, what they liked.” His first job in the record business, as a teen, required him to ride a motorbike around the island’s countryside to change out the records in its rum bars’ jukeboxes. As a location scout on the first James Bond film, in 1962, Blackwell found the beach where Ursula Andress, dripping in her bikini-and-dagger suit in Dr. No, became a star. But it was in England that he made his mark.
“When we won independence in 1962,” Blackwell said, “I didn’t really know what I could do for Jamaica as a white person. I thought I could contribute more in England.” So he went. Having founded Island Records in 1959 to distribute Jamaica’s music among its emigrants abroad, Blackwell now delivered his wares from the boot of his Mini Cooper to West Indian shops from London to Birmingham. And then he decided, with trademark foresight, that one of those records could win white kids’ acclaim, too. In 1964 he arranged to have thousands of copies