The Global Reggae Conference had wrapped for the day. Some friends in attendance, though, were debriefing over Chinese food up the road. I arrived at the restaurant to find Herbie Miller, the director of the Jamaican Music Museum, surrounded by a tableful of northern visitors. Herbie was an accomplished music scholar and music-biz vet; he had the savoir faire of many in that world, and the dark skin and beautiful bone structure of many of his countrymen. He began his career managing the affairs of a few reggae greats and then, during a decade’s stint in New York, those of jazz heavies like Max Roach. Now his workdays were spent inveigling his bosses in government for nonexistent funds, to build his museum, and liaising, by night, with people like his companions here: foreign “collectors” and untenured researchers whose obsessions with Jamaica’s music, and with its records, have made them the main chroniclers of its history in books and films. Herbie greeted me warmly, and I said hello to a reggae deejay and filmmaker from Minnesota, né Brad but who went by “Moses” here, whom I’d met years before under the mango tree at the Prestige. Herbie introduced a shaggy-haired white man with deep smile lines around his eyes, with whom he was engaged, when I arrived, in a sotto voce chat (their subject, I gleaned, was a high-profile collector and “reggae archivist” in LA). Herbie’s interlocutor told us, over beef and broccoli, how he’d had two guiding passions over the past couple of decades. The first was helping Bob Marley’s mum win her fair share of Bob’s estate. The second, which was occupying all his time now, was working to “free up the herb” about whose benefits Bob sang. He handed me a business card. It listed an address in Omaha, and cited his head counsel position with a group advocating the medical uses of marijuana, called Patients Out of Time—POT.
Not every devotee of reggae studies is a pothead “from foreign”: the inchoate discipline is very much a field forged and embraced by the serious scholars at the University of the West Indies, who had founded its Reggae Studies Centre and were hosting this conference. Their endeavors, moreover, were embraced by Jamaican society at large. That weekend, they launched a companion book to the conference. An anthology of essays on “the globalization of reggae” (its “global dispersal and adaptation,” that is, “in diverse local contexts”), this was the kind of abstruse volume whose launch would struggle to attract a dozen shabby Brie munchers to a bookshop in Berkeley. Here, its publishers’ fete was held at a flashy nightspot run by Jamaica’s hottest modeling agency. The Gleaner dispatched a photographer and ran a full-page spread on the event the next day that reminded me of Vanity Fair’s caption-heavy coverage of its own Oscars party. Local pride informs such fetes: “This lickle island changed the world.” But that pride, and this storyline, comes with an inborn tension between Jamaicans’ determination to shape their culture’s serious study (and its crass exploitation) for themselves, on the one hand, and a deep awareness, on the other, that reggae’s viability, as both pop genre and scholarly field, depends on the abiding love of foreigners. Reggae Studies, and the idea of “authentic culture” on which its subject music is based, is predicated on its rhythms’ capacity for getting people far from reggae’s wellspring, most in countries far richer than Jamaica, to nod along.
Lucky for reggae, then, the music’s sheer ability to do so, decades now after Bob Marley’s end, continues to astonish. For the culture maven given to pondering this music’s persistent grip on everyone from Iowa frat boys to the 100,000 Spaniards who attend the Rototom reggae fest on the Costa Brava each summer, there are many ways to explain how and why, after Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come soundtrack became a UK hit in 1973, reggae went global. This music’s inspired makers were youths impressed by ’60s rock but still in love with ’50s doo-wop. They found a needful way to wed the latter’s sweet harmonies to the former’s bass-and-drums-led edge; they offered a digestible soundtrack, sung in English, to colonial rule’s end across Africa and the Third World. They gave the black people of those lands, as a Kingston guitarist who toured the continent told me they said to him in Kenya, a model for “how to be at once black and modern.” Reggae’s stars evoked the same elixir of electrified primitivity that Jimi Hendrix, with his wild-haired-ethnic-with-a-Stratocaster act, caught at Woodstock. This was the territory they claimed, in the confusing years after the counterculture’s end, in global youth culture’s matrix. And that’s no small reason, along with reggae’s espousing the ’70s’ great narcotic as a sacrament, why their figurehead’s face came to be plastered, alongside Che Guevara’s, in coffee shops everywhere. A latte-complected oval, ringed by regal ropes of hair, that singer’s visage became that of the soul rebel who condoned, from his post on the dorm-room wall, our seasons of don’t-worry-about-a-thing experimentation: the pothead as revolutionary.
Of course, simple Marley worship, for serious reggae fans, is naturally passé: every one of them can tell you, and will, that by the time Bob’s locks grew long enough to take those photos on the posters, his finest work was past. The Marley tunes they love best were made with the two old friends, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, with whom he grew up in Jamaica before becoming a slicked-up Londoner, and were produced by Kingston’s mad Rasta genius of the mixing board, Lee “Scratch” Perry. To roots reggae diehards, “Three Little Birds” is late-period dross. But such Marley tunes, no matter, had likely served as the gateway for people like Minnesota Moses and the Nebraska pot lawyer who we came, that night, to call “Ganja Man.” These characters’ backstories no doubt featured scenes like my own teen ritual of tromping to a big farmer’s field each summer of high school, along with a few thousand reggae nuts and other partyers committing the deep cosmetological sin of wearing dreadlocks while white, to dance along to whichever of Marley’s kids the Vermont Reggae Festival’s promoters could book that year. Such scenes, as one lived them, may have felt endearing or absurd. But replicated around the world, in many times and spots over recent decades, they provided the kernel of entrée into a larger culture whose makers did things with the English of the King James Bible, and the magic of amplified bass, that had a way of blowing earnest teens’ heads clean off. Not only did Marley and his righteous peers set the muse of history to a beguiling beat. (Reggae’s guiding question was posed by the singer Burning Spear: “Do you remember the days of slavery?”) They looked cool doing it. And they vested every mundane speech act, whether describing being in trouble (that was to be “under heavy manners”) or expressing impending arrival (“soon come,” they said) with Old Testament weight. Never mind the confounding tenets of a Rasta faith that held up a vainglorious dictator who died in 1975 as their immortal God. Who could resist a culture that turned talking with your friends into “reasoning with your brethren”?
Roots reggae determined to square two primal passions—for righteous politics and good art—that the grown-up world often doesn’t think can be squared. Its makers ticked a lot of teenage boxes. Many of its more ardent fans, through a hashy haze, are still ticking them. But as those fans devoted enough to come all the way to the source perhaps knew, one reason this world doesn’t merely reward further study, but can bear the weight of academese, is that the story of how Jamaican music emerged on the world’s stage is a history perhaps unexcelled in what it can teach about the larger exigencies of recorded sound, and their power, in the postwar age. That story, as classically told, begins on a sleepy island whose music-scape is made up of hymns sung in clapboard churches and folk ditties strummed by mento men on its docks. Its action commences after World War II, as the island’s countrypeople begin crowding to Kingston’s slums. There, their sonic lives are transformed. Firstly, by the fact that this English-speaking island is in range of the new fifty-thousand-watt