LITMIR.BIZ

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institution—the “sound system”—to provide them. The “sound system men,” with their grandiloquent sobriquets like Duke and King, attach turntables to huge speaker towers, which they mount on trucks, from whose beds they spin records and sing-speak, over the beats, of the day’s news and boasts. They grant amplified sound perhaps a larger role, in Kingston’s streets, earlier than anywhere on the planet, in the making of social life—and, if you were unlucky enough to challenge a leading deejay and lose, social death.

      Sound clash! That’s what the deejays crow over the R&B 45s they fly to America to find in the ’50s, digging in crates in Chicago and Houston to return with discs whose labels they scratch off to hide their names from rivals. Scattering seeds that their emigrant kids, up in New York, will sprout as hip-hop, the sound system men also reach the logical decision, in their drive to best the competition and as their sources dry up, that they should make records themselves. Local musicians, tweaking the boogie-woogie they love, forge a buoyant new music—“ska”—by sounding the upbeats its tempos leave silent. A generation of Kingston kids become singing stars—and find, in ska, a sound to then tweak and slow further. “Rocksteady,” as their next rhythm’s called, is then transformed once more, by savants of four-track recording like Scratch Perry, into the beat that Toots Hibbert names in his hit single “Do the Reggay” in 1968. It’s at this point, with the help of Jamaica’s émigrés in the cultural capitals of London and New York, The Harder They Come, and a sandy-haired Jamaican son of privilege, Chris Blackwell, who has the foresight, when a young Bob Marley strides into his office, to know that this ragged yardie was a star, that reggae goes global.

      But the larger saga of “Jamaican music, a’ yard and abroad,” didn’t end in the ’70s. It has moved on, since that rootsy apogee, from the Rastas’ sanctimonies to the stripped-down sex songs of “lover’s rock,” and the rat-a-tat riddims of the producers Sly and Robbie; to the “slack” sex songs of King Yellowman and Lady Saw; to the still-faster, still-rougher, all-in-patois sounds of the modern “dancehall,” to whose pulse Kingston’s youth thrill today. An aggressively local sound, recorded in such poor quality as to never be Grammy-worthy, dancehall’s records are sung in local diction unintelligible to foreigners. But its foremost exponents, from the still-active trickster feminist Lady Saw (her first big hit was a sex ditty called “Stab Out the Meat”) to the enigmatic Vybz Kartel (a gruff-voiced wraith with bleach-whitened skin who was jailed in 2011 after a charred body was found in his yard), still attract the ears of pop and hip-hop producers, and hip kids everywhere, looking for what’s next, and giving Global Reggae’s exegetes here plenty to chew on.

      This, in other words, is its own complete world, complex and full. And at the University of the West Indies that weekend, that world’s various aspects and characters, from ska’s greatest horn players to Vybz Kartel’s authored-in-prison book, Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto, were the subjects of panel talks.¹² But if reggae is a world, it is also a world with a king, around whose story and model the whole culture can often still feel arranged. There is one figure, after all, to which this music owes the world knowing it exists: everyone here has a Bob Story. And the conference’s keynote speaker, whom my companions from the Dragon Court, with a hundred-odd others, went to see speak the next day, was a figure whose identity and livelihood had derived, for forty years, from his having been as close to Bob as anyone. Alan “Skill” Cole, who earned his nickname for his prowess as a footballer, addressed us in UWI’s open-air lecture hall. He reminisced about his days living with Marley in that big clapboard home on Hope Road that now houses the Marley museum. “Me and Bob,” Skill said, “lived a life consistent with being a good athlete.” His words were underscored by his healthy white locks and lithe physique. “We would wake up around four-thirty, five, and train,” Skill said. “We’d go to the studio; then go sell records; come back, play some football, and, in the nighttime, write some music.”

      It was hard to say how interesting Skill’s crowd found these revelations there at the Global Reggae Conference. Either way, his talk served these prideful experts with a welcome prompt, that afternoon, to spend some ensuing hours discussing what it really meant, being “Bob’s closest spar”—a title, in Skill’s case, tied to his notorious habit of turning up with Marley at radio stations or business meetings where they needed a song played or deal done, with a big baseball bat he rather liked swinging. This tidbit was affirmed by Moses and others, whose knowing looks underscored a larger truth about “Jamdown”: that in the 1970s and today, bad men were the ones with respeck. That famous peace prophet Bob Marley, like all those who succeed in rising from the ghetto here, knew this well. He also knew the bad men themselves. And he too had wielded their world’s stock-in-trade—violence—to make his way out of Kingston’s Trench Town ghetto, and into that big uptown home, once shared with Skill Cole, up behind which Global Reggae’s devotees, returning to the Prestige after Skill’s speech on Marley’s authentic life, went to parse its aftermath.

      * * *

      HERBIE HADN’T COME ALONG. He had business, pertinent to Brand Jamaica, with the Russian ambassador: at the World Track Championships in Moscow, he hoped to mount an exhibition on Jamaican music. Ganja Man was present, though. And he served the role of wizened elder well. Settling into a chair beneath the mango tree, he opened a plastic tackle box and, murmuring something about the “endocannabinoid system,” pulled out a thick spliff. “I’ve been coming to Jamdown since ’78,” he said, pushing a forelock from his eyes. “I know the runnings here.” He lit his spliff. And then, drawing deeply, he began telling stories of his dealings with the famously turbulent Marley estate. In one such, he recalled how Bob’s estranged wife, Rita—a craven operator, to hear most tell it—forged her dead man’s signature to empty his cash accounts in the Tortugas by writing “Bob Marley” (he only ever signed his name “Robert”) on a dotted line. Another recounted how the only way he’d been able to help Bob’s mum, Cedella Booker, gain anything from Bob’s estate was by helping her become the legal guardian of one of his kids. (This was Rohan, the Marley son who gained notoriety first as a football player at the University of Miami and then for his long relationship with the musician Lauryn Hill.)

      If Jamaican society can feel like a place drawn in rings around Mother Booker’s son, the family he left behind naturally occupies a prideful, if pitiable, place: three decades into his heirs’ often-tawdry struggle to live off Bob’s memory, unhelped by his having refused to sign a will, his kids have helped sell concerns ranging from Marley brand coffee to Marley brand headphones and Marley’s Mood energy drinks. Much more interesting than Marley’s family to me were figures more peripheral to his life but central to his culture. And on the Prestige’s patio that night, Moses and Ganja Man discussed a few of these, hatching plans that would result that weekend in a series of adventures that turned Kingston into a living museum. The museum’s rooms included a Rotary Club gym where Marley’s close friend Ernie Smith, sporting the round belly and waist-long locks of an aging dread, mouthed the chorus to his classic “We de People” (“Are we building a nation? / Or are we building a hut?”); a shaded front porch, out in the suburb of Portmore, where we met a bespectacled octogenarian, known as Mr. Edwards to his neighbors but whom Minnesota Moses knew as “King” Edwards, owner of one of the “big three” sound systems in the ’50s (and who happily recounted the Greyhound journeys he’d taken to find records in America, posing for photos with some of his old 45s with their labels scratched off); and the famous “locals beach” at Hellshire, out past the entrance to Kingston Harbour, where Jamaicans go to “play domino” or laze on scrapwood lounge chairs by the waves. As Ganja Man rolled his car onto the beach, he concluded what must have been his eighth soliloquy of the weekend, on the delicate workings of the endocannabinoid system. A pair of hustlers, waving a shining fresh parrotfish in Ganja Man’s windshield, absorbed his protests that he was just here to see a friend but still insisted on guiding him, waiving their usual fee, to a parking spot in the sand.

      Hellshire is always worth the trip. That day, though, we’d come on a mission: to visit with an old friend of Marley’s and Ganja Man’s with a potent bit role in reggae’s golden era. Countryman had first come to Marley’s attention, our pied piper had recounted on the drive, when a young Bob had heard of a fellow Rasta, out by Hellshire, with a gift for expounding the virtues of what the Rastas called ital

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