During this time of unprecedented demands of civil rights, our Good Black News playlists have focused on African-American artists during the month of June. But Reggae artists from Jamaica, the U.K., and Africa have long had a thing or two to say about the triumphs and struggle of people of the African diaspora as well.
Reggae came into being in the 1960s as an evolution of the Rocksteady and Ska musical styles. (More on those forms in the weeks to come.) Reggae is a soulful export of Jamaica that expresses in words the pain, struggle, hope, and emotion that is felt by the average person.
Reggae is often marked by its lament-like chanting and emphasizes the syncopated beat. It leans heavily on the use of the Jamaican vernacular and African drumming style.
This collection features a wide range of international artists including, Bob Marley, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Alpha Blondy, Steel Pulse, Hortense Ellis, Bim Sherman, Judy Mowatt, John Holt, and many others.
The novelist Marlon James grew up in Jamaica in the 1970s, which means he has a child’s memories of that politically turbulent and culturally fertile period. But as an adult, he keeps circling around that time and place in his mind, trying to make sense of what he could perceive only dimly then.
Out of that quest comes his third novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” which begins as the optimistic glow of independence is giving way to the harsh realities of Cold War politics and the rise of gangs connected to the country’s two main political parties. From there, things get only worse: Crack cocaine appears and the gangs go international, setting up operations in Miami and New York.
“The idea for this book is the very first I had, even before the other two novels, because I always was interested in writing about the Jamaica I grew up in,” Mr. James said. “I thought it was going to be a short novel, that it was one person’s story. But I was wrong, because history is always shaping everything.”
Publishers Weekly declared that “no book this fall is more impressive than ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings,’ ” which comes out Thursday from Riverhead Books. In a review in The New York Times last week, Michiko Kakutani described Mr. James as a “prodigious talent” who has produced a novel that is “epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over the top, colossal and dizzyingly complex.”
At 43, Mr. James is part of a new generation of Caribbean writers whose main cultural reference, aside from their home countries, is the United States rather than their former colonial power (in Jamaica’s case, Britain). These writers share some of the concerns of American peers like Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat and view the questions of identity and authenticity, which preoccupy older writers like George Lamming and the Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and V. S. Naipaul, as largely settled.
During a recent interview in the Bronx, where “Seven Killings” concludes, Mr. James called himself a “post-postcolonial writer” with a hybrid intellectual background. So while he read Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Henry Fielding in school, he noted, he also listened to Michael Jackson and Grandmaster Flash; a section of the new novel makes repeated references to Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing.”
The plot of “Seven Killings” revolves around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley a few days before he was to give a free concert in Kingston in December 1976, and required the novelist to dig deep into his creative toolbox. Marley, called simply the Singer in the novel, so dominated that period, Mr. James said, that his persona risked overwhelming the novel, which clocks in at just under 700 pages.
“I needed him more to hover over the book, as opposed to being in the middle of it,” he explained. He said he found a solution when he read Gay Talese’s Esquire magazine article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which focuses on the circle around that singer. Another help was Roberto Bolaño’s novel“The Savage Detectives,” which Mr. James described as “a very conscious template.”
Characters based on real-life people, including Cuban exiles and their C.I.A. handlers, play central roles in the novel. Jamaican politicians like the rival former prime ministers Michael Manley and Edward Seaga are very much present, too, along with leaders of the “garrisons,” the communities and criminal militias that their parties controlled.
Mr. James warns, though, that “if you are going to read this as history, you’re bound to be disappointed and confounded.” A lot of the novel, he said, is “just me being a trickster.”
But he does remember overhearing as a child some of the stories he incorporates into the novel. His mother was a police detective and his father a police officer who became a lawyer, “so the world of crime and politics and disturbances was always around,” he said, discussed in hushed and coded adult conversations.
A few years ago, Mr. James said, a European interviewer began a question to him with “as someone who escaped the ghetto….” He remembers objecting: “I grew up in the suburbs, like every other kid in every other part of the world. We had two cars, and we argued about things like ‘Is “T. J. Hooker” better than “Starsky & Hutch?” ’ ”
After studying at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Mr. James spent more than a decade in advertising as a copywriter, graphic designer and art director. His clients included the dancehall star Sean Paul, for whom he designed several CD covers, and The New York Times’s T Magazine. During much of that time, he said, “I made a big point of not writing seriously and even stopped reading for a while, too.”
But he was drawn back to literature by what he described as the “lack of a sense of possibility” he felt in Jamaica. Publishers and agents in New York showed no interest in a draft of what became “John Crow’s Devil,” his first novel. But when he took a chapter to a writing workshop in Kingston taught by a visiting American, Kaylie Jones, she was immediately taken by Mr. James’s writing and choice of subject.
“What leaped out at me right away was that he was a phenomenally visual writer with a lyrical, magical voice,” said Ms. Jones, who teaches writing at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania. “I was shocked that nobody had picked up this guy.”
A stint in the writing program at Wilkes enabled Mr. James to work on a second novel, “The Book of Night Women,” set on a sugar plantation in colonial times. He now teaches literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul.
Chunks of Mr. James’s novels, especially “Seven Killings,” are written in Jamaican patois. He describes himself as “bilingual,” fond of using dialect in speech and also to discuss serious questions of race, class and politics in the novel, but equally comfortable employing standard speech in interviews and the classroom, with an accent that is beginning to incorporate the flat tones of the American Midwest.
“When we are taking our business out in the public, that’s not how you are supposed to speak,” he said of patois. “It’s an embarrassment” to older and middle-class Jamaicans, he added, “especially if they hear I’m an English teacher. ‘Why are you speaking broken English?’ As if this is something that needs to be fixed.”
Nesta Robert Marley, OM (6 February 1945 – 11 May 1981), more widely and commonly known as Bob Marley, was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and musician. He was the rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the ska, rocksteady and reggae bands The Wailers (1963-1974) and Bob Marley & The Wailers (1974–1981). Marley remains the most widely-known performer of reggae music, and is credited with helping spread both Jamaican music and the Rastafari movement to a worldwide audience. Marley’s music was greatly influenced by the social issues of his homeland, and he gave voice to the political and cultural nexus of Jamaica as well other oppressive, racist societies throughout the world. His best-known hits include “I Shot the Sheriff“, “No Woman, No Cry“, “Could You Be Loved“, “Stir It Up“, “Get Up Stand Up“, “Jamming“, “Redemption Song“, “One Love” and “Three Little Birds“, as well as the posthumous releases “Buffalo Soldier” and “Iron Lion Zion.” The compilation album Legend (1984), released three years after his death, is reggae’s best-selling album, going ten times Platinum which is also known as one Diamond in the U.S., and selling 25 million copies worldwide. To learn more about his life and music, click here, and watch “Could You Be Loved” below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qo42heoLUs&w=420&h=315] article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
Rohan Marley, son of the late Bob Marley
Las Vegas–A Reno-based company intentionally interfered with business relationships established by Bob Marley’s heirs and must pay the family at least $300,000 in damages, a Las Vegas jury ruled Friday.
Jurors ruled that AVELA, a corporation based in Reno, and owner Leo Valencia, a San Diego resident, intentionally interfered with the family’s business relationships and engaged in unfair competition by selling T-shirts and other products bearing Bob Marley’s image. The products have been sold across the country at retail stores such as Target, Walmart and Wet Seal.
“The verdict sends a clear message to anyone who would challenge the integrity of our father’s legacy,” Rohan Marley, son of the late reggae musician, said in a written statement. “Preserving it remains one of our top priorities and we will continue to aggressively pursue legal actions against those who attempt to unfairly profit from his life and legacy.”
Jurors awarded the plaintiffs $300,000 in damages on the claim of intentional interference. U.S. District Judge Philip Pro is expected to award additional damages after he determines the amount of lost profits caused by the unfair competition.
The jury found that all the defendants willfully engaged in unfair competition, but the panel found that JEM and Central Mills did not intentionally interfere with the Marleys’ business relationships.
Read more at LVRJ.com
Las Vegas–A Reno-based company intentionally interfered with business relationships established by Bob Marley’s heirs and must pay the family at least $300,000 in damages, a Las Vegas jury ruled Friday.
Jurors ruled that AVELA, a corporation based in Reno, and owner Leo Valencia, a San Diego resident, intentionally interfered with the family’s business relationships and engaged in unfair competition by selling T-shirts and other products bearing Bob Marley’s image. The products have been sold across the country at retail stores such as Target, Walmart and Wet Seal.
“The verdict sends a clear message to anyone who would challenge the integrity of our father’s legacy,” Rohan Marley, son of the late reggae musician, said in a written statement. “Preserving it remains one of our top priorities and we will continue to aggressively pursue legal actions against those who attempt to unfairly profit from his life and legacy.”
Jurors awarded the plaintiffs $300,000 in damages on the claim of intentional interference. U.S. District Judge Philip Pro is expected to award additional damages after he determines the amount of lost profits caused by the unfair competition.
The jury found that all the defendants willfully engaged in unfair competition, but the panel found that JEM and Central Mills did not intentionally interfere with the Marleys’ business relationships.
Read more at LVRJ.com