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Just like many other processes, music evolution has its merits and
shortcomings. When music evolves, it moves away from its past, from stagnation
and boredom. This is the good side of music evolution. Sometimes however, music
could be too hasty in moving ahead such that the fans continue to look
backwards with longing.
Roots and Culture reggae, as played by Bob Marley and the other
countrymen of his time, is one genre of music that was hastily thrown into the
archives. That was a mistake that is currently vindicated by the continued
embrace of the genre by later generation of music fans. Roots and culture has today
found itself in the category of music that is referred to as classical.
The prominence of Roots and Culture over its current derivatives can be
seen in the distinction it gave the small and otherwise inconspicuous Caribbean
Island nation of Jamaica where it originated and travelled out to remote
corners of our planet, conquering it in the process. The grandeur of this style
of music also made people like Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Eric Donaldson, Jimmy
Cliff and the others who played it, demigods. Persons who play whatever is
today an offspring of Reggae in Jamaica cannot boast of the reverence with
which makers of Roots and Culture were held.
People who favor the bearing Reggae Music has taken today argue that the
protest and confrontational temperament of Roots and Culture is old-fashioned
and should not have a place in our contemporary planet. What is obvious however
is that it has remained a genre of music that later generations of music fans
have continued to go head-over-heels in love with the moment they discover it.
I know a man who, between the seventies and eighties, stayed in New
York, the Mecca of showbiz of our planet. While in New York, he was at
different times able to watch the shows of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Eric
Donaldson. At the time that each of these reggae acts came to town, it was
“like,” according to him, “God was in town.” This statement to me was a simile
taken too far until i listen to “Rastafari Is” and a version of “Equal Rights”
all by Peter Tosh. In these songs, there is something in his voice that seems
to suggest that the messages were handed down from heaven. There is also the
vocal awesomeness of Eric Donaldson and Bob Marley’s peculiar creativeness and
his character of a rude boy and pastor in one. I am now able to see through the
eyes of the former New Yorker.
Gen 1:27: God
created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and
female he created them.
