Weekend watch on Bob Marley’s birthday: Redemption song for reggae legend with documentary, film about revolution through music

Whether you are on a beach in Goa or diving off the seven mile beach in Negril, Jamaica if there’s music playing it’s reggae. Reggae music comes from the Jamaican ‘rege-rege’ (means raggedy clothing) evolved from Ska and Rocksteady music.

It is primarily folksy telling of stories that speak of love and religion, in happy almost childlike joyous rhythms. Drums and bass guitar to make you get up and dance and the ‘shika shika’ sibilant sound of the Scraper (two sticks, one corrugated the other not, the sound produced when they’re rubbed/scraped against one another) to help you keep the swaying beat. Songs like Jammin’, Could You Be Loved, Satisfy My Soul, Sun Is Shining and the very popular One love, one heart…

But, Robert Nesta Marley was not just making you get up and dance, he was a beacon of hope to those whose lives he touched. From Trenchtown Jamaica he taught people to ‘Get up stand up! Stand up for your rights!’ Years after his suspicious death, we are still singing Buffalo Soldier. Every time I have felt like my heart was going to burst into tear soaked pieces because my life was going out of control, Bob Marley’s words, ‘No Woman, No Cry’ came to my rescue.

They said no one who met Bob Marley came away untouched. But, his assassination is such a huge mystery that I have watched it not once but twice, also going down the rabbithole of video clips of his concerts.

The long, rasta hair, the almost thin frame enveloped by a cloud of marijuana, a presence likened to a messiah, and a voice so distinctive no one else dared sing cover versions of the Redemption Song.

He grew up in a shanty town made from haphazardly put together tin roofs, with the poorest of the poor and he turned to rebels called ‘Rude Boys’ who were sharply dressed notorious bullies. Marley’s poetry blossomed among them and it was just as he promised his mother that he would not resort to guns to bring about a change.

His words turned out to be so powerful, the politicians tried to silence him. He became a national, no international icon. The documentary is a fascinating study of the revolution that started in Kingston, Jamaica, a redemption song.

Catch A Fire is Timothy White’s brilliantly written biography of a man who could agree to sing and bring over a 100.000 people to their feet.

“You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have,” said Bob Marley and it resonates with me even today.

In 2017, at the Los Angeles Film Festival, a different kind of musical revolution was presented on film. ‘What We Started’ stars Martin Garrix, Eric Morillo, Moby, David Guetta, Steve Agnello, Afrojack, Tiesto, Usher and Ed Sheeran.

If you have a teenager at home who wears headphones, bobbing their heads to music and rolls their eyes at your choice of music, you can be sure they're listening to Electronic Dance Music or EDM. I was fascinated by it because this is how far music has come.

You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have

- Bob Marley

Visually, this film will stun you. Moby rightly says, "The crowd is the star."

The music lets you lose yourself in the music and be absorbed mentally and physically into the music. It’s repetitive as music has been ever since man discovered beat and rhythm. This music works on the principle of DJs wanting to discover and share. Their sample tracks set it to beats and rock the house!

How Martin Garrix evolved is a fabulous discovery. You will hear yourself in Carl Cox’s mother when she says, "Turn it down!" to her son who perhaps occupies a place of pride in the pantheon of DJ Gods of the music world.

I smiled when I heard, ‘Get a proper job because what you are doing is never going to amount to anything.’ Isn’t that what we have all heard at one time or another whenever our entrepreneurial spirit has wanted to do something?

I watched older cousins get dressed for disco, and we kids danced to their records (vinyl for you!) at home. The documentary shows us how House Music came to be and I paused the film to hear these primal drum beats on Spotify...It has a hypnotic quality because of the repetitive patterns and you cannot but be dancing. You wish you could add a strobe light or two to your home when this begins to play.

Like they say, put your head in the speaker and be consumed by the beats.

Put your head in the speaker and be consumed by the beats.

"If you had to party until 3.30am and then go to work after that, so be it."

This sounds like something I wish I had been a part of growing up. Most of us do the nine to five, pulling all-nighters to sell products someone else is making. But imagine creating music every night for ten hours, not sitting down, with your legs and arms and ears aching - no, protesting - and yet feeling alive as you crash on your bed.

I could not stop smiling as Martin Garrix shares his story. He was fourteen when Julio Iglesias began to play Martin’s version of Iglesias’ track during the concerts! He did not tell Spinning Records that he was just a child producing music from his room at home. Every time I see Indian parents push their children into learning how to code or send kids to cram schools, I wish I could play Martin’s story to tell them children can do wonderfully in life if they do things they love.

Unfortunately, we have grown up in an environment where we follow the straight and narrow and become beancounters, leaving that hunger to bake, write stories and even farm for ‘retirement’.

Another kind of revolution in music was short - two years - and when Sid Vicious was found dead one was being forced to study for the tenth grade. A punk rock aficionado brother of a classmate had introduced us kids to the music of Sex Pistols. It was wild, and it fed our rebellious streak. I still remember how I got slapped for using the school tanpura like a guitar and another schoolgirl playing God Save The Queen as if we were the Sex Pistols. Thankfully there were no phone cameras to record our shenanigans or we’d be shamed for our antics for ever and ever.

The culture of rebellion is different across the world. But the music beats unite us. Musicians have been persecuted for breaking rules and music will always find a way out of lock and key. Underground music is huge only because partying has been frowned upon by authority. That Hindi film music has a line that says, ‘Aunty Police bula legi’ is proof that grown ups don’t like music. Bollywood creates ghastly remixes, but there are indie bands and DJs creating music that is unique and pathbreaking.

I wish it were as simple as Sid said, “You just pick up a chord, go twang and you’ve got music.”

I look longingly at guitars in stores and pianos and wish I had been granted the gift of music. The Sid and Nancy story is on YouTube and even though you and I will never perhaps be even a fraction of the anarchists we want to be and change this world, I have practiced that Sid Vicious on posters snarl. And just to hope for a miraculous change to happen, I am going to put this out in our everyday, ordinary boring world created by a regime that demands fealty: ‘Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards.

Make anarchy and disorder your trademarks, cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don;t let them take you alive. - Sid Vicious.