Jamming to Bob Marley’s big screen redemption song
Covering three critical years in the Jamaican reggae legend’s life, a new biopic has brought the music and sensibility of the Wailers to a new generation that is looking for songs of freedom
usical biopics are growing in popularity – and profitability. Nevertheless, it takes a brave director (in this case Reinaldo Marcus Green) and an even braver lead actor (Kingsley Ben-adir) to try to bring Robert Nesta (Bob) Marley back to life.
Because Bob Marley was far larger than life. His mannerisms, his dreads, his unique lilt and dancing steps, 13 studio albums and global anthems like Get up, Stand Up combine to make making a Marley biopic an Everest to climb.
Their task was made easier by the fact that One Love is produced by Tuff Gong Pictures, one of the offshoots of Marley’s record label, and helped by members of the Marley family: his wife, Rita, and two of his sons, Stephen and Ziggy, acted as producers.
On the flipside, one of the criticisms of the film is that its producers were too close to the whirlwind that was Bob to take a more detached, political view of his life and work.
Being Bob Marley
MI’ve been a fan of Bob since I bought his first solo album, Natty Dread, in 1977. I have visited his birthplace and mausoleum in the village of Nine Mile in the highlands of Jamaica, smoked herb in his house (now a museum) and put my head on the rockstone that was his pillow (as described in Talkin’ Blues).
So I’d rather talk about the merits of the film, particularly for a new generation, than be clever-clever and focus on its weaknesses.
First, as can be seen by the way his major songs and albums are back at the top of the charts, One Love has awakened millions to Marley and his music. This can only be good for the world.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a crap film with a good outcome. Actually, the script has a coherent structure. It centres on three critical years in Marley’s life between two of his most iconic and politically charged concerts – the Smile Jamaica concert in Kingston, Jamaica, on 5 December 1976 and the One Love concert on 22 April 1978.
During these three years Marley was growing in influence not just musically, but politically. Jamaica was almost in a civil war. The US Central Intelligence Agency (at the height of its global mischief in Latin America) had sent money and guns into Jamaica to support the right-wing presidential challenger, Edward Seaga. Why?
After gaining its independence in August 1962, Jamaica emerged as a small island with a loud independent voice for human rights and international accountability based on a legal order. As my friend, the historian Steven LB Jensen, puts it: “From 1962 to 1968, Jamaica directly took on the human rights resistance by the two superpowers – the Soviet Union and the United States – and charged a course in international diplomacy that focused on developing human rights accountability mechanisms at national, regional and international levels.”
These were also Marley’s formative years.
Ten years later, a paranoid CIA worried that Jamaica was going the same way as Cuba. Its aim was to counter Jamaica’s growing political independence and influence by using criminal gangs of the urban ghetto of Kingston to disrupt society through murder and mayhem. (If you really want to understand the gritty details of the politics of Jamaica at that time, read the 2015 Booker Prize-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.)
In the early 1970s, Bob Marley and the Wailers were
young rebels from the ghetto who had sung about rights, rebellion and revolution even before Marley had become globally successful.
As independence failed to deliver social improvements, Marley and others became a totem for the dissatisfaction with significant influence among young people. On 3 December 1976, a day before the Smile Jamaica concert, there was an assassination attempt on Marley in which he was shot but not badly injured.
Marley played at the concert, revealing his gunshot wound to the crowd. Rita Marley, who was shot in the head, also sang as the lead of the I-threes. The morning after, he left Jamaica for the safety of England, where he arrived in the midst of the punk rock rebellion.
In the early 1970s, Bob Marley and the Wailers
were young rebels from the ghetto who had sung about rights, rebellion and revolution even before Marley had become globally
successful
Rivals together
The One Love concert, which bookends the movie, was a peace concert which Marley had been persuaded to headline by warring political gang leaders. At the concert he drew both Michael Manley, of the populist left wing, and Edward Seaga of the right-wing Jamaican Labour Party onto the stage, lifting their hands above his head, during the singing of his iconic song Jamming. This was despite, or perhaps because of, the rumour that Seaga had been behind the assassination attempt.
Fortunately, films of these two concerts exist on Youtube. But most people don’t know that and so One Love opens the door for a wider audience to become aware of the way Marley connected social justice, politics and music. This is enough to justify the film.
In between the two concerts, there are flashbacks to Marley’s youth, his romance with Rita, the coming together of the Wailers and his year of exile in England. Tragically, this exile year was also when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in his toe.
One Love may not satisfy those Marley aficionados who wanted a film that captured the complex interplay of politics, music, religious belief, and its frequent contradictions. But it is a great Bob Marley primer for the uninitiated.
With biopics about Bob Dylan, each of the Beatles and Michael Jackson in early production and Amy Winehouse due out any day now, my bet is that One Love will still prove to be the film with the greatest global sweep, capturing the vision of Marley and his music, a legacy that provides the anthems and energy to those still trying to change the world.