Greetings,

A sad milestone in the history of Reggae music. On this day in 1981 Bob Marley lost his brutal fight with cancer.

How does as black man die of melanoma? Ah, but remember, Bob’s father was a white man. Cruelest of ironies.

There has been a lot of second guessing with Bob’s disease. He supposedly had an infected toe from accidentally being spiked while playing soccer. As the wound festered, somehow it turned to cancer.

The Secret History of Reggae would suggest that Bob needed to have half of his foot amputated.

One of the theories is that Bob would not abide amputation because it went against his Rasta/Nazirite beliefs that you neither cut nor crease your flesh.

Wikipedia on Nazirite vows blended with Rasta belief by Bob and his fellow Rastas:

• Abstain from wine, wine vinegar, grapes, raisins;
• Refrain from cutting the hair on one’s head;
• Avoid corpses and graves, even those of family members, and any structure which contains such.
• Leviticus 19:28: “‘Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.”

Here is a great Wikipedia entry devoted to the diversity of belief within the Rastafari Movement in Jamaica and the Diaspora

Mansions of Rastafari

Surgery of that magnitude  would have made Bob’s phenomenally successful “Babylon By Bus” tours promoting Exodus and Kaya impossible. Bob was conquering Europe, Japan and America during those crucial years.  100,000 in Milan, Jah-taly.

And to validate his rebel spirit, Bob was the musical act to celebrate the liberation of African Zimbabwe ousting white minority Rhodesia. Bob Marley the Real Revolutionary.

By Survival and his last album, Uprising. Bob was starting to gain the support of the last holdouts to his musical charisma. That would be the important American black music consumer coming out of the decadence of Disco.

Kevin MacDonald’s superb biography of Bob’s life Marley went as far to suggest that doctors would have preferred to have Bob’s leg disarticulated entirely.

Disarticulation is the clinical term for radical amputation.

In the wake of Bob’s passing, at least a score of his bredrin & sistren took to the recording studios to rush tribute songs to the airwaves.

Over the decades, I have devoted Smile Jamaica editions to his legacy entitled Memorial Roots: Livicated to the life works of Bob Marley.

Livicated never dead-icated. One of the Nazirite vows is to not be around death or houses of death. As The Wailers, Peter Tosh and Bunny have sang: No Funeral. No Burial.

Yet, for me, the tragedy becomes the mechanism to recognize the dramatic legacy of Bob who died as he was just about to shoot off into superstardom. With MTV, the breakdown of barriers to black music sold to white kids, his exotic charisma, Bob Marley would have had an 80s musical discography to rival Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, U2 and Madonna.

Imagine Bob Marley at the vanguard against Reaganism and  Thatcherism in the 80s. How he would have celebrated the end of the Cold War, the liberation of South Africa. So for me I can’t resist the tragic irony.

Saturday May 11, 2013, the calendar synched for Smile Jamaica to feature 3 hours of Bob Tributes, bootleg live, covers and rarities. Worth a listen to hear the love Bob’s contemporaries had for him and his legacy.

I think in 500 years they will be talking about three artists of the 20th century like we all know Bach, Mozart and Beethoven: The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley

bless, robt

Smile Jamaica Ark-Ives Presents: Memorial Roots – Tribute to Bob Marley; May 11, 2013

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