The Meaning(s) of Bob Marley's Songs

Recently, I have been getting many queries about the meaning(s) of Bob Marley’s songs. Or should I say the meaning(s) behind Bob Marley’s songs? Other than the breakdown I offered at the end of the essay, “Bob Marley and the Seven Chakras,” the only advice that I can offer is to consult my tried and true favorites: Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley by Timothy White; Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius by Kwame Dawes; The Complete Guide to the Music of Bob Marley by Ian McCann, and Bob Marley by Stephen Davis. Of course, Bob Marley's official site (www.bobmarley.com) has a complete index of the songs and the inspiration behind the songs.

In many cases, songs such as “Put it on,” “Guava Jelly,” “Stir it up” or "Lick Samba" have no more meaning other than a celebration of life and sexual prowess. Of course, there’s also the attraction of the seductive language that’s involved in “Guava Jelly”: “Come rub in my belly like a guava jelly.” Or in “Stir it up” where Bob transforms the simple act of cooking a meal into a highly charged metaphor for a sexual encounter:

I'll push the wood
I'll blaze your fire
Then I'll satisfy your heart's desire
Said I'll stir it, yeah, ev'ry minute, yeah
All you got to do is keep it in, baby

If you don’t know what “it” is or what “wood” means, “Leave the Studio!”

Bob was an artist/entertainer who made his living by writing songs that he thought would appeal to the widest audience while still maintaining his integrity: “I'm not a preacher, but I am calling” (“Lick Samba”). To eat or not to eat. To poet or not to poet. That is the question. Dead poets don’t eat.

You have to eat and you have to write. Sense man and higher man. But do you have the courage to declare as Bob did on “So Jah Seh”: “Not one of my seed/ shall sit on the sidewalk and beg your bread.”? We live in Babylon. What to do? This is one of the reasons why I have always admired Rastafari. They insist that we can find the solutions to our problems within ourselves:

Most people think great God will come from the sky
Take away ev'rything, and make ev'rybody feel high
But if you know what life is worth
You would look for yours on earth
And now you see the light
You stand up for your right, yeah!

The promise that was stated in “So Jah Seh” is still there, but we have to want it for ourselves: “The preaching and talking is done, we’ve got to live up.” (Survival)

So, on the one hand, Bob wrote these songs that had commercial value (Could you be Loved?), but on the other hand, he had songs such as “Rastaman Chant” on Burnin’. “Rastaman Chant” doesn’t make any sense commercially, but it continues to be valued within the community. As Christopher John Farley points out in Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley: "The reggae star Bob Marley never sold out, but he understood the importance of selling well. He came to terms with the necessity of marketing at an early age."

How do I strike a balance? This is the dilemma that all artists confront.

In my own case, I’ve been advised “to just write one pum pum book and relax. It will solve all your problems.” But it’s not that easy.

First, to write a novel takes an enormous amount of time. I don’t know how Kwame does it with everything else that he’s doing. That’s why I’ve been sticking to short stories and poems. The plotting and editing that are involved with writing a novel also mean that you have to be interested in the subject, the characters, and the book. You have to care about the characters and then your readers and have the stamina to go for at least two hundred pages and several revisions. If not, you’ll get bored no matter how much sex is involved or how much amount money you’re being paid. And your boredom will show up in the writing. It’s sometimes like life. If it isn’t interesting, you won’t do it. Well, maybe. Just once to see how it feels.

So, why should I waste time and effort over something in which I’ve lost interest? And it’s when you don’t have an agenda (seduction and/or money aside), that you run into the commercial vs. artistic issue.

What happens when you have what James Joyce calls an epiphany? You suddenly realize that x is x. You see the difference between x and not x. You recognize all the parts of x and the relationships of all the parts in x to x and that they have their own internal symmetry. In other words, when you discover that x, for no other reason than for being x, is in and of itself unutterably x, and you find x interesting, and you think you can convey the x-ness of x to a reader, then you have the beginning of a work of art. The x factor.

This is the situation that many writers, but more acutely, Caribbean writers face. As I said before, I’m interested in Rastafari. So, I’m thinking, what would happen if a Rastaman became a vampire and was now forced to find virgin blood to survive? He’s an ethical man, but he has to live. That’s how I wrote “Sister Faye and the Dreadlocked Vampire.” Or suppose you have a young man whose mother is a fundamentalist Christian and she asks him to do something unethical to a neighbor who is a Rastaman? That’s how I wrote “I Want to Disturb my Neighbor.” What did it feel like to grow up in the late eighties to early ninetines? I wrote Benjamin, My Son.

“But how many people would want to read a story like that?” my ex-agent would ask. This is after days and weeks of writing and rewriting and editing and revising the story. Maybe I should have asked first.

For if enough people don’t buy the books, or they’re not interested in the subjects that are in their/our backyards (What’s more interesting a naseberry or a peach?), then we have the situation that I went through in my thirties (this happens to many writers, but it’s even more dread for Caribbean writers because we don’t have institutionalized support): teaching seven million adjunct courses just to keep body and soul together.

And then, there’s the rispec.’
“You’re a writer? What books have you written?”
“x”
“Never heard of it. Why don’t you write books like Stephen King? Or better yet, write a good pum pum book. Yeah, you’ll make a bag of money with a pum pum book.”

At this point, I usually say, “Given the choice between writing about pum pum and …”

You get the idea.

***
Related Posts:

Bob Marley

What Does "Redemption Song" mean?

Bob Marley & the Seven Chakras

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Reggae
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Bob Marley
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Stir it up
So Jah Seh


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