Word: marley
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...Dancehall has a real excitement and tension to it," says Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, who signed Bob Marley to the label in 1972. Says Tiger, whose dancehall album, Claws of the Cat, was just released: "It's not just the roots and Rastafarian thing anymore...
Anyone looking for more proof of the revival need only check out the history of Legend, a compilation of songs by Bob Marley and the Wailers. Sales of the album, released in 1984, have recently surged. The record has dominated Billboard's Top Pop Catalog album chart for an unprecedented 17 weeks, outdrawing such heavyweights as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Michael Jackson's Thriller and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...
...this music suddenly so fashionable again? "Reggae has been big on college campuses for more than a decade," says Timothy White, Billboard's editor and author of Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley. "But a number of forces seem to be converging now. You have more and more people becoming more aware of the complexity and diversity of our culture -- and with that is the awareness that reggae is a lot broader and deeper than they previously thought...
...Marley, a poor Jamaican from Kingston's Trenchtown slum, who brought reggae to international prominence in the '70s with his albums Catch a Fire, Rastaman Vibration and Exodus. An outspoken champion of racial equality and social justice, Marley was also a tireless promoter of Rastafarianism, the pro-African sect whose followers grow their hair into long, matted dreadlocks and smoke marijuana, or ganja, as part of a religious rite...
...After Marley died of a brain tumor in 1981 at 36, a new generation of Trenchtown youths began to forge a harder, denser style of reggae called dancehall. Reflecting the desperate times in Kingston's ghettos, dancehall lyrics were charged with angry diatribes glorifying guns, drugs and sex, and sung often in a fast, talky style called "toasting." On Minute to Pray, Mad Cobra warns, "Original bad boy have no mercy/ Original bad boy run the country/ Them get a minute to pray and a second to die . . . We no miss the target...