Word: trenchtown
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...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...
Survival is Marley's most political album to date, perhaps a result of the deteriorating political situation in Jamaica, where the ruling socialist party has failed to improve the living conditions of the burnt-out ghettos like Kingston's Trenchtown...
This renewed endorsement of violence serves as Marley's own response--if not as the catalyst--to the recent increase in street-fighting in Trenchtown ghettos...
...Marley sings about his life and the lives of his parents, friends and family in the poverty-stricken, politically-torn wasteland of Jamaica--where music and ganja are the accepted antidotes for hunger, humiliation, wage labor and police brutality. He comes from Kingston, more specifically, Trenchtown--a filthy oasis of life in Jamaica's post-colonial, morally-bankrupt desert...