On Racial Frontiers is a study of three heroes of black culture linked by their mixed race origins; Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth century anti-slavery activist, Ralph Ellison, twentieth century American novelist and author of Invisible Man, and Bob Marley, the best known of all Jamaican reggae artists. Gregory Stephens argues that their mixed race heritage enabled all three to escape racial boundaries, whether imposed by black or white. Stephens calls them "integrative ancestors" who "people from more than one ethnic or national group can claim as their own." This, Stephens argues, is exactly what Marley became, an international icon through whom "multiethnic and multinational audiences" can create themselves as "a multiracial imagined community".
That Bob Marley was the son of a fifty year old white Englishman and a seventeen year old black Jamaican woman is well known but Gregory Stephens attaches more importance to Marley's mixed race heritage than any previous commentator. In the long chapter entitled Bob Marley's Zion Stephens argues that in Jamaica, or at least in the West Kingston ghetto where he grew up, Bob Marley was made to feel an outsider due to his mixed origins. But, he argues, this black-and-white heritage later enabled Marley to escape Jamaican racial boundaries to create an international audience and a "transracial" or rainbow culture for people of all races.
Stephens comments that the clever marketing by Chris Blackwell and his Island label which launched Bob Marley's international career cannot alone explain why he became an international superstar. Marketed though he might have been as an exotic, spliff smoking counter culture rebel with whom international rock audiences could identify, Stephens argues that this role liberated something deep and real within Marley himself, his own "biracial identity", which enabled him to make contact across racial boundaries with the hearts and minds of millions outside Jamaica and create the "new culture" of the title.
Stephens argues that Bob Marley's Rastafarianism was an internationalist and inclusive set of beliefs that anyone, black or white, could share. It was not a way of expressing his Jamaican identity and his blackness but a way of escaping both. Marley "wants to use 'Rasta' because he believes 'black' carries too much baggage." This is an argument that will prove controversial, even offensive, to many for whom Bob Marley is first and foremost a great Jamaican and black cultural hero. I'm not completely persuaded but it does offer an answer to the big question: how did Bob Marley reach an international audience when most talented artists remain completely unknown outside Jamaica?
However the argument is often lost in some very tendentious reasoning. For instance, Stephens also argues that Marley's experience of the "absent father" at least partly explains his Rastafarian beliefs: "the imperfections and almost total absence of Marley's own biological father, Norval, led to a largely unconscious projection on to Haile Selassie as a "perfect" African Father. Selassie became Marley's absent father, writ large." Stephens is here describing not a situation unique to Bob Marley but a characteristic Jamaican experience. It is very common for Jamaican fathers to be absent from the upbringing of their children and common too for children in Jamaica to be brought up by grandparents or other members of the extended family because both parents must go elsewhere to seek work or simply cannot afford to feed and clothe their children. So it is not always clear whether Stephens is writing about Marley himself or about the Jamaican experience in general.
This is a problem that bedevils the book as a whole. For example, a key factor in Bob Marley's international success must surely be his immense talents as a songwriter. However in discussing Bob Marley's lyrics largely in terms of their scriptural allusion Stephens is again describing a general feature of Jamaican culture. Jamaican songs have always drawn heavily on the language of the Bible, apocalypse, Old Testament retribution and even the "whether you're black or whether you're white" language of racial inclusion that Stephens looks for in Marley. Stephens also barely gets to grips with how they work and succeed as songs, how they actually move the listener. Instead he looks for the particular "biracial" message he already believes is there. It is a paradox that this preoccupation with Marley's lyrics actually diminishes our sense of what makes Bob Marley special.
To reduce a music to its lyrics and then the lyrics to their "message" is always a dangerous business, perhaps more so in reggae than in any other music. As reggae fans know, music in Jamaica is better understood as a collective rather than individual phenomenon, involving the talents of producers and engineers, and drawing on a collective wealth of basslines, melodies, folk wisdom, dialect sayings, street talk and the like, which Stephens largely ignores. On those occasions when he does try to describe how Jamaican music actually sounds, he writes with feeling: "This is music tailored for people going on a long journey, trodding or stalking music." However even here Stephens is describing not reggae as a whole but the seventies roots music which he favours. For more recent reggae music he displays a tin ear, dismissing dancehall as a music "in which spiritual themes are entirely absent, guns are glorified, and women are degraded." In musical terms this is a conservative book, with the underlying assumption that when Marley died, reggae died with him. Stephens cites as part of Marley's legacy that "full-band reggae" persists "as pioneered by Bob Marley and the Wailers...at a time when Jamaican reggae has been performed by machines." This is actually to say that Bob Marley's influence on current Jamaican music has been negligible. I would agree with this. It seems to me that Jammys' experimentations with a cheap Casio back in the 80s have determined the course of Jamaican music more than all of Bob Marley's albums for Island. This is not to disrespect Marley's music, which I love as much as Gregory Stephens, but to make the point that Bob Marley's status and relationship to Jamaican culture is more complicated than Stephens will allow.
To be fair, this is not a book about reggae music as such but about black cultural icons and their place in "a communicative culture which transcends racial, national, and temporal boundaries." But on this level too the book is flawed. There is no doubt that Marley created a massive record-buying audience for his music but whether this amounts to a culture is quite another matter. As evidence of a "new culture" Stephens mentions little more than some other American fans of Bob Marley who he knows, posters of a spliff-smoking Bob in American dorm rooms and that "in 1980 one million Irish youth sang Rivers Of Babylon for Pope Paul II." He even describes how in 1979 a Cambridge professor visiting Tibet was shown by an ageing monk a Lebanese bootleg of Natty Dread playing over and over again in some underground catacombs. Substitute "Elvis Presley" for "Bob Marley" and you get the idea. If this is a new culture, then include me out.
Stephens affectionately describes his four year old mixed race daughter Sela as part of this new culture, talking intimately of Douglass and Marley as "abuelo Fred" and "tio Bob", as exactly those "integrative ancestors" he believes them to be. With all due respect, I suggest that the real test of the "new culture" will come when his daughter reaches adolescence! My own mixed race son, the product of English and Jamaican parentage like Marley himself, has now reached his teens and has little interest in his parents' reggae music. He prefers instead to listen to jungle, garage and R& B, as do his multi racial circle of friends. Almost by definition any "new culture" rejects the past, makes up its own rules, and invents itself as it goes along even if, with hindsight, the new can be seen as part of a longer continuity and so made safe again. If Stephens had looked at the genuinely new and multiracial cultures emerging now this might have been a more illuminating book.
Stephens comments that "Bob Marley's face has taken on an iconic status not unlike a Buddha or the Virgin Mary...a cultural phenomenon who transcended racial and national boundaries." and that "a wide range of people project quasi-messianic qualities onto Marley." He points out that "it was the burden of all the aspirations that Marley dragged around that killed him". But in the end, Stephens seems no different to all the rest, pressing Marley into the service of his own particular ideology and projecting onto Marley his own hopes and desires for the future, no matter how attractive these might be. Perhaps any attempt to understand reggae music through its single iconic figure rather than its unsung grassroots (as in Norman Stolzoff's recent excellent study of dancehall culture Wake The Town and Tell The People) is doomed to failure.