"I was on Radio Four yesterday",

says Dr Jason Toynbee, who sounds as if he's thoroughly enjoying the duties that come with promoting his new book 'Bob Marley, Herald Of A Postcolonial World?' Following in the footsteps of Radio Four is a new departure for culturereggae and I'm pretty sure it's one that won't be repeated. However, putting together a feature on Dr Toynbee was always going to be a different kind of experience. Interviews for this website have taken me to record companies, shops and distributors, recording studios, rehearsal rooms and dancehalls. Meeting Jason required a trip to the University of London Union on a Sunday afternoon to see him artfully guide an attentive group of political activists through the history of Reggae. His well marshalled Powerpoint presentation was accompanied by a selection of music that started with Mento and ended with Richie Spice's 'Earth A Run Red'.

 

I put it to Jason that there will be people who object to the way that an academic chooses to commentate on this music.

"I believe that thinking is important in whatever we do. Anti-intellectualism doesn't just belong to Reggae music. It's the same with all popular culture where there's a strong sense of the authentic, a strong sense of something being expressed from below and coming from within people. Yeah, some people within those cultures or subcultures object to the idea that you can think about it. They feel it's too pretentious or too cold blooded. I disagree because I don't think it's a case of having to be one thing or another. What I try to do with the book is combine a sense of my own engagement with Reggae, the fact that I love it, with thinking about it as carefully, critically and analytically as I can."

Jason is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies in the Department of Sociology at the Open University and he has produced a book which attempts to be both scholarly and engaging. It has much of the style and structure of a straightforward music biography; comparing pretty favourably in terms of entertainment with Vivien Goldman's 'Book Of Exodus' which was published in 2006. However, Jason's book is still very much an academic text which asks some interesting questions: How big a part did Bob Marley himself play in becoming the only Third World superstar? And what has been the meaning of his work in cultural and political terms?

I suggest that, when you're talking about Rastafarian Roots Reggae artists, politics is just a dirty word.

"It's a more ambiguous story than that. Absolutely there are aspects which are all about disengagement from politics, from the world, that nothing can be done. Marley was very suspicious of politics or 'politricks' and that in some ways is about not being involved. On the other hand there is a very materialist view of the world; no belief in heaven, Jah is a living God or maybe even more like a figure that represents where we should be going than a god. Rasta's have a kind of socialist critique. Babylon is the world capitalist system, the vampires are the capitalists and the sufferahs are the working class of the world. That really is there, it's not just reading something into it."

 

It's certainly true that conscious Reggae music has been a beacon to righteous rebels from every race and background. I ask Jason what he thinks we should be doing with our revolutionary intentions. How can we stand up for our rights?

"The idea that music brings people together is a truism, but you know, it's still true. My thinking about it is that you've got plusses and minuses. The great plus is that it does unite people. The minus or the danger is that people don't really think about what's next. It's not a failing with Reggae. We just need to supplement it with something. Culture is a good way to get into politics, it can be a really important spur. Music can do lots of things, it can get you thinking about politics, it's a good soundtrack to politics, it can even be a form of political criticism or analysis; Bob Marley does that brilliantly. But it isn't the same thing as a movement which is challenging the system."

In his book Jason goes as far as to argue that Bob Marley stage-shows could give the "misleading sense that an egalitarian society existed right there". The same analysis could, I suppose, be applied to any Roots dance. Are we just kidding ourselves that Reggae runnings are "sufficiently political" acts, "so that struggle outside" is not necessary"? It can certainly feel as if absorbing yourself in conscious Reggae music is fighting back against the system. No big companies are interested in promoting the scene, no radio or TV plays it, no magazines report it and every tune you buy is money into the coffers of an independent label rather than a big multinational. Jason's having none of it.

"It's naive to think that somehow there is a form of music making that is not wrapped up with capitalism. I'm suspicious about the power of consumer politics. You can't choose to buy your way out of a commodity system. Music has always been commodified. You have to go back before capitalism itself to find music that wasn't commodified. In Jamaica in the fifties, sixties and early seventies when the international record industry wasn't involved, you had cut-throat petty capitalism. It was based on an economy where records were made to be played on soundsystems and it was nothing but commercial. Independent record companies aren't necessarily lead by principled people. Quite often they're just small entrepreneurs who've seen a gap in the market. Sir Coxsonne didn't think small record companies were good, he was trying to become the biggest capitalist he could. It was entrepreneurial capitalist energy which helped to make Studio One the label it was. That's not an apology for it, it's just to say that under capitalism we can expect that kind of energy to be expressed."

Jason isn't suggesting that music obsessives are being deceived or deluded by the seditious sounds they love. Far from it.

"Actually music and culture are hard products or processes for capitalism to take over, and that's mainly down to the uncertainty. Capitalism thrives on certainty and having a known market. Even when you think about the most commercial of commercial music, it's still a fantastically volatile and uncertain market. It causes problems for capitalism and it's an area in which it's most vulnerable and least able to operate. Popular culture is extraordinary. Much of it is crap and banal, but even the most popular forms which you'd think were being marketed for purely commercial reasons, contain some brilliant stuff. I always objected to the term "manufactured bands"; all bands are manufactured. There's nothing that's being made in order not to be sold. The point is that people will make good stuff because they love music."

An unaffected, anti-elitism appears to be something that is central to Jason Toynbee's character and thinking. He's youthful looking for somebody in his early fifties and the kind of person you'd imagine would be just at home discussing politics on the street corner as he would an academic conference. The desire to avoid academic obfuscation and to produce a readable book extends to the theories that he applies to his subject. It's interesting that when Reggae artists talk about 'reality', there is never any question that they know exactly what it is. Reggae artists don't tend to question that there exists an objectively knowable reality. This is very different from much of the academic debate about culture, which refutes our ability to describe a state of things as they actually exist. Obscurantism doesn't appear to hold much allure for Jason and he uses 'Critical Realism' in 'Bob Marley, Herald Of A Postcolonial World?' As he explained.

"Critical Realism is an approach which says something that appears to be very common sensical ... stuff exists! The reason that it's an important argument is because many intellectuals, academics and social scientists have come to believe in something called Constructionism. In other words, the idea that the world as we know it is really to do with the ideas in people's heads; the words we use to describe things, images or language. That there isn't really anything substantial out there. The world is created by us in our discourse. So many people have moved towards that thinking. There are common sense ideas now that there isn't reality. We get it in the media. The idea that what's real, is what's being produced on screen."

 

Whilst working on his book, Jason travelled to Jamaica and interviewed Derrick Harriot, Winston Riley, Bob Andy as well as Lloyd Knibb and Lester Sterling from the Skatalites.

"Jamaica is and was an extraordinary place. That isn't to romanticise it or to say that there's something in the blood. It's to do with history and the position right in the middle of the Caribbean. The most horrific experience of slavery combined with being on the rim of the modern world, just close enough to the States to get radio stations and records coming in during the fifties and sixties. It's a hybrid island and that's why Reggae music is so extraordinary. Geography and history."

I wondered if he had also come across any books during his research that he'd like to recommend.

"'Dubwise: Reasoning From The Reggae Underground' by Klive Walker. Klive's a great guy I've got to know through conferences. He's about my age, lived in Jamaica as a child and now he's in Toronto. It's essays, and some of them are terrific. 'Solid Foundation' by David Katz is a really valuable document. A collection of fantastic interviews, quotes and stories."

I mention a favourite of mine 'Wake The Town And Tell The People' by white American academic Norman Stolzoff, and conversation returns to the criticism that can come your way when you dare to write about Reggae.

"Stolzoff had a lot of stick from black academics and journalists. That's going to happen. It may well happen with my book. It's necessary I suppose, because we need to understand that there aren't enough black academics and journalists around commenting on this music. There needs to be more."

As a white, British academic there are three fronts that critics can attack on if they so wish, but Jason isn't going to leave this kind of subject alone. There is more work to be done. Since completing his book, he has been concentrating on the British experience of Reggae, through a research project that is trying to establish whether a Caribbean identity persists in this country. Again the significance of the music has been highlighted in the interviews he has conducted.

"I've been talking to a guy who's about a year younger than me, he's fifty three or something. He came over to England in the sixties. Very late in fact because Commonwealth immigration all but dried up in 1966 after the Immigration Act. He came over in '66. Like many young men he came with a relative who disappeared back to Jamaica and as a youth he was virtually on his own here. The experience of Reggae for him was like family. He and his friends started a sound in Coventry in about '71 or '72. That sound, for all the people in it, was like family. Literally a lifeline."

 

When you spend a significant amount of your life listening to Reggae, thinking about Reggae and even writing about Reggae, it's always a good feeling when you meet others who've also got "the fever" as Rodigan refers to it. There's a re-assurance to be gained from something shared. I never imagined it would be coming via the Department of Sociology at the Open University, but here it is:

"Reggae has absolutely been a force for good. Bob Marley played a big part in that. With conscious Reggae in general, you can't think of another musical form which has been so consistently political. That's immensely good. Nor can you think of another music that's spread around the world in the way that it has. Admittedly it's been both subversive and banal, but it's the subversive that matters, and that remains. All around the world it has provided the sountdrack for lifting people up and fighting back."

 

November 2007

'Bob Marley, Herald Of A Postcolonial World?' by Jason Toynbee

Polity Press - ISBN-13: 978-07456-3088-5