ABSTRACT
Fortified by an arsenal of word and sound, Bob Marley used his Rastafari faith in a bitter, protracted campaign against Christian missionary propaganda and capitalist imperialism. He chanted down Babylon. And over time songs like “Africa Unite,” “Get Up, Stand Up,” and “Blackman Redemption” not only served to accentuate the Rastafari religious movement’s devotion to social change through protest music, they also helped to place its livity on the world’s cultural stage. 1 “Marley’s reggae burrowed so deep that its rhythms and words erased barriers of language and culture, so that even the globe’s most marginalized citizens embraced the Rastaman’s vibration,” Klive Walker states, referencing Marley’s popularity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. 2 Unlike the literary art previously explored, this early reggae was an insider artistic expression, produced by and intended for Rastafari themselves. Since then, reggae music has catapulted to the status of popular art form, and nowadays it serves as the main mechanism of the Rastafari religion’s transcultural transmission. Its more recent forms (dancehall, ragga, reggaeton) stand in contrast to roots reggae, the socially conscious music that Marley pioneered, making contemporary reggae a complicated affair. Non-Rastafari and Rastafari currently produce it, for example, and non-Rastafari frequently employ the dread talk that Rastafari first introduced to the world, often blurring the line between the two groups. Insiders and outsiders thus shape Rastafari, which means I must attend to both perspectives as well as their overlap.
