Man I was feeling good and nostalgic last night, so I decided to throw on some Bob, and recall my teenage years, riding the 33 bus from Rogers Station to Poly, with Uprising rocking on the walkman. I had a good time and all, but the experience was tainted. A few years back I was informed by a very good friend of mine, who happens to be white, that no self-respecting person can play Bob Marley, because all his albums had been stamped "FRAT-BOY." Damn. I do love my Bob, but it just ain't been the same since then. I tell you integration is not an unqualified good--unless it's the Clash. Speaking of which, I can't decide if I like this or not...
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Doesn't it count for something if you are a Bob fan before the FRAT-BOY label? I got turned on to Bob from a cover performed by Pat Travers. Went out and bought the Marley album and have been a fan since. This was back in the late 70s.
Ta-Nehisi,
The more I read our blog the more I think we were trapped in the same black geek life--except that whole D&D thing.
I saw The Clash in 1982 and they just blew my doors off. To see you reference "Guns of Brixton" just floored me. On a side note, I always thought that the intro to Guns of Brixton would make a a hot hook for Jay-Z if he would change it to Guns of Brooklyn.
Keep doing your thing man.
Bob's music is my soul provider...cannot live without my daily sustenance...even better while "inhaling", cliched but true!
"Emancipate yourselves from mental salvery
None but ourselves can free our minds.."
Long live, Rastaman vibrations!
T.
You shouldn't let frat boys hold such power over you. Why give up something you like just because it's become popular among people you don't like?
I used to feel guilty about enjoying Bob Marley -- I discovered his music while attending a very fratty college too -- but spending periods of time living in Tanzania cleansed his oeuvre of all those associations. Bob Marley is freaking *omnipresent* out there, like espresso in Italy.
Aaron's comment makes me feel better about my enjoyment of Bob.
Luckily for me, frat music was centered around Jimmy Buffett where I went to school, and I am not sure who I disliked more back then, Buffett or the frat boys.
Don't automatically discount things because Frat Boys like it, because then you might end up badmouthing keg parties.
Bob Marley is not The Dead. Takes more than a few white boys saying the word spliff while smoking weed while saying "ire" and talking about "good times" to spoil the master for me.
Go to MoBay or Kingston and you will feel the power that is Bob Marley. He is no less than a god in his own country.
"But if you know what life is worth
You would look for yours on earth"
Bob Marley is too big to be owned by frat boys. It's like not celebrating Christmas because you don't like the way your Southern Reformed Baptist Convention of 1882 neighbours celebrate it. And the Clash may be the awesomest band of all time.
But I'll tell you a sad story. A friend of mine missed seeing the Clash in 1980 because London Calling had just been released and he thought *they had sold out*.
He has been kicking himself ever since. I kicked him too.
TNC...
First, yes the Clash is always an unalloyed good thing. Can't get better.
Second, Arcade Fire = good too. I love their covers even if I've never had a chance to see one live. I assume you've checked out their LPs, if not, well you should. I can't imagine an NYC hipster nerd such as yourself who listens to TVoTR has not...
Third, take this from someone who lived through the "college rock" scene back before we called it alternative. Don't matter what the Frat Boys do, sometimes the stuff that everyone (even the assholes) like really is the most sublime and signifying stuff of all. I was never more glad (well, when it comes to music) when I gave up the "your favorite band sucks" time of life and just listened without caring what or whether it signified for someone else :)
C'mon Ta-Nehisi you're smarter than that. If you wanted to stamp "Legend" as Frat Boy then fine, but to dismiss the whole Marley catalog is silly. Who gives a fuck what Frat Boys are listening to and why is their so much bile directed at Frat boys anyway?
I wasn't in a frat in college, but I had plenty of friends who were and they were all pretty normal guys. They weren't rapists or racists, they went to class and studied or didn't study like everyone else. The only difference was they lived in a large, dirty house that pretty much always had a keg tapped and someone firing up a bong. All this hatred for frat boys sounds like the jealous whining of dudes who wanted to do what the frat boys were doing, but weren't invited to the party.
To all the guys still hating on Frat Boys: let it go man, the only person who still cares that someone was once a member of Tappa Kegga Brew is you.
For me it was the damn hippies ...
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/digital-short-ras-trent/787281/
Hurls, you have brilliant advice in your last paragraph but for the rest we're going to have to agree to disagree (The Arcade Fire give me hives -- I see what they're trying to do and like most of what they're trying to draw on, but something doesn't connect. I figure it's gotta be the Springsteen in them, because I hate Springsteen. This is why I also don't like the Hold Steady.)
I was much more of a Damned fan than a Clash fan, but "Guns of Brixton" I'll always have some time for. Maybe I just like Paul Simonon the most. (I've also wandered around Brixton one summer day, place was totally chill!)
As for Bob M., I don't think he's published it but my friend Michaelangelo Matos -- a damn brilliant writer, check his EMP Pop Conference presentation in 2006 about the Supremes' "Love Child," it'll break your heart -- did his 2007 EMP presentation on the phenomenon of people in college who had Bob Marley posters on their dorm room walls. True! Interviewed not only students but a couple of those folks who do the local circuits, you know, setting up those booths where they're always selling whatever posters there are to sell in between the face painters and whatever. Really fun and thoughtful reflection on the cultural assumptions at play, which weren't so cut-and-dried as folks assumed, like most everyone who's commented here has argued.
It would be interesting to read something on how Bob became a frat-boy staple. On some level, I guess the run-of-the-mill white "cultural appropriation" argument would be evoked but that's just insufficient and not complicated enough. What about Bob is so appealing?
Similarly, I always found it amazing that so many white kids loved Wu-Tang, especially when 5% language was all over that stuff. (For the record: some of my best friends are white Wu-Tang lovers.) Is it as simple as exoticization? Or did the white kids not "get" the "gods and earths" talk?
I tend to think that it has to do with some form of attraction to militancy, especially racialized militancy that has the white kids going nuts. Maybe black militant music as a subsidized form of white cultural capital?
Reading that I think my ending was jumbled -- Matos basically confirmed what we've all been saying, ie the 'FRAT-BOY' thing is an understandable but ultimately inaccurate and limiting stereotype. Chuck it.
Pshaw. Half-Jamaican here. What do these 'frat boys' (I'm assuming your friend was referring to WGLOs) know about the real Bob? Like, early ska Bob?
Spare me. Now if you want more classic reggae, check out Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, both of whom surpassed Bob in some ways.
I used to try to get my white friends to listen to reggae in high school. They just weren't having it. Then, we get to college, they 'discover' weed, Bob, Steel Pulse, you name it. As much as I hated that, I never missed a chance to remind them how they used to front. But to this day, there's only a handful of Bob Marley songs I listen to...it usually starts and ends with Natural Mystic.
As for the Arcade Fire, they can die. I'm so sick of covers and remakes. Out here in L.A., I call (local radio station) KCRW the station that hasn't met a remake/remix/cover they didn't like.
Re: early ska Bob -- man now I've got the original "Simmer Down" going through my head. That's some genius.
What I've always loved about that Clash cover is how Arcade Fire essentially treat it as a British folk song. Ned R. above is right to see a Springsteen thing going here: The sound they end up with is a messier version of what Bruce did on the Seeger Sessions album.
There's a reason that punk happened in a bluegrass club, and that X spun off the Knitters.
It's all pretty icky.
Hope this helps:
Bob Marley Rises From Grave To Free Frat Boys From Bonds Of Oppression
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/41242
"You can't HEAR Jimi! You may be listening, but you can't HEAR him!"
You should check out the soundtrack from the Harder They Come. Movie's nothing special, but the soundtrack rocks (Rivers of Babylon, Harder They Come, etc.)
Good cover. Not knowing who it was until the end probably helped.
Redemption Song and Buffalo Soldier are unofficial national anthems in several countries in Africa. Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabye, and South Africa are big on Robert Nesta Marley. I listen to the legeng album with my dying going to Addis Abebe in the 80's.
the "frat boy" stamp never bothered me... reading about Bob in Rita Marley's "No Woman, No Cry" did bother me
Let me be about as blunt as I get:
I don't give a flying f%$* what other people think of the music I like, don't like, etc.
Not listening to something because it is popular is logically equivalent to listening to something because it is popular. Either way, your choices are based on other people's taste.
Free your mind, young Jedi.
What's this with TNC not being allowed to like Bob's music?
My partner and I, from Central-Asia en Holland respectively, love Bob and have a Bob Marley photo calender hanging next to the dining room table as I'm typing this. You should know I'm 47 and a very white woman. This is getting complicated. Should we feel guilty for trespass and/or appropriation?
Ta-Nehisi, I love the fact you're playing The Clash. It's like you are recycling some of the favorite parts of my past and putting them back into circulation. Or, to make this sound less creepy: the past of my generation. Great stuff. Enjoy.
I wanted to add that you should have been there. But it was actually a dismal time, a recession and the beginning of Reagonomics. Decades of misrule.
Maybe it's just the quality of the video, but it doesn't feel like the Arcade Fire were really bringing their usual intensity to that song. Which is pretty silly, because it doesn't work any other way.
Agree with all the comments about not letting frat morons take Marley away from you. Geez, man - you're also a Dallas Cowboys fan, right? Have you ever taken a close look at the freak show in the Texas Stadium stands each game? Yikes. Nevertheless, I bleed blue and silver.
For a real cultural mind-blowing, listen to Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer doing "Redemption Song."
Ned R. -- well thanks, and let's agree to disagree, b/c the other current band that I really dig is the Hold Steady ;-) See them live and you'll get it (and I'm not springsteen fan)
TNC, if the Marley thing is too tough for you b/c of the uninformed audience (I'll refrain from saying frat boys -- I wasn't in a frat, but I too had a lot of friends who were, and only some of them were vapid a-holes), maybe you should mix in some roots reggae like Culture.
Now I can get behind Marley's message a lot, and I really can't dig on all the crazy apocalyptic shit in Culture nearly as much, but I could listen to Two Sevens Clash pretty much every day (and never worry about hearing it coming out the windows of a frat house with a bong going -- should I somehow wander past one)
I like it. The poster who called it a British folk song is spot on. If you think of it like one of those Irish revolutionary songs or English working-class movement songs, it makes perfect sense. Other punk bands that went down that path, with excursions into roots music, were the Mekons and Chumbawamba (long before they had that one song that all the frat boys liked).
Bob Marley is much too large a movement to be limited to frat boys, but I have heard No Woman No Cry and songs like that a few too many times. But "Burnin and Lootin" never gets old. And check out Linton Kwesi Johnson. LKJ is too hard to ever be comfortable for dorm-room posterization. Somebody who likes Bob and the Clash both (yes, that's a lot of people) can appreciate LKJ.
Well, if Bob Marley is tainted by frat boys, you can still listen to Fela Kuti. Most of them have never heard of him, and he's just as brilliant musically, if not more than, Bob Marley, and equally respected as a godfather in world music.
What do we all think Bob's reaction to frat boys liking his music would be? I think he'd get a kick out of it. Bob Marley was a true revolutionary, NOTHHING can take that away. The man poured too much soul and at times literally blood (being shot and then going on to perform) into his music for all of us. No trendy frat boy tastes can take that power away.
Several of Marley's songs were modified a bit, by speeding up the tempo, to be released in the US. Go for the original ones and kiss the frat-boy guilt goodbye.
Nah, you don't like it. The Arcade Fire have gotten some of the most mileage out of some of the least interesting music of anyone in decades. IMHO, that is.
The mid-60s rocksteady stuff is free of frat boy taint. For me it's just the general overplayedness of the 70s hits that makes them hard to listen to - kind of like the Beatles. Get some distance from them & they stand up.
You love it. You feel like storming the gates of hell, a smile on your lips. Glad to have cleard that up.
Well, I was (am?) a fratboy and we listened to a lot more Clash than Marley. Of course, I was at school in some weird transitional period where no one I knew regularly smoked pot, so that may not be an accurate representation.
Anyway, I thought it was a pretty fun cover. The bullhorn gave it a tinge of menace and - for all the cover haters - a live cover is always a different and much cooler beast than a recorded cover.
BTW, isn't the essential genius of Ta-Nehisi that he makes nerdy, middle class men - black and white - feel waaaaaay hipper than they have any right to? If you could bottle that, you'd be a millionaire.
@AlanW - How old are you?
Yes to Bob, yes to the Clash, and big big yes to Arcade Fire, whose live shows are mighty powerful experiences.
If I was going to stop listening to Bob because frat boys/white guys were pumping it , then I would have toturn off Mos def, Talib kweli, Common, Wu tang, Rakim.....you get the point.
By the way , I also wouldn't have been in PG county reading X-men , Thor, Iron man , Quasar, and New Warriors.
I love The Clash, love Guns of Brixton, like Arcade Fire pretty well, but lord I don't get that cover. Good call on the idea that AF made it a folk song, but still, it took all the bite out of the song for me.
BTW, isn't the essential genius of Ta-Nehisi that he makes nerdy, middle class men - black and white - feel waaaaaay hipper than they have any right to?
C'mon, Alan. Let us bitches have some too.
I dig the video, but the Arcade Fire cover I really love is the one of "This Must Be the Place" by the Talking Heads, where they go nuts replicating all these loopy synth sounds from the original with analog instruments. It's a lot of fun, and I thought it was a neat play on all the acoustic covers of 80's songs people kept doing a few years ago.
Yeah, I'm with Aaron-- I started listening to Bob when I was living in the Caribbean. He is omnipresent there, on stereos, bumper stickers, T-shirts, etc. Sure, lame white people like him too, but, lame white people like lots of stuff.
I remember listening to Bob with a friend of mine at the end of my first year of medical school at Indiana University - Bloomington. We lived in a dorm for grad students. There was a knock on the door and it was a student from somewhere in Africa. He was thrilled to see two white guys listening to Bob. He smiled and blessed us as he waved.
On a side note, I always thought that the intro to Guns of Brixton would make a a hot hook for Jay-Z if he would change it to Guns of Brooklyn.
@Domonic
Check out the Santogold/Diplo mixtape.
http://getweird.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/santogolddiplo-mixtape/
I hear you, Line.
I remember as a child, maybe 8 years old sneeking into my fathers room and putting on his Legends LP and listening to it! Now i own 2 box-sets and 4 dvds on his work and life....along with 20 other reggae-cds i have in my somewhat bloated cd-collection...
I cannot for the life of me understand why someone wouldn't listen to Marley just because of someone else listening to it? Would you stop regarding Malcolm X as a force of good in the black community just because he's quoted by Al-Qaida?
She love to party, have a good time
She looks so hearty, feeling fine
She loves to smoke, sometime shifting coke
She'll be laughing when there ain't no joke
fun-fact....bob marley was...just like obama...half-white....but he is...just like obama, a hero to many black youths all around the world...as he should be!
I love the Clash, and I hate that version, and I hate Arcade Fire.
Reggae has been ruined for me not by frat boys, but by Deadheads. The fact that they have no love for old ska/rocksteady/Channel One stuff cinches it. Frat boys have better taste. This is not high praise.
Don't worry, Ta-Nehisi, if you're black you can listen to Marley without the taint of frat boys. Fight stereotypes with stereotypes!
For a different take on Guns of Brixton, I like the Nouvelle Vague cover.
I can totally understand not liking a band because you associate it with assholes---it took me years to like any heavy metal simply because everyone I knew who was into metal was a complete prick.
And I can even understand getting turned off of Marley because you've ended up associating it with the part of the quad where dickheads congregate---I love The Clash, but if you smeared poo in my mouth every time I heard The Clash, I'd probably end up not liking them, too.
But as regards Bob Marley: It's true that fratboys love him. So do Ethiopians. So do Russians (really---I saw as many pictures of Marley in Moscow as anywhere else). So do Hatians. So do Dutch. So do Chinese.
The thing is---EVERYONE loves Bob Marley. I really can't think of another musician---hell, another artist---who is so universally, completely, totally loved everywhere by everyone. So when you listen to Bob Marley, you are in fact reminding yourself of what we all have in common, wherever we are, and can perhaps find it in yourself to forgive even fratboys for being such complete dipshits. It's a beautiful thing.
Frat boy listeners don't make anything a frat-boy thing. The Grateful Dead? Back when my hair was down to my chest, if you saw me dancing in the hall at a GD show, you knew my ticket sat me next to a crowd of frat guys. Drunken loudmouths talking over the music, asking my friends for drugs and shouting out requests for songs the band hadn't played in twenty years. Wish I had the guts of a six-foot-something biker guy I saw at an Allman Bros. show once. His shirt read "Frat boys Ain't Got No Genitals"
Hey, Phoebe! Where were you 20 years ago when I was wondering what reggae was out there beside Marley and Tosh?
You shouldn't let frat boys hold such power over you. Why give up something you like just because it's become popular among people you don't like?
Very much this. It's like the Office Space Michael Bolton Rule: "Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!"
Arcade Fire sucks. It's bad emo for the mature set. I'd rather listen to My Chemical Romance, for real.
Also, seconded whoever recommended early Bob. Chris Blackwell absolutely ruined all those later albums. "Small Axe"? "Mister Brown"? "Simmer Down"? Can't go wrong with the early stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnGBJAnYA9E
We actually had fraternities at my high school, and they were led by the rich guys who would hold big keggers at their houses with 300 attendees and live bands playing. The most popular band to have play was Sublime... yep, this was Long Beach, California, and all the rich white guys were listening to Bob Marley and supporting the local Third Wave Ska scene.
Anyway, yeah, I was the nerd who never actually went to those parties.
Bob will always hold a special place in music, but, yes, the general frat scene may hold license to BM - Legend. If in need of a classic quality island vibe I recommend Gregory Isaacs, Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ is a master poet), and Lee "Scratch" Perry (produced loads of early BMW recordings and tracks the creation of dub).
Clash, Clash, Clash, Clash, Clash! Thank you, T N-C, mention much appreciated.
As for Bob Marley, the enthusiasm of frat-boys, bohemian bourgeoisie, and sundry nerd fans have truly transformed and sunk the 'Legend'. Or maybe it was the 'Legend' album collection. Lee Scratch Perry, and Peter Tosh and a host of others, though, fill the gap more that adequately. I started listening to Reggae seriously while living in the Windies in 1978, and I pity those for whom the road to reggaedom led solely through Bob Marley. He was only one master among many.
Cypress Hill sampled Guns of Brixton on a song called "What's Your Number". One of my law school friends was playing it and I asked "Have you heard the original by the Clash?" He said "Who's The Clash?"
Sad.
I miss the bassline in that cover. I know that's not the band's style but for me that makes the song.
I avoided Bob for similar reasons when I was in college, and realized afterward, thanks to some amazing reggae program on the Cleveland college stations, how much I was missing with that sound in general.
I think the word you are looking for is "trustifarian". Not all frat boys who like the rub-a-dub style are trustifarians, who turn adolescent liminality into a (heavily subsidized) lifestyle.
Oooh, now we're talking about something I'm happy to delurk and chime in on.
I'm an old white girl hippy chick, and I've been a reggae-phile since about 1977 - 78, when I first heard Bob's Exodus lp. I was fortunate enough to be living in Austin, Tx during what I consider the heyday of reggae music, when some of the best reggae acts used to tour through here on a fairly regular basis. I saw some amazing, transcendent performances by Burning Spear, the Mighty Diamonds, the Itals, Meditations, Skatalites, among others. Talk about having a near religious experience! So many of those shows were just incredible. The college and post college contingency, the hippies, immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, a handful of African-Americans, all mingling, rocking out, smoking up lots of the herb, grooving to a mighty reggaefarian vibe. And yeah, some of the college guys and gals could be obnoxious, especially when drunk, but as a low-rent, southern white gal getting my reggae groove on, who am I to criticize?
I hope ya'll don't mind if I plug my favorite new reggae artist, Taj Weekes and Adowa, out of St. Lucia. Skillful roots reggae paired with a memorable husky voice and incite-ful, socially conscious lyrics. Their new, release, Deidem, is very good, and I recommend it to anyone who loves (or is interested in) reggae music. Check 'em out at: http://www.tajandadowa.com.
Now, right there is some good reggae.
Well, I was a white-boy Frat Guy(TM) who loved him some Marley. Of course, when I got turned on to Bob, it was years before I became a Frat Guy (and had never seen a joint), and at a time when I hated Frat Guys (a hatred which continued until literally weeks before I became a Frat Guy sophomore year). Oddly enough, Marley was not something I regularly heard other people play, and when I did, it was limited to Legend (I, on the other hand, owned the entire Marley catalog, plus about 15-25 Bob concert bootlegs, most of which I have since lost, much to my everlasting regret....although I still have one from a concert in Gabon).
Anyways, there were always two reasons to listen to Bob - the right reasons and the wrong reasons. If it was the former, you never expanded your horizon much beyond Legend. If it was the latter, you eventually discovered that as brilliant as Bob was, he had some competition from the more-militant Peter Tosh...and early Jimmy Cliff is unbelievable (I'm not as big a fan of Bunny Wailer), as is anything from The Harder They Come soundtrack. And while I'm here, I might as well throw a shout-out to the late, great South African Lucky Dube, whose murder still saddens me more than a year later.
Mark -- so right about the demise of Lucky. His shows were something else, more like the shows of African performers rather than reggae acts. Always loved his back up singers, with their choreographed moves and wearing their kente cloth outfits.
Lahdidah- Not seeing one of his shows is one of my great regrets. I had been a big fan of his for about a decade (I listened to his stuff more than I listened to Marley during that period), but I did a bad job keeping on top of his touring schedule. A few weeks before he was killed, I looked it up and saw that he had recently finished a US tour, much to my chagrin, and promised myself to check his schedule more often. I couldn't have known what was going to happen shortly thereafter.
Some thoughts:
1) No, no, no, don't ever, ever, ever go re-naming British tunes to make them more appealing to the US public. Brixton is very much different to Brooklyn, as you might know if you ever went there. We don't go renaming West Coast hip-hop tracks "Cornwall love" or "Straight outta Glasgow", don't do it to our tracks.
2) Saw Arcade Fire at Alexandra Palace when they were in London last year, best band I've ever seen live, did a great cover of a Smiths song. This cover's not bad either, it's good to hear a different spin on things.
3) As someone born in 1980, I find the whole post-punk thing a bit confusing - it was great music (Morissey, Smiths, Joseph K, Joy Division/New Order, etc.) but why did it suddenly go fashionable now (or rather, in the last few years - I think it may be over by now)? Especially the hero worship of Ian Curtis that was sparked by the films, it all seems a bit bizarre.
Anyway - here's my favourite band, Radiohead, with Ceremony by Joy Division - my favourite 80's cover of the last year or so:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=08_2eTj3wsA
I understand the many commenters who feel a group of fools shouldn't ruin something you love, but fans are an integral part of music. They shape the scene and influence the experience. Frat Boys ruined Bob Marley for me not because they changed the music, but because they influenced my associations with the music. It happens to practically every "scene": punks ruined 90s ska; uneducated imitators killed the swing and lounge revival; wanna-bes killed grunge; etc., etc...
But as far as reggae goes, there's gobs of music left unspoiled: Maytals, Desmond Dekker, Ethiopians, Upsetters, Jimmy Cliff, et. al.