Essays: Representations of Youth and Political Consciousness in the Music of Bob Marley
The evaluation of Bob Marley's legacy should begin with consideration of the elaborate profile that he constructed through his music. Over the course of his career, Marley wrote music that encompassed a rich variety of subjects and sentiments, ranging from praise of youth culture in Jamaica to spiritual meditations, denunciations of war to reflections on intimacy and love. Marley's lyrics undoubtedly expressed his private feelings about personal relationships as well as his own political convictions rooted in the oppressive conditions of urban Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s. But the character of the expression of these sentiments, especially through the figurative language of Rastafari, also opens them up to an array of possible interpretations and enables the ongoing process of identification with his music. Literary scholar Carolyn Cooper has suggested about Marley's music that meaning is not immanent: 'The audience, as much as the performer, engages in the making/spreading of the text and its meanings' (1995:118) One important ramification of this premise is that the extent of Marley's influence on social and political consciousness across the world should not be considered fixed. Broadening our sense of the ways in which people have identified politically with Marley's music may be accomplished by considering the ways in which the lyrical subjects and 1. Paul Gilroy has argued that, in analyzing Marley's global appeal, 'attention should be placed upon the processes and mechanisms of identification. Do people connect themselves and their hopes with the mythic figure of Bob Marley as a man, as a Jamaican, a Caribbean, an African or panAfrican artist? He was somehow all of the above and yet more' (2005:240) Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 81, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2010, 237 242