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By Root 491 0

herb would be the answer to the island's economic problems; I think that the situation in Jamaica is the most persuasive argument I’ve ever seen for its non-legalization, and the fact that everybody smokes it anyway does nothing to contradict that. Of course, the argument could be raised that the people resort so extensively to this dope, which is not nearly as strong as legend would have it and has the most tranquilizing effect of any I’ve ever smoked, to blot out their feeling of helplessness in the face of such realities as that Michael Manley, the current Prime Minister who came in on a liberal reform ticket, is now taking on some of the earmarks of a dictator. As for the Rastas, it makes sense that they should dream of a pilgrimage back to the cradle of Ethiopia since all black people in Jamaica are descended from people originally brought here as slaves, except for one hitch: the current government of Ethiopia is almost virulently anti-Selassie, and would hardly welcome an influx of Jah knows how many thousand dreadlocked dopers with almost no skills or education. I seriously doubt most of the Rastas know this, just as I doubt that most Jamaicans would know or care that their “freedom” has made the island perhaps more wide-open than ever for colonialist carpetbaggers.

What all this has to do with reggae is that for most reggae connoisseurs the old-time Jamaican music scene is rabble-rousingly epitomized in The Harder They Come, the Perry Henzell film about a youth who records a song he wrote himself for an unscrupulous (and archetypal) producer who pays him twenty bucks and tells him to scram. He is forced to resort to selling herb for money, the producer rips him off for all royalties, his dealings lead him to a shoot-out, and the great twist upon which this intentionally amateurish film hangs is that the kid is Public Enemy Number One and has the Number One hit single at the same time: a Bob Dylan wet dream.

Understandably, this film is banned in Jamaica. But conventional wisdom has it that the music-biz situation depicted in it has been rendered a thing of the past, principally by the founder-president of Island Records, Chris Blackwell. When reggae first became a popular export, in England in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the big English reggae label was Trojan, where boxes of tapes with nothing but artists’ names and song titles printed by hand used to arrive to be be waxed and sold with the artists in most cases receiving no royalties at all. It must be remembered that most of the people making this music come from poverty and illiteracy so extreme that they can have little to no idea of the amounts of money to be made from it; undoubtedly many have been satisfied merely to have a record released with their name on the label and voice in the grooves. In such a situation many vital performers and groups, such as the Pioneers and even Desmond Dekker (who had a U.S. hit in ‘69 with “Israelites”) were allowed to die on the vine, and Chris Blackwell is the first exception to this—the first person to try to build the careers of individual reggae artists and an international market for them.

Many people, however, feel that conditions for Jamaican musicians are much the same today as in The Harder They Come, even if most don’t actually resort to picking up the gun. The content of the records being released has become increasingly geared to visions of Rasta revolution of the mind and heart, although it is difficult to see how Babylon could fall and leave the record companies standing, a paradox that your average Rasta musician is cosmically adroit at skirting. With all their talk of “Jah will provide,” the Rastafarians may yet prove the first people in history to actively (if innocently) collaborate in their own exploitation by the music industry. Robert Johnson got ripped off too, but I doubt that it was a tenet of his religion. Then again, it may be that the Rastas are merely the logical extension of the sad lethargy, punctuated by random blasts of berserk gunfire, which permeates Jamaica like the smog steadily