April 12, 2007

Stephen Marley might save reggae from itself

By Alexander Varty

Too many low-budget productions and monotonous digital rhythms have given reggae a bad reputation, one that's not entirely undeserved. But if Stephen Marley has his way, that's going to change. The second son of the greatest songwriter the form has ever seen knows that reggae must evolve if it is to be anything other than a musical dead end. And on his new Mind Control CD he pushes the sound of Jamaica forward by mixing it up with Latin dance rhythms, the hip-hop phrasing of rapper Mos Def, Ben Harper's bluesy slide guitar–and a few well-placed sound effects.

Mind Control's jailhouse anthem "Iron Bars" opens with the sound of sirens. Set up by a brief satirical monologue in which "Officer Jimmy" encounters some spliffed-up Rastafarians, it's about the victimless crime of marijuana possession–something Marley and his brothers know a little about.

"It was based on kind of a personal experience," the singer confesses, reached at a Kansas City sound check. "Damian had a show in New Orleans, and me and Julian went to the show. And then we were driving back to Miami, and on the way back, going through Tallahassee, we got pulled over and them find some herb."

Unlike the prisoner in his song, Marley didn't end up in shackles; if anything, the bust was more profitable than not, given that it also inspired a second Mind Control offering, "Traffic Jam". Along with the title track's scathing denunciation of media trickery, "Iron Bars" and "Traffic Jam" set a militant tone, but that's soon leavened by the moody lovers' rock of "You're Gonna Leave", the flamenco-inflected "Let Her Dance", and a Wailers-style take on Ray Charles's "Lonely Avenue".

Marley says he's a lifelong fan of the late soul shouter. "He's passed on, but he is one man I would have liked to have met," he explains. "And when I heard that song, man, it hit me, because it has more than one meaning to me. You know what I mean? There are a lot of people in the world whose rooms do not have windows, and the sun does not shine for them. So it doesn't just mean a man-and-woman relationship; it means life. A lot of youths face that kind of struggle, where the sun does not shine for them."

The singer does more than just sing for the young and poor: through the Marley family's Ghetto Youths foundation, he and his siblings are quietly providing education and health care for some of Jamaica's neediest.

"Right now, the youth, them need schooling," he states. "The youth in Jamaica need schools and books and those type of things. So we're trying to concentrate more on education and health, and them will take it from there. But we don't really talk about the things that we do for people. It's more personal. It's just part of our life, and we don't want to go on in the media about it."

More important, he says, is to offer an alternative to the gun culture that has taken over Kingston's streets.

"To tell you the truth, the youths look up to us," Marley allows. "They do, and we cannot deny that. The youths look up to us, they idolize us, they dress like us, they want to talk like us. So we have to use that in a positive way if we want to see a change."