Free Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright by Hank Bordowitz Page A

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 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 building over Kingston.
    Then again, that lethargy may be as illusory as many other things in Jamaica. The rude boys (Jamaican street punks of the early Sixties) were not lethargic, Marley has sung that “a hungry mob is an angry mob,” and there is certainly no lethargy in a white person going to a black country, or shouldn’t be if he values his skin. There is something almost obscenely ironic in the need to find exotic strokes in folks so far removed from you, who are not, at all, exotic to themselves; in the way white longs to lose itself in black.
    Monday. Flying over Cuba, I first realized that I was heading for the celebrated Third World. All that means for us is poor people, poorer than you or I could probably ever conceive. There’s no way they’re not gonna hate our guts, there’s no way you’re not gonna be slumming no matter who you are—I had been told that they hate black Americans as well as white (a certain odd comfort in that), and when I got there I was to