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HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE BOB MARLEY?
If celebrity depends on amount â the more people who know about you, the more famous you are â then Bob Marley is a very great celebrity indeed. Years after his death in 1981 he is still listened to and passionately admired by millions of people across the world. In fact he is probably the best-known secular figure in the contemporary period. That âprobablyâ is crucial though. For straight away it has to be admitted that we do not have the sort of evidence to make such a claim without qualification.
Of course in the west and north of the planet market information does provide some indication of Marleyâs celebrity. Take cumulative record sales. In the United States alone 16.5 million of his albums had been sold by 2005. This was enough to put him in joint seventy-second place alongside artists as diverse as Neil Young and Destinyâs Child. Meanwhile the Beatles at the top of the league had achieved 50 million US sales by the same year (RIAA 2005). Another useful index comes in the shape of âForbes Top-Earning Dead Celebrities Listâ (Kafka 2005). For 2005 it shows Marley in twelfth position, sandwiched between Irving Berlin and Ray Charles, and some distance behind Elvis Presley at number one. The Forbes list is based on total annual revenue, which includes earnings not just from record sales but also from the exploitation of copyright, licensing deals, merchandising and so on. That makes it a more rounded measure of celebrity than record sales alone. It also reflects international, rather than just US, earnings.1
Yet the âinternationalâ dimension of these figures from the cultural industries hardly gets at Bob Marleyâs standing in the peripheral regions of the world.2 Here most people listen to him on cassettes, generally copied and distributed outside official music industry channels. No statistics are available for this activity.3 Nor is there a way to quantify the circulation of images of Marley in the form of posters and drawings, or the spread of stories about him.4 And we do not have a figure for the number of local musicians who play his songs, or have simply taken him as inspiration in their own musical careers. This suggests that celebrity among the poor is a poor sort of celebrity indeed. To be well known by people without buying power, even in their millions, counts for little in the cultural industries of the core of the world system.
Still, that makes some sort of reckoning even more urgent. Quite simply, being famous has greater social significance when it is not registered commercially. Such fame bucks the system, suggesting there are some autonomous tendencies at work. On that basis, and taking into account anecdote and some rather patchy evidence, it seems reasonable to say that in the global south Bob Marley is very famous indeed.5 When we add this assessment to what we know from the statistical data available in the core of the world system, then a strong argument emerges for Marley being the major global superstar of the present period. Case reasoned, if not quite proven.
The sheer geographical range of Marleyâs success is clearly significant. But, as we are starting to see, it also has a peculiar quality. Not only is Bob Marley a big star, he is a third world star, hailing from the small Caribbean island of Jamaica, and then finding an audience and a special resonance across the poorer south of the planet. Crucially, he remains the only figure of this kind. Of course there are other successful artists from the margins, for example in so-called âworld musicâ. Produced largely in former colonies, since the mid-1980s world music has been sold to a middle-class market in the advanced capitalist countries. However, this has remained a small niche, representing only 2 per cent of global recorded music sales. Its stars, like Youssou NâDour, from Senegal, are correspondingly small in stature. Another international style which originates outside the core of the world system is âBollywoodâ, or filmi, soundtrack music. Filmi is made for the Mumbai film industry, and distributed throughout South Asia and its diaspora via cinema exhibition, and on radio and record. It probably has a larger audience than that for world music. But since they never appear on screen (actors âlip syncâ to the songs), Bollywood singers generally lack the sort of image needed for celebrity.6 Anyway, even if the audience for the genre is quite large it is also segregated â mainly confined to South Asia and its diaspora.
All this is by way of suggesting that Bob Marley stands alone as a third world superstar. So far, no other music maker coming from a third world country has become a global celebrity. No other artist from anywhere has attracted such a following in the poorer periphery of the capitalist world system. The questions that the present book then tries to answer are, what part did Marley himself play in achieving this unique status? And what has been the meaning of his work in cultural and political terms?
To address these issues the book takes what at first sight looks like a biographical approach. In other words its chapters are organized chronologically so that we follow Marley from his birth in 1945 along the course of a tumultuous life, but also through a momentous historical period; decolonization and its aftermath. The final chapter examines the phenomenon of Bob Marley since his death in 1981. Yet this is by no means a biography in the conventional sense. In a biography the goal is to understand the progress of the subject (most often, an ascent) in terms of her or his own character. In biographies of artists there is a further quest to find the origins of the artistic work in the life, especially the inner life, of the artist. Of course there is always some element of social background too. Particular aspects will come into focus according to the requirements of the particular episode, providing causes for actions, barriers to be overcome and so on. In the case of Bob Marley, several other writers, notably Stephen Davis (1994) and Timothy White (2000), have already produced biographies along these lines.
The approach adopted in the present study is rather different, though, in that social factors are treated as something primary rather than as background. This is not simply a question of emphasis â though there is more sociology here than in a biography. It also has to do with a distinct aim, namely to understand Marley as a social agent and choice-maker, always located within the structure of world capitalism yet by no means completely determined by it.
SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO CELEBRITY AND CREATIVITY
Recent research on celebrity has certainly emphasized the social. Discarding the idea of individual value or talent in the famous, this literature conceives of celebrities as products of a media system which works to construct acclaim (see Gamson 1994). Or, in a slightly different formulation, the celebrity is thought to be an effect of media discourse, as in the case of the television celebrity who, according to David Marshall, âis configured around conceptions of familiarityâ (1997: 119). The emphasis on construction here derives, of course, from a much wider intellectual current which has âdecentredâ the individual, and her intentional action. It takes in other disciplines relevant to the project of this book; literary studies, for example, where the notion of the author has been contested since the 1970s, and replaced with a reader-or text-centred approach to literature (Burke 1992).
In its various forms, then, the constructionist perspective challenges the romantic notion of the self-sufficient creator found in artist biographies. The trouble is, in doing so it also manages to avoid engaging with the celebrity as person. The emphasis on institutional and discursive factors effectively blots out the idea that a celebrity might have a part to play in her own making as author, performer or public intellectual. No doubt in the case of sociological work this also has something to do with the basic orientation of social science, where the particular individual has always appeared as an awkward figure.7 Of course it is a particular individual, Bob Marley, whom we are concerned with here.
Still, one sociological approach does look as though it could provide a framework for the present study. In his analysis of writers and artists in mid-nineteenth-century France, Pierre Bourdieu treats them as agents operating within a specific social arena â the âfield of cultural productionâ (1993, 1996). Bourdieu is keen to distinguish this perspective from two conventional ways of characterizing art makers. The first is that self-sufficient artist of literary and artistic biographies. Here, Bourdieu suggests, it is assumed that one may find âthe explanatory principle of a work in the author taken in isolationâ (1993: 192). Bourdieuâs second target is a reductive sociology of culture where, âunderstanding the work means understanding the world view of the social group that is supposed to have expressed itself through the artist acting as a sort of mediumâ (pp. 180â1). In place of these two mistaken perspectives (the first has no society, the second only society) he offers an alternative formulation. âThe existence of the writer, as fact and as value, is inseparable from the existence of the literary field as an autonomous universe endowed with specific principles of evaluation of practices and worksâ (pp. 162â3).
What makes this concept of the field of cultural production so useful is the way it draws attention to the parochial social relations through which art is made. What is at stake, Bourdieu suggests, is a constant struggle for position among artists, generally taking the form of a battle between establishments and avant-gardes. A key aspect is that the cultural field represents the âeconomic world reversedâ (Bourdieu 1993: 164), such that the aesthetic value of a work is inversely related to its commercial value, and cultural capital trumps economic capital. According to Bourdieu, then, claims for the autonomy of art (art for artâs sake) are generated through the competition for status which characterizes the field.
At first glance it is hard to see much art for artâs sake in the recording studios of downtown Kingston where Marley produced most of his work. The spirit of fiercely competitive small-time capitalism comes across much more strongly (Stolzoff 2000: 172â92). As Dave Hesmondhalgh (2006) points out, because Bourdieu hardly examines the modern cultural industries we lack insight into how far his terms can be applied to what is by far the greater part of contemporary culture making â including the production of reggae. Yet, as Hesmondhalgh also suggests, certain aspects of Bourdieuâs nineteenth-century literary field are actually reproduced in popular culture. One example: in rock music new avant-gardes emerge periodically and struggle against established mainstreams to transform aesthetic values, and therefore also the dominant cohort of artists, in the field. The battle of punk against progressive rock is the classic case (2006: 217). Something similar was also at stake in the emergence of modern jazz, in Bourdieuâs terms a form of ârestricted productionâ by a small âdominatedâ group of artists (Bourdieu 1993). Paul Lopes (2000) makes this point. He argues that the bebop revolution represented a successful attempt by disenfranchised musicians, mostly from dance bands, to accumulate cultural capital by donning the mantle of art. Modern jazz, in other words, was a kind of bootstrap avant-garde.
Taking this perspective perhaps we can find parallels in Jamaican popular music after all. From ska early in the 1960s to bashment at the turn of the twentieth century, consecutive musical ânew wavesâ have challenged the conventions of preceding styles.8 What is interesting, though, is that the same music makers often appear in succeeding waves. Artists can have long careers across several stylistic divides. Bob Marley was typical of such a tendency. Clearly, this is at odds with the model of the avant-garde where a young cohort struggles to topple an establishment, only to replace it at the top of the new order. Whatâs more, although reggae musicians repudiated economic values this was expressed much more in terms of Rastafarianism than in the discourse of âpure artâ. Marley was only one among many songwriters to describe the international music industry as âBabylonâ. Finally, no clear distinction between restricted production (as with an avant-garde) and large-scale music making ever existed in Jamaica. When stylistic change came it swept through the whole scene, rather than being pioneered by a cadre.
Given these rather contradictory indications the question arises of how far we can use Bourdieuâs âfield of cultural productionâ. Only to a limited extent must be the answer. Undoubtedly, Bourdieu identifies key aspects of culture making, aspects which seem to be found in many places and styles, including reggae; for example, the importance of concealed stakes and rules, and of struggles over the definition of musical value. Also extremely useful is the concept of the ârefractionâ of external factors (Bourdieu 1993: 181â2), in our case of Marleyâs social origins, through those same stakes, rules and values. For the purposes of this book, then, Bourdieu has merit because he helps us see that reggae music making has a certain autonomy from the wider social relations in which it is embedded.
The trouble lies with the field concept. The way Bourdieu plots the location of artists across negative and positive axes, and sets up binary relations between movements and forms of capital, involves a strange remove from social reality.9 Is Bourdieuâs field-structure an expression of real social relations, one wonders, or rather a kind of heuristic geometry?10 For while there is no doubt that he has identified key tendencies, the difficulty is that these are treated at a high level of abstraction. More, relationships between tendencies are mostly understood in terms of identity or opposition. The most important example of this is the relegation of the economy to the status of a negative value against which art is marked as a positive. In effect âthe economic world reversedâ becomes the organizing principle of high cultural production.
Important as this may be in nineteenth-century France, as we have just seen in Jamaican popular music (and indeed much popular music everywhere) such a principle simply does not apply. And there is a further problem. The ways in which the economics of production have a material as opposed to discursive impact on symbol making go almost unexplored. It is doubtful whether we can properly understand nineteenth-century French literature and art without political economy. But to try and make sense of reggae and its musicians in this way is impossible. From the start Bob Marley was tied into the music industry, whether as an artisan or, later, as a star-commodity. And that industry, whether at the level of Kingstonâs small-time hucksters or Londonâs multinational corporations, always exerted its influence on what Marley did, either direct through supervision or armâs length control in the form of recording contracts.
Finally, there is the difficulty of relating field to the process of culture making itself. In a discussion of âFlaubertâs point of viewâ Bourdieu (1996: 87â91) suggests that the novelist located himself between realist writers on one side and the creators of âgenre literatureâ on the other. The argument is that Flaubertâs strategy as a writer always emerged from the position he was attempting to take in the field of literary production: not this style, not that form of words, not those themes. As Bourdieu puts it, â[w]hat makes for the radical originality of Flaubert, and what confers on his work its incomparable value, is that it makes contact, at least negatively, with the totality of the literary universe in which it is inscribedâ (p. 98). The problem with such a formulation is that it turns art making into something completely self-referential, a matter of homology between forms and themes on one side and structure of the field on the other. If we were to carry Bourdieuâs method across to Marley and reggae music we would have little sense of the way his songs are about things in the world â power, places, people â or that his vocal style might have significance because of its sensuous performance of the human body.
Listen to the rocksteady seduction of âBend Down Lowâ from 1967, slow and sparsely instrumented, with the Wailers singing falsetto âooosâ in response to Bobâs insinuating tenor lead. Then compare this to the social reportage of âHooliganâ, made just two years earlier. Its frantic, horn-heavy ska beat drives on a vocal from Bob that seems to come straight out of a US rhythm and blues side circa 1959. Finally, check the 1979 track âSo Much Trouble in the Worldâ, where synthesizers and a âone dropâ riddim chug along behind Marleyâs oddly mellow call to the multitude to resist oppression.11 Not only are these recordings stylistically and thematically diverse, they have quite different publics â from âHooliganâsâ weekend dancehall crowd in Jamaica to the international audience addressed by âSo Much Trouble âŚâ, divided by region and class.
The general point to make is that âfieldâ cannot encompass the web of interconnections at stake here, a web that ties together singer, song and society yet also changes radically over time. Of course we should listen to what Bourdieu says about the specifics of making culture. But we will have to take his often acute observations out of their abstracted framework (binary opposition, reversed polarity of field, playing out of paradox, etc.), and treat them instead as historical tendencies in the totality of social relations. Such tendencies should be seen as the outcome of causal powers in conjunction, where such powers are attributed to specific levels of social reality. In short, whatâ...
