I did a double take with the title as I kept reading it as Burning Spear by Marcus Garvey – my first thought being “He made music as well as political activism?” followed by “Don’t be stupid, clearly it’s somebody using his name as an artist name”.
But, no, I was being even more silly than
that. The artist is Burning Spear, the album title is Marcus Garvey.
“Burning Spear” is the stage name of Winston Rodney (a very Jamaican name), but
he’s accompanied on this album by a collective calling themselves The Black
Disciples who feature some Wailers like Aston “Family Man” Barrett and Tyrone
“Organ D” Downie. A lot of the musicians have these monikers, I think it’s a
reggae tradition. Vincent “Trommie” Gordon plays trombone which explains his
name. I pity poor drummer Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace though.
And, yes, this is reggae as you might expect, specifically “roots” reggae since it’s all about the African diaspora and is a lot more hard and political compared with Bob Marley. The sound is harder too – Marley tends towards a laid-back style drifting from a cloud of ‘erb smoke, while here the beats are hit with more attack, the rhythms are a Black Power fist raised to the sky. Tracks about the slave trade – Slavery Days, The Invasion, about Marcus Garvey and Old Marcus Garvey, and some that borrow the sense of dislocation and search for belonging from the Bible and the Jewish Diaspora – Tradition, Jordan River, Resting Place, as well as evoking the Red, Gold & Green of Rastafarianism.
Apparently Island records felt that the original production was “too Jamaican” for US audiences, which makes me wonder what that was like. There’s a re-imagined dub version of the album that followed up, Garvey’s Ghost, which may be “more Jamaican”. My personal feeling is that good art will make you interested in something that’d normally be out of your wheelhouse, regardless of what it’s about. Executives making decisions based on sales figures will lead to the Brown Plasticene art, endless iterations of CSNY country-rock. Which is a bad thing (although I have nothing against CSNY except for their seeming ubiquity in this list).
Marcus Garvey himself is a problematic figure; his pursuit of Black Rights led him down the path of racial segregation and purity, deriding those of mixed race. This put him in unlikely alignment with the KKK, although Garvey saw black and white as being on equal sides of a fence, not one side being dominant over the other. The moment you espouse division as your doctrine, though, whatever the motives, you’re in dangerous water. I could go into a whole diversion here, however, about how pernicious ideas of the “correct” way for an oppressed group to behave, and who proscribes that, but this probably isn’t the place.
The album: I liked the harder edged reggae sound, but the album as a whole became a bit samey.
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