~music Listening Club 22 - Survival

I think I need to put in the work to separate my idea of what reggae sounds like from "relaxing on a beach and sipping cold cocktails," because despite any content on here, that's the feeling I get. Or at least, I'm not getting anything much different from what I'd expect from this kind of music. That slow, slight groove that exists in the whole genre seems so at odds with anything else, but I'm sure expanding my knowledge in that area will help.

I know making assumptions about meaning from a specific sound is a problem, but I can't help it for now. All I can do is try to become more familiar...I don't want to be the equivalent of the mom thinking "Suicide Solution" glorifies alcohol usage, after all. I'm going to copy a review by the user Iai on RateYourMusic on this album simply because I think it deserves some more eyes:

It can be easy to feel a bit of a disconnect with Bob Marley. Whenever I read about him, I read about a political icon, a pan-Africanist, a symbol of resistance and anti-imperialism worldwide, a man who spoke truth to power and butted heads with authority figures constantly, and who upset the established order of Jamaican society at the time by wholehearted embracing his blackness despite having a white father and light skin (and later, by remaining outspoken about poverty despite having money). Whenever I hear his music in public, or hear people talking about him....well. The problem is that, like basically every anti-authoritarian figure that became a household name in the 20th century, Marley's legacy was sanitized the second he died. Che Guevara was reduced to a T-shirt. Martin Luther King was reduced to a dream - not even a specific dream, just the words 'I have a dream' and nothing more. Muhammad Ali was reduced to a series of wisecracks, like Groucho Marx in boxing gloves. Nelson Mandela was reduced to a cuddly grandfather figure cosying up to the Spice Girls. And Marley has been reduced to a generic, deracialized and depoliticized symbol of hope at best - more realistically, he's been reduced to a marketing slogan for stoners. His numerous explicitly political songs have been marginalized in favour of "No Woman, No Cry", "Three Little Birds", "One Love", and "Jamming".

I've become acutely aware of that disconnect over the last couple of years and truthfully it's been gnawing away at me a little bit, this idea that despite having heard a decent chunk of his discography, I don't have a complete picture of Bob Marley at all. I wanted to hear the explicitly political Marley, to recalibrate all this contradiction as much as anything, and reviews led me to believe that Survival was the place to get it. (Well, it was that, plus the album artwork, plus the fact that none of this album's songs made it onto Legend, an album that has played a very significant part in the journey Marley's legacy has been through posthumously.) That turned out to be true, but it's still not what I expected at all. 'Political', to my mind, pretty much automatically means 'angry'. Survival isn't that - instead, the territory it starts out in is world-weary, almost bordering on defeatist. For a man so closely associated with hope, it's remarkable how little hope there is in "So Much Trouble in the World", a song that brought Prince's later "Sign o' the Times" to my mind when it mentioned 'men sailing on their ego trip, blast[ing] off on their spaceship...no care for you, no care for me' (was Prince influenced by this when he wrote about sending people to the moon when we can't even afford to feed everybody down here, I wonder?). That's not a song I ever expected a Bob Marley track to remind me of. The song offers no real hope, either - in fact, it explicitly mocks the idea that there's any solution to the world's problems (that's 'just another illusion').

But from there, Survival starts to feel a little like a concept album; from that initial bummer of hopelessness, the album eventually opens up. The lyrics to "Top Rankin" start with more defeatism, speaking out on the colonial forces working to keep Africa at war, but later talks about feeling brotherly love. By "Babylon System", it has become defiant, and "Survival" makes that switch explicit. That the next two songs after this are called "Africa Unite" and "One Drop" means they pretty much need no explanation. It feels that Survival charts Marley's lowest ebb, and his journey to regain his strength and the courage of his convictions from it. In the context of his life, the timing of this is slightly surprising - this was three years after he was shot and two years after his cancer diagnosis, and Survival would have made more sense in that context if it had been released in place of Exodus or Kaya, both albums that feel considerably more content than this does. I didn't have my timeline quite right and assumed this had come out very soon after his shooting - an impression supported by "Ambush in the Night", a song that directly deals with the incident. Perhaps, I suppose, things were just catching up with him.

Or maybe not - maybe the concept was deliberate, not a reflection of his mental state at the time. If so, it feels crucial that the turning point in this album is "Zimbabwe", one of Marley's best ever songs. Even without that song, you would get the impression from the artwork, from the way the album develops, and from "Africa Unite" that Marley was writing about drawing strength from Africa. "Zimbabwe", a song written while Zimbabwe itself was still called Rhodesia, and in the midst of a civil war that would result in its independence from British rule a year later, makes that explicit and ties it to real, tangible events. This houses the ones true moment of bliss on the album - the repeated refrain 'you were right'. That the song is unambiguously about taking up arms against your oppressors to gain the right to be the master of your own destiny (these are the exact terms used in the opening verse), and 'you were right' is rhymed with 'we have to fight', means that you have to assume that the thing they were right about was the need for armed struggle, for violence, in the struggle for freedom. That, perhaps, is ultimately all you need to know about Survival - it's an album that finds its happiness in the active pursuit of liberation, not just the idea of it. If you want to know why Bob Marley is a genuine cross-generational and cross-cultural hero, why there are statues of him all over Africa, why aboriginal Australians, and why reggae was transformed from an essentially regional Jamaican music to a genre with scenes in places as far flung as the Philippines and Indonesia over the course of his career - if you want to reconnect with what he was to peoples around the world, before he became a slogan - then you could do an awful lot worse than just listening to this.