Polit(r)ics
Although
many Rastafarians disapprove of politics, the Jamaican parties sometimes use
musicians as propagandists, because they knew, that a big audience would listen
to them and that the singers have great influence on the people.
In 1973, for example, Michael Manley, at this time prime minister of Jamaica,
and his neo- nationalist party, the PNP (People’s National Party) announced
“free education for all”. As a reaction to this the Reggae singer Flic
Wilson wrote a song with the same name – “Free education for all”, but it
was “a song which is more likely a party political advertisement than a piece
of artistic creation. It is art, but art at its crudest and most vulgar hour.”24
It needs just four verses of the song to show the correctness of this assessment:
“The most expensive words in every way has now become the topic of the day;
come one and all and have a ball and celebrate free education for all”25
As most of these propagandistic songs are neither artificial nor stylistic
valuable, it is not surprising that in Europe this category of Reggae is unknown.
However, in Jamaica the ruling
PNP and the opposition did not only use Reggae to advertise a program, but also
to campaign for their party before elections and to style the images of the
politicians.
But of course, this is no main branch of Reggae and normally the songs that
concern themselves with politics and social problems are protest songs and
social critical songs.
A lot of the musicians grew up in Trench Town, the ghetto of Kingston where they
faced social injustice every day. It was on the one hand to inform all people
about the situation of the poorest in Jamaica, on the other had to encourage the
inhabitants of Trench Town why musicians started to sing about the Ghetto. Bob
Marley ‘s most famous song, “No woman, no cry”, for example, is one of
these songs. He sings about daily situations in Trench Town (“...we used to
sit in a government’s yard in Trench Town”26) and in between repeats the
sentence “Everything’s gonna be alright”26.
In the 1990ies when gang wars started all over Kingston, the Roots Reggae Band
Israel Vibration reacted with the song “Violence in the streets”, that tells
about this problem and its consequences for the people, because they wanted the
youth to do some rethinking: “Violence in the street, one million running feet,
trying to get away from this outrageous gunplay (...)”27
