ZIGGY MARLEY
ZIGGY MARLEY
Tuff Gong Worldwide/Source Music
Reggae and beyond
Sixteen albums into a career that began when he was ten years old accompanying his legendary father in the studio, Ziggy Marley knows exactly how to make the kind of reggae that gets the message across without sacrificing the potential for a melody guaranteed to have you singing along in a couple of listens. And it is so with this eponymous seventh solo album. The message, as you’d expect from any artist with the surname Marley, is peace, love, community and celebration (oh, and ganja of course, but these days it’s more a commodity packaged for mass consumption than for “freein’ da mind, mon”). The core values are spelt in a variety of ways and genre-cross-pollinating – “Now let Peace be your prophet/And let Love be your saint,” he intones on Amen, surely the only reggae or any other kind of popular song to open with the word “verily” in a few decades! Laudable sentiments of course, but in a world being torn apart by bigotry, zealotry and xenophobia, as Marley suggests, the real revolution now has to be love. The case for love is emphasised most particularly in Heaven Can’t Take It, as Marley delivers the roll-call of various “justifications” people give for killing each other and then asks us “to lift up all humanity/There’s been too much tragedy/We can give each other love and respect/Now let’s change our reality.” If only. Play this record loud, and often, and let the hope in it spread out into the Universe. You never know…
MICHAEL SMITH