The Son Also Rises

The son of reggae legend Bob Marley and former Miss World Cindy Breakspeare, Damian Marley (aka Junior Gong) takes his nickname from his famous dad and also his mission: to uphold truth and rights and to forward consciousness “in this generation triumphantly,” as Bob would have said.

Nowadays, the roots reggae promoted by his dad and others has become associated with an older audience, so Marley has made it his concern to speak the truth to the youth, whether in Kingston or Kansas, with a style much more attuned to dancehall and hip-hop. This summer’s breakthrough smash “Welcome to Jamrock” — which sampled Ini Kamoze’s ’80s dancehall hit “World-a-Music” — resonated strongly with urban audiences, and his subsequent album of the same name (featuring guest spots by Nas; Roots MC Black Thought; reggae mainstays Bounty Killer and Eek-a-Mouse; and Bobby Brown, who actually doesn’t embarrass himself) set a sales record for the genre, only to be eclipsed one week later by fellow dancehall crossover king Sean Paul’s The Trinity.

Marley sees the competition as healthy. “The music and the genre is going to continue to grow, until it reaches where it deserves to be now, you know?” Marley says. “Over the years, we’ve had one artist at a time … like it was either Shaggy or Sean [Paul], or before them, Shabba [Ranks], or whether it be Diana King, it was always one at a time. But now we see that there is a number of us kinda bubbling on the Billboard right now. That’s great for reggae music as a genre — it helps expose our peers.”

Now Marley is spreading the word as the opening act for U2, and Welcome to Jamrock continues to reel in hip-hop and pop crowds without compromising its author’s message or integrity.

“Music is music,” Marley says. He sees little difference among the various forms of black cultural expression these days. “I think as time progress, too, the lines that we draw between the genres get more blurred. Because we just start borrowing from one another.”

As an example, he points to No Doubt, whose influences include new wave and reggae. “What would you classify that as?” he asks. “What’s the difference between a dancehall and a hip-hop record?”

Very little, judging from “Welcome to Jamrock,” which was both. The song’s runaway success didn’t surprise Marley much; he attributes its power to the uniqueness of its message — which maintains that violence in the ghetto is a direct result of miseducation — compared with most of mainstream pop’s offerings.

“Right now there is a lack of music out there with substance,” he says. “It’s a fresh thing in that sense, and the sound of it, it doesn’t really sound like a lot of things out there, but at the same time, it sounds like something that the now generation is doing still.”

Whereas many other crossover reggae artists water down their messages for international audiences, Junior Gong refuses to go that route. Welcome to Jamrock sets an appropriately dread tone from the jump, with opening track “Confrontation” sampling Rastafarian icons Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey. A sermonlike benediction by Rasta high priest and elder Bunny Wailer links the dancehall of today with the roots of the past.

“I am a reggae artist,” Marley explains. “I don’t really separate the both, meaning roots and dancehall. I can just say it’s all a part of reggae culture. Because a lot of artists who are considered dancehall artists, if you really check their catalog, they have roots music, also, depending on what beat they’re rhyming over.”

Marley acknowledges that being Bob Marley’s son can be a double-edged sword, yet in his career (he won a reggae Grammy for 2003’s Halfway Tree), he has consistently updated his father’s songs. That tradition continues on Welcome to Jamrock with “Pimpa’s Paradise” and “Move” (a remake of “Exodus”). He has looked often to the elder Gong’s oeuvre; most of his father’s messages, he says, resonate more today than they did in their own time.

For example, he points to the proliferation of pimp-related themes in today’s pop culture. “When you listen to a lot of songs, they’re talking about ‘pimp this’ and ‘pimp that’ and ‘pimp right’ and ‘pimp cup and juice,'” he says. “This is a sad thing.” By updating “Pimpa’s Paradise” — the original version appeared on Bob Marley’s 1980 album Uprising — he figured youthful listeners would gravitate toward the song because of its title, then understand the reality of pimping on a deeper level through the lyrics, about a woman whose partying ways lead to cocaine addiction and prostitution.

Marley says the message of “Exodus” is still relevant. “A lot of our rights are being taken away from us … a lot of immigration situations are getting stickier as time goes by,” he says. “People have to really take their destinies in their own hands … get on the move with it.”

That’s just what Marley and his brother, Stephen, who helped produce Welcome to Jamrock, have done, breaking dancehall out of its formulaic rut by using original music. This was by design, Marley says. He and his brother avoided the similar-sounding “juggling riddims” ubiquitous to most dancehall artists, which is why Welcome to Jamrock sounds like an album, not just a collection of singles using familiar beats.

Roots purists have long lamented dancehall’s slackness as responsible for the dumbing-down of reggae, but it’s clear that the genre is in good hands with the Marleys.