![]() ![]() “When Bob Marley came to England it was very revolutionary to me because he turned rock music on its head,” Sting said in an interview on The Breakfast Club in 2018. They deftly incorporated the reggae influences born from Bob’s time in England during the early ’70s, offering me a cultural cross-breeding through music society hadn’t caught up to yet. I was hearing Bob in my favorite band of that time, The Police, in songs like “So Lonely,” “Can’t Stand Losing You,” and “Roxanne,” from their album Outlandos d’Amour. You could hear Bob’s influence in the ’80s English punk music my older sister loved, which would eventually grow on me. Knowing the right music to listen to and which artists to have a crush on was crucial. My musical landscape would become suffocated at first by the Top 40 hits kids used like social currency. My world grew larger once our family moved to Texas in the waning days of the ’70s, as I was entering grade school. I’d go on to play that record until the needle wore out, absorbing each song before developing the reading skills to discover it was Bob Marley’s Exodus album that had been the soundtrack of my childhood. He instructed me on the delicate process of making music come out of this piece of furniture so I could hear “Three Little Birds” whenever I wanted. ![]() ![]() My father would eventually show me the high-tech combination cabinet/record player with the 8-track addition located in the basement of our Chicago home, where he pulled out a vinyl with some strange title. Around the house, I’d repeatedly sing, “Don’t worry about a thing,” before understanding the tremendous influence that the biracial Rasta with the heavy Jamaican patois would have on my life. And for this son of West Indian parents from Jamaica and Belize, the first one to hook me was “Three Little Birds” by Robert Nesta Marley, better known as Bob. Like most children of the ’70s, I was introduced to music through Sesame Street and The Muppet Show before discovering the songs that would come to shape me. Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley in "Bob Marley: One Love" (Paramount Pictures) By Ray Gill Jr. ![]()
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