1984: Stir It Up

Bob Marley and the Wailers: Stir It Up

[purchase]

I have no idea how much, or indeed whether, reggae was a part of the normative american soundscape in the years before 1984. But I do know that after that year, one could definitively say that the sound of reggae music was and would forever be everywhere, from the huge posters above the bed of the barefoot and tie-dyed guy down the dormitory hall to the Top 40 charts.

It was all due to the musical genius of one guy. And in 1984, he had been dead for three years.

Bob Marley's greatest hits release Legend may have been just a posthumous compilation, but it was a perfect, complete set; it caught fire upon its release, bringing the sound of reggae full-bore into mass culture for the first time. Some of this was surely timing -- the album was released in May, and the songs rode up and down the charts like an elevator all summer long, moving virally and fluidly among those of us at summer camp, and catching fire in the schoolyard upon our return.

But the album was also a timely signifier of authenticity for a growing dissatisfied American underclass left out of the Yuppie movement. College students bought the album in droves. The album went platinum ten times, and set what would appear to be an unbreakable benchmark as the highest selling reggae record ever. By the time I hit high school a few years years later the dreadlocked poster was perfectly familiar; so were the chunky beats, the fat bass, and the loose, rough-hewn vocal harmonies of the Wailers coming from a summer boombox.

There are many, many great songs on this album, from love songs to to peace songs to angry calls for social justice, and you probably know all of them from the first chord: No Woman No Cry, Exodus, Three Little Birds, One Love, the original I Shot The Sherrif. But Stir It Up was the sexiest, sultriest call to action that ever graced a turntable. It said hot summer and hotter possibility in a way I'd never experienced before.

It is a joy and a rare privilege to relive this feeling, just by playing music. And it is fitting to play it today, as we turn towards June, and freedom.