Sweet life is nowhere to be found

When I was in the 8th grade I listened to 'Catch a Fire', 'Burnin' and/or 'The Harder They Come' pretty much every day after school. Marley's first few albums with the Wailers were actually intensely sad records and they appealed to my morbid, lonely junior high mentality. 'Stir It Up', for example, is a really sad song--there's a pervasive melancholy throughout the tune and yet in America that song is Sunday afternoon music for fat white girls! The contempo music scene didn't go through its reggae phase til 5 or 6 years later and by that time my secret joy of reggae after school was long past me. I still loved the music but mostly I loved it because I was lonely, it wasn't a call to collectivism. Oh well. Bob Marley (like a lot of things) is just misunderstood in America, appreciated correctly only in the rest of the world. (The clip cuts off abruptly)

Bob Marley -- 'Concrete Jungle (live)