Not Far from the Tree

"We're all really just products of our experiences to date, you know?" muses Damian Marley, son of the late, great Bob Marley. The young reggae singer and rapper is in Austin Texas, en route to Albuquerque where he's playing the second date on his latest US tour, his third as headliner. Growing up in his father's shadow could have pushed the young Marley away from music, or it could have kept him steeped in his father's legend, away from the influence of the real world. As it turns out, Damian Marley is very much his own person; his father's son, sure, but also the product of his surroundings and the world in which he lives.
"I grew up in Kingston, ya know wha'mean, so really, a lot of what I know about life and what I've learned about life itself, I learned in Kingston," he continues, speaking of his hometown, then turning to himself, his father and the rest of his musical family, which is an impressive brood indeed - Rita, Ziggy, Sharon, Cedella, Stephan and Julian. "My father, from ever since the beginning, we have been looking up to him, and not just the morals and values we've learned from our father and through his music, but our faith in Rastafari and living as Rastafarians."
While Damian and the rest of the Marleys may have learned about life in Kingston, and about morality and Rastafari from their father, they've also learned about music - and not just from Bob. Though many of the Marley children were very young when Bob died, his music is timeless, and, of course, has reached down to all his progeny. However, they have also grown up in a world that has seen the advent of other forms of music, such as hip-hop, and that, says Damian, is where he and his brothers Stephan and Julian, a.k.a The Ghetto Youth Crew, draw their inspiration - a blending of old and new, reggae and hip-hop.
"I wouldn't say it was so much of a conscious effort to find that common ground between the two. It was really more from being young in the times that we're in now, knowing what's popular now, ya know, the music that we listen to that influences us all, like hip-hop. I think that's really the ground of it, where it got that spark," extols Marley, who was first exposed to hip-hop in his formative years. "I was in my early teens, really. I have some cousins who used to live in America at the time, and who always used to come to Jamaica with new stuff. At the time I wasn't really into hip-hop, but after a while, I started catching on. Now I listen to a lot of it."
Perhaps the young Marley's affinity for hip-hop music is rooted in hip-hop's ties to reggae. Jamaican DJs were the first to use turntables as musical instruments, "toasting" the crowd at parties by mixing, juggling and scratching records, while throwing shout-outs over the mic. Later, in the '70s, the concept of turntables as musical instruments made its way to New York City where a whole new breed of artists took the idea and greatly expounded on it.
"If you follow the history of hip-hop, from what I've learned, the first person to come out on the turntables and start that whole movement was a Jamaican named Cool Herc, ya know?" says Marley, who sees the two as similar, if not related styles of music. "I think that the two cultures have evolved out of each other. It's a Jamaican style of thing - both musics are from the streets, and they're for the street peoples, ya know wha'mean?"
And it's those "street" connections - the music's powerful sociopolitical undercurrents that often times echo the voice and the struggle of the common man - that tie the two genres together. Those tenets of social involvement and political empowerment have been diluted over the years though, and Marley sees that plainly.
"Well, hip-hop originally stood for a struggle, but I think the music is going in a different direction right now, and likewise dancehall, 'cause dancehall music is going for more of a materialistic type thing. But the roots of both musics are political and cultural," asserts Marley, who adds that the music that he and The Ghetto Youth Crew make aims to reverse that materialistic trend through singing and rapping about consciousness. "Definitely. A mission that we have right now is to bring back righteousness to the frontier of music. Lyrically is really what it's about, because music itself cannot be unrighteous, so it must be the lyrics."
But for a man who seems to know exactly what he's doing, Damian Marley quickly admits that his goals aren't as earthly as they would seem - sell some records, sure; help human beings attain a higher consciousness, of course. But as far as Marley is concerned, that's all just part of the bigger picture.
"I don't really have any goals that I could tell you about just straight out, ya know, but obviously as a musician, I want my music to be successful, I want people to hear my music. But then again, music for me is really just a way of life, because all music is not just about partying. We can learn something from all music. We're about uplifting people's way of life, through music, and then also we have ambitions in terms of humanitarian work, that music will be the catapult for that."

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