Also, Throwback Thursday.
Ziggy Marley’s Love is My Religion. The original version of this tune isn’t bad at all. But I prefer the acoustic. It turns it to gold.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had once had about Bob Marley. It was maybe two months after I first got to Grenada. I was with Bean’s father and a few of his friends, hanging out on a beach at night. It was one of those things where he’d invited people to hang out with us specifically for the purposes of showing me off. So I was making an effort to be on my best, most impressive behavior.
So, this was very early in my time in Grenada. There were a lot of things I hadn’t figured out yet. And a lot of slang and speech I didn’t understand. This particular friend of Lyndon (yes, that’s Bean’s daddy’s name) was the kind of Grenadian you might meet in a hotel or restaurant or on a cruise ship. And by that I mean that he was used to working with foreigners, and was capable of what we call, for lack of a better expression, “talking like a white person”. So I could understand him easily, which was a relief for me, because at that point there were times that, no matter how hard I tried, and especially after a few beers by both the speaker and listener, Grenadian speech sounded to me like an unfamiliar dialect of French.
Anyhoo. Lyndon’s friend asked me lots of questions and we had a long and interesting conversation. I still remember relatively clearly the part about Bob Marley. He was a little surprised to hear that I was pretty familiar with his music, and that pretty much everyone I knew owned a copy of Legend. I told him that my favorite song was Stir it Up, and that for a long time I had completely misunderstood the Lyrics of No Woman, No Cry. (No Woman, No Cry is about comforting a mother who has lost her son, but I thought it was advice. Like, stay away from women and you’ll never have to cry.)
It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it, that 12-year-old white chicks in suburban New York were down with Bob Marley. But then you think about it some more and realize that these are the same girls who appropriated The Grateful Dead for their own capricious fashion use.
But still. I expounded at length about how I thought Bob Marley had a universal message. That his words can speak to a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations. And then – and this is where I kind of cringe – I said that Bob Marley was a prophet, kind of like Jesus. I didn’t really believe that but I knew he’d get a kick out of it, so I said it. It was the first time I did that in Grenada but not even remotely the last. And it worked. The guy looked at me in awe and proclaimed me “rootsy”, which is a huge, huge compliment, especially considering how “fresh off the boat” I was that night.
No, YOU were baked like a cupcake.
Do You Realize? // The Flaming Lips
do you realize - that you have the most beautiful face
do you realize - we’re floating in space
do you realize - that happiness makes you cry
do you realize - that everyone you know someday will die
and instead of saying all of your goodbyes - let them know
you realize that life goes fast
it’s hard to make the good things last
you realize the sun doesn’t go down
it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round
