The Philosophy Of Reggae - A Guided Tour

An audio journey through struggle and a history of cultural defiance.

Shem Best

and

Rasheed Griffith

Nov 25, 2024

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Show notes

It's not all love, peace, and brotherhood and if you're looking for Bob Marley, you're out of luck there too. Join CPSI director Rasheed Griffith and podcast producer Shem Best for an unfiltered foray into reggae, its historical starting point, political ramifications, and cultural proliferation throughout the region and the world.

Reggae is first and foremost a vehicle of protest. We explore the societal context that forced the hands of the Rastafarians, producing anthems of anti-establishment sentiment that resonated with a growing movement that was finding itself increasingly at odds with a post-colonial government.

What is "Babylon" and why are so many of these songs calling for us to burn it down? A greater understanding of rasta ideologies is required and we've got an informative crash course right here.

Japanese Rastas may appear to be an improbable cultural anomaly, but it's a much more fitting match than you think. Reggae has become a global phenomenon, thus bringing the fight to seemingly unlikely locales. How has its message evolved and how effective is it today in a much more culturally mature and homogenous world?

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by AI and lightly edited by our team. We don’t catch every error, so if you spot one, send us a message/email via shem@cpsi.org.

Rasheed: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Rasheed Griffith Show. Today I am once again joined by Shem Best, also of CPSI, and we are going to be discussing I think perhaps our most requested topic, which is Jamaican Reggae.

Shem: First of all, it is an honor to be on this episode, especially since we finally get to hear the original CPSI podcast opening theme, where it came from, mystery solved.

This episode is kind of near and dear to you because this is based on one of your more prolific essays, "Jamaica is not doing okay", where you highlighted the manifestation of that unrest that is deeply a part of the country's ethos, to be stemming from its culture, a cultural aspect, its music.

Rasheed: Not stemming from, but the music is a very clear representation of underlying social problems. That's how I used it.

Shem: Right. So we've got a really heavy lineup today. Me, myself, I'm not a huge fan of reggae.

Rasheed: Blasphemy.

Shem: I know. I know. We're hoping to change that by the end. So by the end of this episode, if the studio is in flames, you will have accomplished your goal of truly, you know, explaining the violence, the deep violence that is manifested through the music, which is reggae, and kind of brush away that weird kumbaya and peaceful vibe that people seem to think that reggae is supposed to be pushing today.

Rasheed: Yeah. The baseline people have for reggae, at least outside of the Caribbean. I say at least, but even in the Caribbean, I think these days people think of reggae more of a rock steady type, slow, easygoing, humble type genre. And outside of the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, people think of it primarily via Bob Marley as peace and love, hold hands, as you said, kumbaya.

So on and so on, where in reality it's more at the core of violent protest music against not only superficial ideas of actual policies, but it's almost like a meta philosophic or a metaphysical view of how the world should be and how it's not currently. And we're gonna get into that. So it's a bit, it's a bit of a mouthful to even start off a reggae episode about metaphysics. But, we do what we must to get to the core of these concepts. And we're going to do that through me essentially discussing some of these themes with some of what I think are good representative songs of reggae through Jamaican history.

And we will also link a playlist I have called Real Reggae where you can listen to about 50 reggae songs that I think are a good introduction to reggae. Honestly, only one Bar Marley song is on the list. I think by the end of the episode, you'll understand why that is. To start off our conversation, let's go to our first song.

Rasheed: That's our first song called Burn Babylon by Sylford Walker. Are you familiar with this song, Shem?

Shem: Absolutely not. Let's begin our descent into violence.

Rasheed: So the first thing I need to get into here is the title, Babylon, Burn Babylon, but more to the point Babylon, because anytime you hear reggae, especially 1970s, 60s reggae, you hear it also now, but more so then, the theme of Babylon is dominant, completely dominant, and people tend to not understand what the Rasta and reggae artists who are often Rasta, mean by that term Babylon.

What do you think the term 'Babylon' means? You live in the Caribbean, so you have an innate exposure to it, but could you explain what that term means to you?

Shem: Well, even though I am not a part of the reggae crew as Rasheed would like, I do, as you say, have some exposure being that I'm based in the Caribbean with the Rastafarian culture. We've seen these very easygoing, mostly vegetarian because we have some jokes in Barbados, but mostly vegetarian, long-haired individuals who have a fairly different philosophy, but also refer to this almost nebulous entity called Babylon that they're fighting against, some great struggle against Babylon. And our understanding at least my understanding is that Babylon is a representation of structural oppression through the government, any form of resistance against freedom, individual freedoms, any sort of taking away of individual freedoms, be it through policing or government policies, et cetera, that would impede the day to day freedoms of a Rastafarian individual, be it through like education, the ability to homeschool or in a more common case in the Caribbean, access to marijuana.

So that's what we understand Babylon to be. I mean, today we're a bit more desensitized. Anything you don't like you say "Fiya bun Babylon" or, if there's something that's impeding even the most minute things we tend to superfluously use the term Babylon to refer to that.

So did I hit the nail on the head? Am I on my way to becoming a militant?

Rasheed: Yeah, that's mostly right. The Rasta uses the term Babylon as a symbolic representation of everything immoral in the human world. Humans, not only is it physical, but they also think of humans as spiritual as well.

And often it's usually used towards the Western world in particular, so America, Europe, anything that we consider the West. And they often frame that in terms of some kind of capitalist, imperial dominance of these countries and these cultures over primarily a place like Africa or African countries.

So Babylon is that representation. So everything immoral and lacking spiritual awakeness, if we can use that term, in human society. And to fight Babylon, or burn Babylon, is a very deeply Christian idea. You need to fight or struggle against the evils in this world to have a better world.

Now, there is something deeply materialistic because they don't often think you have to ascend to a higher world; it's a more modern Christian idea. It's like an older Christian view which is, this is the world we have, and we have to make this world better. Getting rid of Babylon isn't, say, burning the actual world and getting towards some mystical heaven.

It's trying to get rid of or struggle against, protest against, our burn, burn is a very active metaphor here. To get rid of the current problems, so the current world can be better. And also in their view, better in a very particular pan-Africanist philosophy way. And that's where Babylon comes from. So Jamaica, for example, is Babylon.

The U. S. is Babylon. Europe, as it is, is Babylon. So you have to have that mentality from the beginning. If not, you're not going to get what they're often singing about. So fundamentally, in metaphysics, you have to fight the world we live in to move forward. It's a fundamentally violent thing

Shem: It seems to be a very wide definition.

I mean in one case these people live in Jamaica so you're saying that Jamaica is Babylon?

Rasheed: There's a phrase, what's the word to use, idiom, that Rastafari- so we normally say Rasta or Rastafarian, but I'm just going to resolve to Rasta in this episode because that's what we normally say in the Caribbean.

Rastas have an idiom that goes, Jamaica is an island, but it's not "I land" or my land. So Jamaica is an island, but it's not my island, in the sense that there is universalism, or you could also say cosmopolitanism. It's a very odd term to use in this case, of the notion of what you have to do as a Rasta to struggle against Babylon.

You don't have to resort to only thinking about your own country, but you have to think about the world around you and the people far away from you who might not understand the struggle, but they're often, they're also going to be burned by Babylon if you don't fight against it. So Jamaica is hell,

and, the route to peace or a route to better, more fruitful land is somewhere in Africa.

Shem: I'm going to be very honest with you, that seems like a rather stressful way to exist, if there are so many vague things around you that can be classified as Babylon. It reminds me of how in Islam you have Haram. This is Haram. I can look at anything I don't like or that I think is impeding my perception of heaven, of a heavenly state, and go, this is Babylon. As a result, I feel like that would be room for an eternal struggle per se. Jamaica has changed, but it hasn't changed that much.

So if police are Babylon and certain parts of the government system are Babylon and those things are standard institutions that are pretty much ever-present and never changing, Babylon is always going to be there. Listeners, right now the smile has faded from my face, so my training in violence is now progressing. Back to you, Rasheed.

Rasheed: It's an incurably vague term, I grant that, but in many ways, it's not that different from a lot of the older views of Christian theology in Protestant America, 19th-century type thing where you always have in many ways some new struggle. You always have some new evil in the world and your job is to always hunt it out, get rid of it, burn it clear.

It's a pursuit. There's always a continuous struggle. A lot of the initial struggle from early Rasta was this vague, another vague view of anti-imperialism and how the Western world is supposedly trampling Africa by colonialism and those concepts we are very familiar with now these days.

In theory, you can see how that could evolve into some kind of different struggle, right? Maybe it's like climate change. Climate change is part of Babylon. So, these things are very fluid, but not necessarily in a super, super, super illogical way. If you have faith, well, faith works, I think, in this context also.

One of the other main aspects of Rastafari or Rasta culture that comes up a lot in reggae which is a super dominant theme that does have a very important role in thinking about the context for going forward in conversation is the primacy of marijuana. This is one of the stereotypes that everyone knows. Again, mostly because of Bob Marley and so on, but everyone knows this stereotype. Rootedly they don't know why it is and we won't go into the super philosophical origins of herb theology, but it is a key tenet of part of the actual struggle that needs to be emphasized.

So before we get into a deeper conversation there, let's do a couple of songs that talk about the prominence of herb.

Rasheed: So that was 'Police in Helicopter' by the famous John Holt. Another song on a similar theme, we're gonna play more than one at the same time, is 'Equal Rights' by the infamous Peter Tosh.

Rasheed: And you know, Shem, because I like our listeners so much. I would do three songs. Let me also tag in 'Ganja Smuggling' by Eek-a-Mouse before we get back to our conversation.

Rasheed: so Shem, that was a lot, that was a lot, but here we are.

Shem: Oh, let me get my general interpretation of what I've just heard for the culturally inept among us here. That first song sounds like things are getting drastic. He says if you continue to burn my herb...

He's gonna destroy the cane fields. Some listener context. Of course, this was Jamaica at the time it would have been a cane-producing economy, sugar. Sugar was the gold crop of the time. And you essentially have a man here telling the government that if they continue to confiscate and destroy his ganja fields, he is going to destroy the literal cash crop, the source, a primary source of revenue.

Rasheed: Yeah, that was the metaphor. It wasn't the fact that it was cane per se, but essentially "I will, I will attack the government."

Shem: In case anyone was wondering, the scowl on my face is now holding consistently and a cutlass has appeared on the desk next to me, back to you, Rasheed.

Rasheed: Yeah that's the interpretation.

The police in helicopter is, I think it's very explicit, right? He was saying that you can't do this to me. These are my things. You might not like it, but if you keep doing this, I will be forced to destroy the economy. I will burn this down. I will burn Jamaica down. Just because you don't want to allow me to have my marijuana.

Shem: It sounded a little domestic terrorist-y innit?

Rasheed: Yes, it does. But this is a very popular song.

Shem: There are so many jokes I can make here, none of which are appropriate to various events going on around the world, but I just want people to know this. This is starting to sound very extremist. This is a fringe group now.

Rasheed: But it's not a fringe group. It's so Rastafari.

Shem: It's grown. It's not fringe anymore.

Rasheed: Correct. Here we go. It's grown.

Shem: So now it's got a sizable, following. It means that government oversight is now increasing as well. It's no longer just, you know, they're finding the weed and burning it.

Now they're actively searching out this sacred plant to the Rastafarian community and the Rastas ain't pleased. They're not pleased.

Rasheed: Yeah, that's right. And people emphasize this thing. The government was not a fan of Rastafari culture or groups. This was an anti-government type movement.

In some ways, it was libertarian. The deep irony never ends. But in some ways, early Rasta was a very libertarian type movement. Where they emphasize personal autonomy over state control. That was a very core element of it. And they didn't have that much economic philosophy per se.

This is my, I guess, biased view on this point. But they did emphasize that personal autonomy libertarian view of themselves and their people. And, around this time, because of this, the government has this and, you know, other more explicit statements. The government was very anti-Rasta, anti reggae.

People don't remember this. There were actual groups of the government control trying to attack, the Rastas, trying to get them to to yield and stop singing about all these things. Try to not be so subversive in Jamaica. This was an active government policy. And it was a big deal for example, Bob Marley had a big concert in Jamaica where he got the two opposition politicians in Jamaica to come on stage with him to kind of settle the heat of the country.

It was that bad. It was that, actually that inflamed in Jamaica during this time. Now, the second song I played From Peter Tosh was, in some ways, not too subtle either. It was, you know, "We don't want peace." You want equal rights and justice, but you know equal rights and justice sounds very peaceful, but you say we don't want peace.

Shem: "I don't want peace. I want problems always."

Rasheed: What was that? Wrong country!

Shem: Similar sentiment though.

Rasheed: Similar sentiment in some ways. If you have peace via essentially giving up. That's not the option they have. You will struggle until we have equal rights. And of course, in their view, equal rights meant essentially having marijuana, having other things that the government refused to give them.

And they were vehement about this problem. This was on a side topic. They viewed the marijuana or the ganja, as we, they call it, well we call it Caribbean still, as a core spiritual component of how they as Rasta need to filter Babylon via their brains. It's a very weird way of putting that, but without marijuana, we can't properly meditate.

If we don't meditate, Babylon will kill us all even faster. So it's a very core tenet of the metaphysics of Rasta. So when these things start coming up in government, governments actively pursuing counter-Rasta intelligence and counter-Rasta policy, this was a very active thing. So I also want to point out that you know, this, but Peter Tosh was assassinated.

Shem: Yep. He bit the bullet with not very mysterious circumstances. Can I just say that in this song as well they don't want peace, but they're also asking for justice, which seems to have an almost vengeful element to it. Again, they've suffered unfairness in their accounts of the situation and they're no longer on compromising terms with the government. They're now interested in full-on maybe attacking back and inflicting as much pain as possible on the government as they have seen the government inflicted on them. And I almost, almost Rasheed, I feel for the Jamaican government. Because you've inherited by no fault of your own, mind you. It's just a series of cultural and historical circumstances that have created this subset of the Jamaican population, which is so anti-establishment. And now you're watching your Caribbean neighbors rein in their populations and, you know, kind of get to the whole nation-building part of the decolonization process.

And you are now trying to swat at rebel groups that your predecessor, the British government was like, "Well, you know, we're out."

Rasheed: Yeah, well, they didn't have the Rastas to deal with at that point when they left, but yes.

Shem: They didn't have the Rastas, to that point, they were fighting. They fought the Maroons.

Rasheed: But they had a truce with the Maroons. People forget that.

Shem: There was no truce with the Rastas, though.

Rasheed: Well, eventually, they did have a truce, but later on in the different We'll get to that perhaps later.

Shem: Listeners, in the time that has passed, I have actually successfully taken over a government office.

It is now in flames with my cutlass and several of my other violent friends. Back to you, Rasheed.

Rasheed: Peter Tosh was- How you want to frame this he was actually assassinated on September 11th, 1987

Shem: That was the first 9/11

Rasheed: The first 9/11. Oh my goodness, that's gonna cause some issues for some people. This is the thing. Also, Bob Marley people forget this as well.

There was an assassination attempt on his life too.

Shem: Several times.

Rasheed: Several times. These are not your Teletubby lullaby singers, right? These are soldiers in the war against Babylon.

Shem: And they knew. They knew that their lives were in danger from just pushing this particular media, this particular art, and they still did it anyway. Which kind of shows you how embattled and how passionate they were about this particular form of protest against the government.

Rasheed: That's right. It's hard to grasp, sometimes, for people, I think, how anti-drug liberalization the Caribbean was at this time. And the Rasta did make a lot of strides, obviously, in the following decades, to get this topic into just boring conversation now. No one thinks of marijuana legalization as a terrorist activity.

They think of it as, at best, some health thing. At worst, it's some silly thing the kids want these days. But before, it was about terrorism. It was about terrorism, anti-government struggle, and essentially, not counter Christianity, but almost a subversive, element of Christianity that the church also didn't like either.

It was a big deal

Shem: Now we in Barbados were not too far removed from this. We do have our own community of Orthodox Rastafarian, Orthodox Rastas?

Rasheed: That's why I would say yes.

Shem: Orthodox rastas.

You have this small clump, I can't call it a forest, Barbados just doesn't have forests. This small clump of palm trees in a ravine happens to have a spring running through it.

My only run-in with them, by the way, was when I was hiking in that area once and a single Rasta walked up to me and said I should follow him. I didn't, by the way, because my eyes weren't opened to the true violence I was capable of.

Listeners, the building has burned down completely. We are now standing in the ashes of the government. We have succeeded. Back to you, Rasheed.

Rasheed: So I want to go to another song that I think is very popular, but Shem does not seem to know the song for some reason. It is called "Why Am I a Rasta Man?"by Culture. (First half of song played)

Rasheed: So there is a double theme here. You can see what comes out of a song like this. It's not Bob Marley. I'm not picking on Bob Marley, but love comes in here as well. This is where it gets a bit complicated because I am saying "You know Shem, reggae is fundamentally violent at the core, at the core." But clearly it can't be only violence, because Bob Marley is not a fake reggae singer.

He is a core reggae singer, and you have other people who are also core reggae singers, too. Culture, again, is a core fundamentalist rasta. Weird term I know. And yet, he is also talking about one of the reasons why he is a rasta besides Babylon, he did say that. But he also mentions the love element, there's like kindness he was shown when he was younger and things like that.

So there is this dual complexity with the Rasta ideology in many ways that I think causes people to be very confused as to what fundamentally underlies it.

Shem: First of all, can we swear on this episode?

Rasheed: Yeah, why not?

Shem: At this point, while the main thing that's being pushed right now is violence, this violence is the result of something.

Let's be very honest. This violence did not just spring up overnight. To me, they're the original champions of fuck around and find out. And the government fucked around and very swiftly found out. So, at the heart of it all even though reggae is being used as a vehicle to incite violence, we have to get to the root, we don't have to, we're not getting to the root of that, we know, we know why, but the root of this is the Rastafarians are not, inherently violent people.

I mean these guys are off doing their own thing in little communes and whatnot. No one's threatened by hippies.

Rasheed: Right?

Shem: No one's threatened by hippies. These are just Jamaican hippies out doing their own thing, living off the earth, smoking their weed, and whatnot. And you go out there and you burn their shit.

What did you expect to happen? Without government interference, this is what the Rastafarian community is. You have one or two, almost shaman-like people hanging around and they tell stories, they have lessons.

They have art. Rastafarian communities have art. And you and I, we probably know at least one Rasta guy in our old neighborhoods and everyone calls them 'Ras'. You were taught by one of them at the University of West Indies.

Rasheed: A lecturer at the University of West Indies in Barbados who did Introduction to Economics was a rasta and we would say, "Yo, Ras. "

Shem: Everyone said Ras. I don't know this guy's name to this day. I've never called him, even at university, by his name. He's Ras and Ras is an icon in the community. He's a very peaceful person. He's chill. He plays road tennis with my dad.

This song is getting to the heart of that. You are destroying an important part of a community when you just go in and rip the Rastafarianism or try to erase it from that part of the community.

Rasheed: And I'm going to continue this song from that point because this song does have that transition you're getting to here.

(second half of the previous song played)

Rasheed: This is what you mentioned. The government comes in to subvert this subversive culture and in so doing creates some radicalism in the subculture.

Shem: They come in and remove the shaman. They're threatened by a single hippie. Be it one or two or even an entire community of them, the fact of the matter is they are instrumental to a part of the culture of many Jamaican communities, I should say.

And the fact that they have that effect, even as far as Barbados, where I know if I want, and this is weird- if I need a chair fixed or a wooden ornament, I know there's a Rasta guy up the road that I can go to to get this done. If I need herbs, if you go into Bridgetown right now, there's a Rasta guy that owns a gemology shop and herb center right by the bus stand where you can get remedies for just about anything; traditional herb remedies.

For anything. No weed, I'm so sorry, he's not gonna sell you any weed. Too bad. But yeah. For the government to just swoop in and remove that and he's seeing this as a little boy, mind you. Now he wants to know, why is the government so threatened by this culture.

So inadvertently, the Jamaican government is proliferating Rastafarianism, whether they like it or not. Because people are now curious as to why they are so threatened by a bunch of commune hippies. Rasheed, we are now in negotiations with the government outside of City Hall. We're waving our cutlasses and banners, back to you.

Rasheed: Yeah, so this is a core thing. I wanted to write an essay at some point, titled, "Why I am not a Rasta." Playing off the famous essay from Bertrand Russell "Why I'm not a Christian". Because there are some fundamental ideas that you think I would like a lot.

It is somehow fundamentally libertarian in some particularly important ways. I'm not against struggle. I think some struggle in life is good. I also think materialism of the world is somehow usually a bit better than thinking of heaven as a place apart from the world in an older Christian view.

So I do think Babylon is a useful concept. So there are some aspects there. But there are some other things that I don't think are logically consistent. That part I mentioned about the politics, really does show though that there is a thing where the government did cause a lot of the increasingly violent lyrics and a violent sentiment of this growing subculture in Jamaica that is spread to the Caribbean. But it also spread to other places too, like Cuba and Japan.

Shem: The least subversive group of people on earth, I believe, are probably the Japanese.

Rasheed: These days.

Shem: These days. We know some history. Let's not go there. Let's not go there. Remember the saying, "The nail that's outside of the wood or something gets hammered down". So Japanese people are not known for starting riots in that sort of way.

Rasheed: These days. Hey, I'm just being an objective historian here.

Shem: I still find the existence of Rastafarianism in Japan to be a reach on the part of those people who have sailed over there and...

Rasheed: So I've been to a Japanese reggae bar in Tokyo. Of course. Of course, I've been to one of these. And I went with a friend of mine, we were in Tokyo a couple of years ago and it was very odd because it was playing reggae music. There were Japanese men and women in the bar with dreadlocks.

They're Japanese. They're wearing dreadlocks and there's smoking marijuana. How they get it in Japan is a different conversation, I'm sure. The themes on all the pictures on the wall, all the themes and the color scheme, it did feel like some… It felt like a performance of reggae culture.

It felt to me like someone was playing a joke on me somehow. But it is a real concept, and there actually is a very good book, on this topic called "Babylon East" by the author, I seem to forget the name, I had the book right next to me a few moments ago.

He discusses the emergence of Rasta culture in Japan. In some ways, it's very surprising, but in some ways also, in a crude way, Japan will be the perfect place to have a Rasta community. Because at the core of it is a fairly quiet culture, Rastas.

They try to be very outside of the main hustle and bustle. So I can see, for example, why there's some subgroup of people who are checked out of Tokyo life. In some ways, we also notice the other outgoings of Japanese culture. Hermits that stay in the house for years and years.

People who have these virtual girlfriends, for example, as a real thing in Japan. And you could go on and on. So having a presence of Rasta culture as a metaphysics of the world, I can easily see how Japan could fit into Babylon.

Shem: I too would like to say there are some parts of Rastafarian culture that I would- I personally, would not be a Rasta, I don't have the hair for it, and I definitely cannot give up chicken.

Rasheed: You know, you used to be a vegan and I always mentioned your lifestyle choices were I think inappropriate. But you have somehow transitioned away from being a vegan and now can't even contemplate giving up.

Shem: Do you not see this violent banner around my head with the cutlass? Again, let me continue before we have to have another demonstration in this studio.

The idea of personal freedoms that they've brought forward really underscores how these matters had not been addressed post-colonialism at all. We hadn't looked into it. We sort of just adopted the basis of our colonial masters, our colonial governments, what their laws were in place, and whatnot.

We weren't looking into the context of what these new Caribbean peoples would expect from a government or what these new Caribbean peoples would consider to be everyday life. We weren't expecting a whole new religion to spring out of nowhere. And I think that was basically a case study.

And how would a government just handle a new religion out of nowhere in the Caribbean? And there it was. And as we can see, the Jamaican government handled it as poorly as they possibly could. There's also more on the superfluous side, just calling anything I don't like or agree with Babylon. I am fully on board with that.

You know what? My flight on Tuesday, Babylon, uh, the prices of things in Barbados, Babylon. Taxes, Babylon. I think we should just go straight ahead with that. When I get back home, I'm going to take this riot and this violence with me back to the

Rasheed: So I'm going to play one more song that goes a bit deeper into the history.

Now, I don't know if you know this song, and I hope you know this song because I'd be very upset if you didn't know it.

Shem: Prepare to be upset.

Rasheed: I'll play it first and we'll come back.

Rasheed: Does that song ring bells for you?

Shem: It does. I do know this one. I've heard it a couple of times.

Rasheed: A couple of times? You must have heard this song every day. Year of your life.

Shem: Well, I live in a metrified country, so 96 degrees.

Rasheed: We live in, we lived in the same country.

Shem: We do. So you should understand that they've already lost points with me for that whole 96 degree thing.

Rasheed: God dammit.

Shem: What's the Celsius?

Rasheed: Okay, so the name of this song is 1865. That's the proper name of the song and it's known as 96 Degrees In The Shade and it's by Third World. Now, it's funny because almost no person I have spoken to actually knows what this song is about.

Shem: I'm not gonna buck that trend.

Rasheed: But when I tell you, you're gonna be like... This song is about the Morant Bay Rebellion.

Shem: Go on.

Rasheed: Do you know about the Morant Bay Rebellion, Shem? We did it in history class.

Shem: You did it in history class, I didn't.

Rasheed: It was the rebellion in 1865 in Jamaica, where hundreds of people led by the preacher Bogle in Morant Bay, Jamaica, hence the name Morant Bay, uh, can rebel against the slave owners. That was one of the main rebellions in the British Empire that forced some quick changes of laws by the UK Parliament and that is when the UK took back control of Jamaica from the planter class which then led to a lot of the political reforms in Jamaica that I discuss in my piece on cpsi.media called Colonialism and Progress. That was the key rebellion. And also one of the key rebellions that pushed the anti-slavery organizations in the UK to push for faster laws to get rid of slavery in the British Empire. So it was a very key rebellion in the British Empire. This song encapsulates that feeling of fight, and violence.

It is entertainment for you, but it's important for me. This is a reggae song that talks about the deep-rootedness, historically, of violence in Jamaica. It's almost too poetic not to laugh about.

Shem: This is how it started. This is what continues to this day.

Rasheed: Yeah. And this song reflects it to you.

Shem: You know, I was going to form a truce with the government, but now I think the violence may continue.

Rasheed: I think we're going to end it there and I just want to summarize to say that it is not simply true to say that reggae is about peace and love, a core element baked into the metaphysics of Rasta culture and therefore Reggae is about violence, is about struggle against the world, is about It's about Babylon, burning Babylon essentially, and you have to understand that this, I think, shows or reflects a very key element of Jamaican culture, deeply rooted in the social fabric, which is not that bad.

Prominent in other Caribbean countries and again to get more information, you can read my piece on CPSI.media on this topic. I do plan to write a part two to that piece where I give some more current analysis of Jamaican economics But I will save that for a later episode

Shem: Well Rasheed, this has been wonderful.

I am now a fully radicalized and violent person. You succeeded. We're going to burn this place down right after we finish. This is Babylon.

Rasheed: What's a good outro song? Ah, this one.