Love in the key of Bob Marley

Nesta Robert “Bob” Mar­ley is a uni­ver­sal leg­end! Some truths are just writ­ten into the scrolls and are indisputable.

Brother Bob was undoubt­edly a man’s man, a woman’s man, his own man and cer­tainly a man after God’s own heart.

Today, on the day that Bob, the man would have turned 66, I want to speak of Bob as a woman, not because of any inti­mate fore­knowl­edge, but because I am a bene­fac­tor of the love. And in this month of self-imposed love, with every great expec­ta­tion for most, it means some­thing to this woman that any man would spend a too-short life­time (36 years) pre­oc­cu­pied with cap­i­tal L O V E i.e. Love of self, Love of fel­low­man, Love of woman, Love of Black­ness and with much fer­vor love of JAH!

It mat­ters that for every mood, polit­i­cal cli­mate, ghetto, peo­ple, in times of plenty and times of poverty that this sol­dier of cap­i­tal LOVE could always find time and a melody to spread the gospel of cap­i­tal LOVE to any­one who would listen.

My all-time favorite Bob Mar­ley song has to be No Woman Nuh Cry, writ­ten right here in just the way he would sing it. I love that I can hear this song as a gong in my ear, or some­times even whistle-range, and I can be moved to tears and activ­ity all at once.

Despite the cir­cum­stances, I fully under­stand that there is ‘more LOVE, more LIFE woman, so nuh cry for we gon mek it if we could just mek do wid a likkle bit.’ So much more than any para­phrase or rein­ven­tion of orig­i­nal intent/content, for every lyric, which I know word for word, this is how I hear it, this is how I feel it, this is how I know that this is cap­i­tal LOVE.

Take a listen:

Me cap­i­tal LOVE!

When he chants “everything’s gonna be alright,” I’m hard-pressed not to believe him. For this post I went a lot off pure feel­ing for Bob’s music, then I stopped to see what oth­ers were say­ing and finally I searched for Rita Mar­ley because I needed to hear her tell it. Woman to woman, I knew that she would soar where I would never have left ground zero.

I know beyond a shadow that Bob Mar­ley was an easy man to love, even as he was fast becom­ing leg­endary as a musi­cian while still walk­ing among us.

He could have been anything/any one thing! He could have been bad man, good man, lover man, sports­man, prophet, rev­o­lu­tion­ary… He was all of the above and right­eously so! But you have to lis­ten, hear and then believe to truly know.

I say to you Bob as you look down, you are LEGEND, you are cap­i­tal LOVE and we feel you… WE FEEL YOU.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Hi there, I’m Tynisha C. Leon, writer, West Indian, mango-lover, founder and editor-in-chief of DASHEEN mag­a­zine — the online des­ti­na­tion where cul­ture feeds imag­i­na­tion. Join the cul­ture con­ver­sa­tions on Face­book, Twit­ter and Tum­blr!