WORK

...because monday was "labour day" & because the studio sessions have such a genuine quality to them & because the capitalist wheel never stops spinning & because i've never thought about music in such specific terms

Duty and Unity: On the Form and Function of Labour in Bob Marley’s “Work”

As a pioneer in the development of the reggae aesthetic, Bob Marley is often credited with injecting the fresh cultural and nationalist product of the newly independent Jamaican state into the worldwide mainstream. However this has created a cult-like consumption of the music even penetrating the academia, as reflected in the sparse scholarship dealing with his musical canon as serious works of lyrical, poetic, and pedagogical value. There exists a large body of literature dealing with Rastafarianism generally and Marley’s engagement with this anomalistic spirituality, but with the exception of some of his better-known songs such as “One Love”, “No Woman No Cry”, and “Redemption Song”, there is a lack of critical writing addressing most of his poetry. For this reason I will be exploring in more depth the song “Work” from Uprising (1980), the last album released by Bob Marley and The Wailers before Marley’s death in 1981, a song which is relatively obscure and who’s structure is “simple” in contrast to much of Bob Marley’s work. By approaching this song as both a reggae-infused version of the labouror/ prisoner’s chant, and a musical spiritual-sermon of sorts, I hope to engage in a conversation dealing with the complex shift of tone in Marley’s aesthetic, particularly at this climactic time for him personally and for Jamaican culture at large. In working within the limits of this paper’s length, I will therefore focus on the repetitive value and deceptive simplicity of the song’s lyrics in regards to their poetic appeal. As this is a performed piece of literature (i.e. a song), I will also briefly link these ideas to some of the sonic features, including the rhythm, tempo, and vocals. By doing this analysis I hope to gain some more insight into the piece’s overall tone as a dismal commentary on the futility of the “work” (required of “Jah’s people”), and the prospective reward offered by this endeavor—a commentary, contradictory as it were, of a lower-class musician turned spiritual leader made acutely aware of his own lingering mortality.

By the time Uprising had been released, reggae music had come to develop as a globally recognized musical genre deeply associated with pioneering figures like Bob Marley—its Rastafarian influence and association with liberationist movements built on principles of self-reliance and self-confidence worked to create a cultural niche for a society whose ancestors’ own cultures were purposefully omitted and obscured. This sense of communal independence and the utilitarian work ethic required to sustain it is evident in the song’s opening lines, “We Jah people can make it work/ Come together and make it work, yeah!” Marley calls out to the listener—immediately compelling a tone of unity and duty. The singer then repeats “We can make it work” (x2), a sense of agency cast in urgency (the lyrics themselves as well as their repetition) made immediately comprehensible in the first bars. The idea of agency relates to the song’s subjectivity and begs the question of who the “We” being invoked are, a topic which requires its own discussion and therefore cannot be paid the attention it is due in this paper. I will comment, however, that in implicating himself—a best-selling, world-famous, infamously mixed-race artist—with this “We”, Bob Marley relocates the song from a place of worker’s anthem to a transcendent position whose meaning may not be so visceral—this “We” has more in common than just lifestyle and class or social status.

The musical background coincided with the political scene in Jamaica at the time, one centred on the region’s Socialist craze of the mid-20^th century and reflected in the names of leading political parties such as the JLP, or Jamaican Labour Party. This sort of context is amplified by the reality of Jamaica’s historical development as a slave colony, a dismal narrative that is invoked by the spirit of labour ringing through the economically-unstable island nation, predominantly composed of wage-laborours (Hodges, 2005). Bob Marley notoriously referred to his music as ‘the people’s noise’, or some variation of this, and it therefore follows that much of his music would reflect the day-to-day routine of much of the island’s population. This sense of the circuitousness of history, paired with the strong ethos of labour in modern Jamaica, is reflected in the stanza that follows. By counting down days, Marley invokes the tradition of the worker (or prisoner’s) chant, which plays into the piece’s thematic significance of the futility of the labour needed to ‘keep the wheels spinning’.

By universalizing this, Marley reminds the reader that such a task is ongoing and exhaustive—a function that parallels the mood of desperation created by the repetition from the preceding bars. The dignity of the work bestowed on “Jah people” from the first line seems to be negated or at least undermined by the “countdown bars”; despite the level of collaborative effort that may be required, it all seems futile, Sisyphean in the sense that it will always be “for the next day” and the next and the next and so on. This is highlighted by the final line of the stanza, for even when there is but “one day to go”, the work is far from over, as: “Every day is work—work—work—work—work!”. By singing the “work” notes specifically to the down-beat of the tempo, the music emphasizes the dismal mood captured by the repetition of that word. In watching a live in-studio performance of the song, one can sense the shifts in the grain Marley’s voice as he sings the countdown—notably missing from this portion of the song are the colourful ad libs (the “woy-ah-ya-ya”s and “ooh”s which play a crucial role in Marley’s sound specifically and in reggae’s reliance on what Kamau Brathwaite calls “national language” (Brathwaite, 1984). When one considers the fatigue of constant touring and recording and Marley’s declining health due to cancer, this sonic shift takes on more personal meaning.

In fact, the song’s turning point can be located after this initial countdown segment. Rather than entirely give way to the despair of unending labour, the doubling or mirror effect of the “We can make it work” imbues Marley with the same sense of insistence it did earlier, but is now made more functional because it follows the chant-like anthem of the worker’s countdown. In other words, the sense of over-simplfication and futility acts as a reminder of how imperative the task at hand is, and Marley convinces the listener that all of the efforts will mean that we can make it work (repeated again, in case some are still non-believers). The simplicity and uniformity of the song’s basic rhythm is then challenged with the guitar solo that follows, a break from the slow, down-beat rhythm heavily concentrated in the bass and drum instrumentals of the music. Once again the “We” that is being invoked is emphasized both vocally and rhythmically with a longer beat count.

The temporal and spatial distance provided by the countdown in between—which itself acts as a device of paradox, for what is the “it” being made to “work” if the process is perpetual and circuitous—also adds another layer of meaning and tone to this doubling. As with the song’s opening Marley calls on the listener to involve him or herself into the active process through a sense of duty, but now he must also confront the task of convincing the ‘workers’ that their efforts are not only worthwhile, but necessary to the functioning of a sovereign and autonomous socio-political entity on one hand, and an infinite spiritual salvation for the individual on the other. This sense of mission and spiritual duty vested in unity of “Jah people” is very much in tune with the body of music created by Bob Marley and The Wailers, especially in these later periods. However, “Work” is different from some of these songs not only in its relative lack of complex poetical and rhetorical devices, but because of less incendiary lyrics and tone.

It is then understandable why the stanza that follows is yet another repetition of the first stanza, contributing to the song’s overall deceptively simple structure and reflecting the tone of urgency, calling-on, and reassurance. After providing a somewhat clearer understanding of all that rests on this critical duty, Marley reverts back to the countdown form for the song’s final stanza. This time, the sense of repetition and doubling helps remind the ‘worker’ (i.e. the audience, who is implicated in the ‘process of labour’ as both listener of the music and recipient of spiritual and pedagogical sermon) also works to reinforce the urgency. As reflected in Bob Marley’s personal (and by now, fleeting) life, it is precisely because of how important the metaphorical “next day” is that all of this labour must be performed. This layer of meaning is also represented in the texture of the final verse, like when the melody begins to stray and display an improvisation as he sings, “Say we got, one day to go now/”. In a further instance of ‘impromtu’ musical variation, here we are reintroduced to Marley’s well-known vocal “ad-libbing” techniques, the “oooh-ooh-ooh” found near the end and the ‘wotcha”, etc., which convey a wide meter of feelings which range from fatigue, overworkedness, and anguish to commandeering, elation, and euphoria–elusive emotion impossible to capture with such vivacity in the lyrics and instrumentals themselves.

The final lyric of the song provides its own wealth of insight, as Marley ends the song with “If you aint got nothing to do/…./We got some work for you”—retaining his position as both labour and spiritual leader, as one who has the authority to assign “work” to the idle. It is worth noting here the importance of the background context in fully comprehending the discourse of mission in Marley’s music. A quick scan through the lyrics reveals that the nature of the “work” Marley alludes to is never explicitly stated in the lyrics. The “work” that he seems to refer to is found throughout the messages in his musical canon, as well as the personal example he provided through his own practices. In recalling the far more circulated “Redemption Song” from the same album, the tasks that are required of “Jah people” are not like the material tasks challenging the labouror, for “redemption is not simply destiny. It is work—redemption works—that is the product of dispersed networks of belonging that bind us as people.” (Hill, 2010). In fact, the “work” seems to be intentionally obscured and therefore open to interpretation, such as in the final stanza when the countdown has reached “one day to go”, and just as the singer begins “working for—“, he is cut short and the listener is forced to do his or her own work to fully engage in the song and it’s meaning. 

WORKS CITED

Brathwaite, Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon, 1984.

Hill, Robert A. "Redemption Works: From “African Redemption” to “Redemption Song”." Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 43.2 (2010): 200-07.

Hodges, H. "Walk Good: West Indian Oratorical Traditions in Bob Marley's Uprising." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.2 (2005): 43-63.

Marley, Bob. "Work." Uprising. Bob Marley & The Wailers. Tuff Gong/Island Records, 1980. Recording.

(ORIGINALLY SUBMITTED IN 2014)