I got some emails from folks this morning asking if they’d missed this week’s edition—as you can probably guess from this one, they hadn’t! Most of yesterday was spent involved in various household repair/maintenance missions that together threw a handful of wrenches (and screwdrivers and weatherstripping and coffee grounds) into what was usually a writing day for me. But the Principle must go on!
When the news broke last week of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse’s assassination, it marked both the culmination and beginning of a twisting saga of discord and political machination. Yet, the moment I heard the circumstances—Moïse was gunned down not in public or in transit, like so many modern heads of state, but in his own home—all I could think of was another person who had met a similar fate. Like Moïse, this person had been killed at home in the capital city of an island nation in the Caribbean. He wasn’t an elected official, though his political impact was arguably far larger. He was an artist, and one who continues to loom large in my life more than 20 years after his death. He was born Winston Hubert McIntosh, though you’re probably familiar with the name he assumed when he joined a vocal trio in the early 1960s in Kingston, Jamaica: Peter Tosh.
I was 13 the first time I bought a reggae album. I was a diehard hip-hop fan, but by the late ’80s I’d heard enough nods to reggae in the music I loved to know I wanted to branch out. Standing in a record store in Washington DC, while on summer vacation with my family, I ran my fingers over the cassette spines, passing Bob Marley’s name to land on his son’s: Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers’ Conscious Party would be my official introduction. Every child of the ’80s can tell you about the smell of store-bought tapes; with Conscious Party, I don’t know if it was the plastic of the cassette itself or the ink of the printed insert, but it lodged into my olfactory centers like a Madeleine.
The music was another story. I liked it, it just didn’t grab me. It felt shiny and fleeting, like a reggae Partridge Family—which it kinda was, given that the Melody Makers included a handful of other Marleys. I didn’t yet recognize how Ziggy’s voice bore uncanny resemblances to his father’s, just like his brothers’ did. (Listen to Stephen or Damian or even Julian, and you’ll see what I mean.) Thirteen-year-olds just want a place to start, and this wasn’t it. Moving up the family tree, I emulated the rest of the planet and wound up with a copy of Legend. Better. Definitely better. But also deeper. Not necessarily in Bob’s lightly graveled tenor, but rather somewhere in the background, where the Wailers’ backing harmonies resided. Bunny Wailer didn’t have much on the shelves that I could find, so I opted instead for the third Wailer, Peter Tosh, and his album Equal Rights.
So, a quick digression here: 1977 was a wild-ass time to release an album in Jamaica. Decades before, Marcus Garvey had prophesied chaos for July 7 of that year (7/7/77—when the sevens met, as he put it), and political tensions in the mid-’70s had revived the forecast. Rival parties forged alliances with neighborhood dons and the CIA alike, drawing lines that would fracture Kingston and the nation for years to come. Early in 1977, the group Culture released a massively popular song, “When the Two Sevens Clash,” adding an eerie note to the unfolding unrest, name-checking Garvey but otherwise opting for metaphor over literality. Then along came Peter Tosh, ready to throw metaphor to the wind and claim the reggae throne.
Say what you will about Bob Marley’s rose-colored kumbaya, but Tosh was 👏🏼 not 👏🏼 here 👏🏼 for 👏🏼 that👏🏼 shit. He’d left the Wailers in 1973 after Island Records refused to release his first solo album—and, more notably, after Island had turned the Wailers into Bob Marley and the Wailers and elevated. (Tosh and Bunny Wailer both walked, for what it’s worth, leaving Marley to become a global icon all by his lonesome.) That first album, 1976’s Legalize It, became a stoner classic for obvious reasons, with the cover depicting Tosh puffing a chalice in a field of cannabis plants, but it also highlighted what Island had backgrounded. Tosh’s voice was more mournful than Marley’s, more defiant; let the dead bury the dead and who is to be fed, be fed, he sang on “Burial,” and even inside the scriptural wrapping you could feel the way he saw the world. Equal Rights turned that up to 11. The cover styled him like a Che Guevara-style revolutionary, and the songs—“Apartheid,” “Downpressor Man,” “Stepping Razor,” “African”—turned away from metaphor once and for all. This wasn’t party music; this was power music.
Coming into my life when it did, just as I was stumbling into The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice on paper (and X-Clan and Public Enemy and Poor Righteous Teachers in rap), Equal Rights—and Tosh specifically—unlocked something crucial for me. It contextualized justice as something beyond border and statute; it turned protest into art a way I’d never understood; it showed that a simmer could feel more effectual than a boil. It also marked, after a couple of false starts, the true beginning of a lifelong love affair with a musical genre far more rich and varied than casual listeners give it credit for. (More to come on that in a future edition.)
Despite his gifts and directness (and indeed, maybe because of them), Tosh would never reach the heights that his onetime bandmate did. After a long career, he was killed—hope you didn’t forget that part!—at his home in 1987, gunned down by a onetime associate and two other men who broke in to rob his house. Ten years after the sevens clashed, chaos finally came for Peter Tosh.
One Thing I Can’t Get Enough of This Week
📺 Kevin Can F*** Himself
Fans of Schitt’s Creek know Annie Murphy as Alexis Rose. (They might also know her as the woman whose name my wife refuses to say any other way than as Dave Chappelle as Rick James.) But even if you’ve never heard of her before, you might like this weird-ass dramedy on AMC which can probably best be described as “CBS sitcom after the laughter stops.” Some scenes are lit and staged exactly like a three-camera Chuck Lorre sitcom, with Murphy playing Allison, the beleaguered wife of a buffoonish Masshole; as soon as Allison leaves the living room, though, the format changes drastically. Away from the garish lighting and laugh track, she’s no longer the wisecracking foil for an overgrown imp—she’s a tormented woman, trapped in a life with a manipulative manchild. The title is a swipe at Kevin Can Wait, which famously killed off the titular protagonist’s wife after a single season; the show itself is a little bit of Breaking Bad-lite, a little bit of WandaVision, and just enough entertainment value to track the show down on however you get your “live TV” these days.