370 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 However artfully you transformed yourself Into bitch, vixen, tigress, I knew the woman behind. He knows the woman behind because he created her in his poems. Joyce Wexler Loyola University of Chicago Timothy White, Catch a Fire: the Life of Bob Marley. Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1983, 380 pages. Though the laid-back ballads of mellow Californians and the disco rhythms of beat machine operators from New York dominated the American record charts in the seventies, it was Jamaican reggae that had the most invigorating impact on the era's popular music. For most Americans, reggae was simply a fresh pop sound that gave new bounce to top forty radio. For inhabitants of Jamaica's hellish shantytown slums, however, reggae was more than background music: it was a vital folk art that galvanized communities with names like Trench Town, Concrete Jungle, and Lizard City. Of the hundreds of "rude boys" (street toughs) and "bungo-bungoes " (country hicks) whose energies reggae drew away from soccer and random street violence, none was more talented than the visionary singer-composer Bob Marley. It was Marley's peculiar genius to make the island's indigenous music meaningful and accessible to a worldwide audience. He used reggae to voice his religious aspirations and political grievances, praising "Jah," the Rastafarian God, and in vying against the "crazy baldheads" who run governments. In the process, he became the Third World's most beloved advocate of social justice, and, incredibly, an international rock superstar. Catch a Fire, by rock journalist Timothy White, is a comprehensive and richly-detailed account of the singer's life and times. Exhaustively researched and lucidly written. White's book is no quickie, tattle-tale rock bio. It is a judicious study that is careful to place Marley within the context of contemporary Jamaican culture. As such, White's book is as much ethnography as biography. He insists that only after mastering the island's intricate folkways, its Byzantian politics, and the sometimes-bewildering tenets of the Rastafarian faith can one begin to understand Bob Marley. REVIEWS 371 In anthropological terms, White blends two classic ethnographic techniques, the "etic" and the "emic" approaches. That is, the author exploits dual frames of reference: the critical distance of the onlooking "outsider" and the immediate experience of the participating "insider ." This is a cross-cultural enterprise that doesn't stop at the dissemination of facts. By extensive use of the local "patois" dialect and thick description of native perceptions, White forces the reader to enter into the culture that shaped Bob Marley. White reveals that the greatest influence on Bob Marley was neither music nor politics, but religion. In his life and music, Marley adopted the role of a messianic Rastafarian seer. To outsiders, Rastafarians are doubtless best known for their shoulder-length "dreadlocks" (matted hair) and sacramental "ganja" (marijuana) rolled in "spliffs" (cigarsized joints). To his credit, White goes beyond the stylistic surface and offers a first-rate analysis of the millenarian cult's history and beliefs. Acquisitive middle-class Jamaicans, eager to hype their country as a tourist paradise, initially looked upon the Rastas as a public relations nightmare. Ironically, the reggae explosion that the Rastas spearheaded ended up pumping more money into the local economy than the old colonial rum trade. By the seventies, Rastafarianism and its most famous adherent had become forces to be reckoned with in Jamaican politics. Marley was always more of a mystic than a Marxist, but the radical messages on albums like "Burnin'," "Natty Dread," and "Rastaman Vibration" had made him, in White's words, "the hero of black freedom fighters everywhere and the most charismatic emmissary of modern Pan-Africanism ." White reminds the reader that Marley's celebrations of ghetto rebellion and wars of liberation were expressed in a country where ideology is played for keeps. Just days before a scheduled concert for the Jamaican Ministry of Culture, seven gunmen invaded his Kingston residence and shot Marley, his wife, and a business associate. Remarkably, no one was killed in the raid and Marley triumphantly performed at the show as scheduled. Marley's miraculous escape from the death squad enhanced his reputation as...