I was young and lived in a nondescript village in the Netherlands, near Utrecht. Of course, I knew nothing about the Black struggle. It was the late ’70s, early ’80s. What did I know about anything? But oh, the music of Bob Marley. I felt like he was singing about something big and important—about human dignity and what he had experienced, felt. As an insecure teenager, it almost felt like it was about me, too. I loved Peter Tosh as well, though he seemed a bit angrier.
As much as I could, in those pre-internet days, I looked up what Rastafari meant and where the music came from. I even did a school presentation about it. Maybe his message was universal, something that resonated even with a 14-year-old insecure Dutch boy spinning his records. Records that I bought in a record store eight kilometers away, after a bike ride through the flat Dutch landscape.