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Kingston from camp to camp. Ossie would receive and mentor many of the most important Jamaican ska, rock steady and reggae musicians at his haven on Wareika Hill. Due in no small part to his efforts, Jamaican musicians began to blend the popular New Orleans rhythm-and-blues with elements of folk mento, jonkanoo, kumina and Revival Zion styles into a new sound.
    But while Rasta thought—first in coded forms, then gradually more explicitly—spread through popular music, the authorities portrayed Rastas as bizarre cultists. Many of Jamaica’s Black and brown strivers held the same opinion. As a child in Kingston, DJ Kool Herc recalls, he was told that anyone who had their hair twisted up was, in local parlance, a badman. In 1966, Rastas began to move from the margins to the mainstream of Jamaican society. On April 21, Haile Selassie came to Jamaica and was greeted by a gathering of more than a hundred thousand followers. As the plane landed, the rain stopped, which all gathered took for a sign.
    â€œI remember watching it on TV,” DJ Kool Herc recalls. “They took buses and trucks and bicycles and any type of means of transportation, going to the airport for this man who they looked upon as a god. That’s when Jamaica really found out there was a force on the island.
    â€œWhen that the plane came down, they stormed the tarmac,” he continues. “Haile Selassie came out and looked at the people and went back on the plane and cried. He didn’t know he was worshiped that strongly.” The Rastas were exuberant, and their ranks swelled with new converts.
    But three months later, history took another sharp turn. Seaga—then the Minister of Community Development and Welfare—was in need of a new political base. The JLP leader, former music exec, and cultural patron was an ambitious man with dangerous connections. He once faced down some hecklers at a political rally by saying, “If they think they are bad, I can bring the crowds of West Kingston. We can deal with you in any way at any time. It will be fire for fire, and blood for blood.” 2
    Now Seaga fingered the Back-O-Wall ghetto, the west Kingston yard where the camps of the Boboshanti and two other Rasta sects thrived. It was an area that had voted for the opposing political party, the democratic socialist People’s National Party (PNP), and Seaga wanted it cleared. So on the morning of July 12, armed police filled the air with tear gas, and dispersed the residents with batons and rifles. Bulldozers rolled in behind the police, flattening the shanties. “When the first raided camp was demolished,” Leonard Barrett reported, “a blazing fire of unknown origin consumed what remained to ashes while the fire company stood by.” 3
    On the site, Seaga built a housing project named Tivoli Gardens and moved in a voting constituency of JLP supporters. He recruited and armed young badmen to protect the area and expand the JLP turf, a gang that called itself, appropriately enough, the Phoenix. 4 The lines were now drawn for generations to come.
    â€œAnd I can see it with my own eyes,” Culture sang a decade later on “Two Sevens Clash.” “It’s only a housing scheme that divides.” Politics, apocalypse—some reasoned—was it a coincidence the two words sounded so similar?
Globalizing the Roots Rebel
    In 1973, Jamaica’s record industry was on the verge of a major international breakthrough. Up until then, the island had produced occasional novelty hits, like Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop,” that crossed over from Britain’s growing West Indian immigrant community to the Top of the Pops and the American top 40. But with the twin vehicles of film and music, the Third World roots rebel made his global debut.
    Debuting in Jamaica in 1972, with wider global release the following year, Perry Henzell’s movie
The Harder They Come
was a portrait of the Jamaica