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few yankees would ever trod. The movie opened with a country bus navigating a narrow northern road, the coconut trees of the stormy coastline eerily headless, their fronds and fruits sheered off by plague. Singer Jimmy Cliff played Ivan O. Martin, a peasant making the well-worn trip from rural parish to concrete jungle, the metaphoric journey of a newly freed nation into modernity. But this was not to be a narrative of progress.
    Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin was a real-life fifties Kingston outlaw who renamed himself Rhygin and summoned Jamaica’s Maroon pride.
The Harder They Come
updated his story for a nation defining its postcolonial identity in and through itshomegrown popular music. Cliff’s Ivan was to be exploited by a greedy music producer, reviled by a Christian pastor, and eventually tortured and hunted by corrupt police. A country
bwai
innocent remade into the urban renegade Rhygin, he shoots down a cop and goes underground. A picture of him posing with two pistols hits the papers and his song controls the airwaves. “As sure as the sun will shine, I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine,” he sings, “and then the harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all.” The new legend of Rhygin would frame the island’s turbulent seventies.
    In another landmark 1973 film,
Enter the Dragon
, Jim Kelly’s African-American activist character Williams had gazed at Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong home from a sampan and said, “Ghettos are the same all over the world. They stink.” Like Bruce Lee, the Third World reggae heroes seemed to First World audiences an intriguing mix of the familiar and fresh. The soundtrack to Henzell’s film, and the debut album by Bob Marley and the Wailers positioned reggae as a quintessential rebel music, steeped in a different kind of urban Black authenticity.
    The Wailers’ album,
Catch a Fire
, would be a product of the sometimes giddy, sometimes halting dialogue between Third World roots and First World pop. When Bob Marley delivered the rough master tapes to the Island Records offices in London in the dead winter of 1972, a lot was riding on the getting the mix right.
    Just months earlier, the Wailers had been stranded in Britain, abandoned by their manager after a European tour failed to materialize. Island Records head Chris Blackwell, a prominent financier of Henzell’s film, bailed them out by signing them, advancing them £4,000, and sending them home to Kingston to record the album. They took their opportunity seriously—it was a chance for the boys from Trenchtown to bring the message of Jamaican sufferers to the world.
    Blackwell, a wealthy white descendant of Jamaican rum traders now living in London, was beginning to have success in the rock market, and knew he might be on a fool’s mission in trying to cross reggae over. But, emboldened by the success of
The Harder They Come
, and embittered by Jimmy Cliff’s snubbing to sign a deal with EMI, he was eager to see how far reggae could be taken into the mainstream. He gave the Wailers fancy album packaging and put them on tour with rock and funk bands. Most importantly, he sent the music back for over-dubs by rock session musicians, keyboardist Rabbit Bundrick and guitarist Wayne Perkins.
    The album’s leadoff track, “Concrete Jungle,” illustrated the perils and promiseof translating Jamaican music for First World audiences. The opening notes drifted into a disorienting key, Robbie Shakespeare’s bassline seemed to omit more notes than were played, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh’s harmonies floated and attacked like rope-a-dope boxing. Marley’s lyrics described the unrelenting bleakness of the west Kingston yard. “No chains around my feet,” the Wailers sang, “but I’m not free.” It was utterly brilliant, but the music, Blackwell decided, sounded far too Jamaican.
    When he first played the music to