10/19/2011
"I want people to get sensitive to the music…if you’re not listening to the message of the music it’s like a fool dancing to calamity” ….Fool dance to comfortable promises" – Peter Tosh
Peter Tosh would have been 67 on October 19. 2011. It has been 24 years since one of the worlds and reggae music’s greatest artists and most articulate and influential voices were silenced by an assassin’s gun.
The government of Jamaica has yet to honor him with a national award for his monumental contribution to the development of Jamaica’s reggae music. Nor, have they seen fit to highlight his achievements. Tosh was recently profiled in the United States on National Public Radio. NPR is the equivalent of the BBC in England. He has received many honors from around the world including a Grammy award in the United States for his timely 1987 album “No Nuclear War.” 
The album reflected his concerns about the cold war tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was timely because in the mid 1980’s Europe erupted in massive demonstrations over United States president Ronald Reagan’s, Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s and NATO’s decision to deploy SS20, Pershing 2 and Cruise Missiles in West Germany. In the United States, the ‘Sun of Reggae’ was also presented keys to cities where marijuana is decriminalized, like Atlanta, Brooklyn, New York city, (he accepted at steps of City Hall with his ‘spliff’ in tow) and also Nigeria.
The history of reggae music – or the reggae story, and its importance – is invariably and inextricably linked to the Wailers: Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley. They single-handedly transformed what popular music could be used for as an instrument of liberation. As the Wailers, they created a complex music, reggae music, and redefined popular culture by shifting the focus from words and melody to concerns with the realities of the poor and oppressed and their quest for equal rights and justice.
Peter Tosh, the musical artist and Pan Africanist Rastafarian, is a fascinating study in contrast, because, like most revolutionaries, he was a multi-faceted and complex human being. As an authentic artist who rose from common culture, Tosh's importance as a world figure, for me, occurred when as the first reggae artist, and possibly the first western artist I can remember, he highlighted and then educated us about the evils of apartheid as a political system. On his 1977 epochal Columbia Records album 'Equal Rights', Tosh details "apartheid inhumanity." With his mantra of “Equal rights and Justice” Tosh challenged the world community to end apartheid. More importantly, this was done before apartheid became a fashionable political issue. Many were surprised at Tosh’s grasp of this unpopular issue so early before this issue penetrated the public consciousness.
I had the good fortune to produce and host four retrospectives on the life and times of Tosh on "Reggae Roundtable" hosted by Habte Selassie on his programme, Labrish, which aired on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York. The guests included Tosh’s former bandleader and Chairman of the Jamaica Association of Artists and Performers, Steve Golding, dub poet Oku Onuora, musician/producers Sly and Robbie, former manager and lecturer, Herbie Miller, musicologist and Director of Reggae Programming at XM Satellite Radio, Dermott Hussey (who visited Brazil with Tosh in ‘83), Fikisha Cumbo, (who had a nine-year association with Tosh and is the author of ‘Get Up Stand Up: Bob Marley and Peter Tosh’ and radio personality Karl Anthony. A deeper understanding of him and his work could help to accord Tosh his rightful place in history. Peter Tosh should be honored.
