from the LP I Shall Not Remove, Divine Recordings, released: 2004, recorded: 1976Cornell Campbell was never known for subtlety, whether he was singing his famed love songs, praising weed (see “100 Pounds of Collie”), or dicing up the latest Rasta gossip; what may sound here like peaceful and mellow neutrality to the casual listener is, in fact, a scathing rebuke of his peer Bob Marley’s increased involvement in the political goings-on of Jamaica when this song was recorded. I have no way of being sure, but I’d be willing to bet that it was written right after the organized attack on the Marley compound before his SMILE Jamaica concerts, which left Marley, Rita and others wounded in the hail of bullets; incidentally, many Rasta’s took Bob’s relatively miraculous escape with his life as a sign of his invincibility---clearly, Mr. Campbell undertook a more skeptical analysis of those events. This song is spilt between the first half, which is straight-up reggae, and the back end that is completely dubbed out, letting the message sink in both directly and more subconsciously.
