The Bob Marley Legacy - Damian At 30

It’s been three years since Damian Marley’s third album, Welcome to Jamrock, put the youngest son of reggae legend Bob Marley on the musical map with dance-floor slammers such as the title track and “Move!”. Since then, the 30-year-old has been working on new music, but as usual his career has been a family affair.

Marley says he is working on a new record now and has helped his brother Stephen on the recording and touring for his latest record, last year’s Mind Control. Brother Julian is working on a new record as well, and the brothers are also working with the young Jamaican artist Javaughn Bond, whose debut album Superstar was released last year.

Inspired by a mix of reggae and hip-hop influences that was relatively new, Marley says that collaborations between the two genres are happening all over the place, and to him it seems perfectly natural.

Hip-hop historians attribute reggae music as one of the birth elements of hip-hop. For example, Kool Herc is a Jamaican who brought the Jamaican culture of speaking over the turntables to America, and that was the birth of hip-hop music, similar to the rise of roots reggae — the basic, vintage form, popularized by his father Bob Marley who died in 1981, when Damian was 2 years old, but thanks to the records, the stories, and even the video footage, his father still plays a major role in his life
The family legacy is one he accepts gratefully.

“The world knows so much of my father. And what he gave to the world is still very much alive, where people can experience it and get to know him. So in that sense I’d say I know him. And really, that’s an ideal legacy. I look up to my father first and foremost as my father, and also as the great humanitarian that the world has come to embrace him as.”


The Reggae News Agency

www.riddimjamaica.net | www.riddimja.com