An uncomfortable number of people, all singing, many swigging from cans, are packed into a studio control room in London’s Maida Vale.
A bespectacled boy somehow manages to wriggle his way from the door, carrying a foot-wide chocolate cake with four candles on top and plonks it in front of Damian Marley as a chorus of Happy Birthday reaches a climax.
The Jamaican reggae artist, headphones still around his neck after finishing recording a BBC radio session five minutes earlier, smiles with slightly embarrassed gratitude at his backing band, road crew and current touring partner, the hip-hop star Nas.
Life on the road can be anything from a quasimilitary campaign to a debauched cavalcade of ever-greater excess; for others, a private jet-to-limo-to-venue conveyor belt keeps the stars at a remove from the little people. But for Marley and Nas, the prevailing mood as their musical caravan wends its way through Europe is one of easy-going familial unity.
“I think we share a lot of philosophies on life,” Marley says. “Just how we look at things and the things we choose to pay attention to. We have a lot in common when it comes down to how we approach music, what kind of people we want to be the voice of and what kind of people we want to get through to.”
Collaborations in hip-hop are ten a penny. But when someone like Nasir Jones — who emerged from New York’s Queensbridge projects in 1994 as a prodigiously talented teenager with a near-perfect, all-time-classic debut album — and “Jr Gong”, the son of Bob Marley, whose third LP, 2005’s Welcome to Jamrock, has been described as the best reggae record of the century, team up, it’s usually only for a track on each other’s releases. Yet when Nas and Damian got together to follow up their first track, plans for a four-song EP soon mushroomed into a full album and an accompanying world tour.
“Each artist is trying to be the greatest they can be at their thing,” Nas says, “and they’re trying to make each record greater than the last. We don’t get the chance to say: ‘Let me stop thinking about me and let me do something that’s more than me.’ This was more than me.
The stuff I’ve been doing my whole life is primarily hip-hop and I know what it is before I get to the studio. This is exciting because I didn’t know what to expect each time. And there was the excitement that I’m actually in the studio, recording with another artist — I’ve never done that before.”
The title for their collaboration, Distant Relatives, was arrived at only after they were some way through recording it, but it couldn’t have been more apt. The record, released in May, is intensely focused, as the pair home in on a shared African heritage. In the song, Count Your Blessings, Nas raps about his son and invokes Damian’s father — but Jr Gong doesn’t believe the Marley legacy was something he consciously invoked. “That’s something I guess other people think about a lot more than I do,” he says.
“Distant Relatives was never so much about our own family it was always about the broader sense. But [in our family] we share a lot of the same kinds of morals and values as our father, so it’s not really something that you have to force. We are Rastas — that influences how we think, how we walk, what we eat, how we dress. It’s not really a departure from being yourself to be your father’s son.”
The record is not just intellectually and emotionally consistent: the production superbly complements the lyrical preoccupations, intuitively blending those distant musical relatives, reggae and rap, with a unique fusion of sounds from the African diaspora.
Marley, who produced all but three tracks (and those were the work of his brother, Stephen), deliberately sought out a style that wasn’t immediately identifiable as his or Nas’s and went in search of samples from Africa, such as that from the Ethiopian jazz artist Mulatu Astatke’s song Yegelle Tezeta, which underpins the album’s opening track, As We Enter.
The result is both organic and intellectually thorough; music that’s experimental and unusual yet has the relaxed, organic warmth of a jam session. “You say ‘African music’ and you think ‘tribal drumming’,” Marley says. He says the disparate sounds reflect a continent teeming with musical styles that reach way beyond many Western preconceptions. “But there’s a lot of African music that’s like James Brown and a lot, too, that sounds very Hispanic.”
At its heart, the project is about education: not just for listeners, who are encouraged to stop thinking of Africa in terms of famine, war and poverty, but for Nas and Marley, too.
Their own experiences fed into conversations that shaped the record and reinforced one of its more subtle messages — that the blights on Africa are by no means confined to the continent. “A lot of things that happen in Africa happen in Europe, too,” Nas says. “Croatia, Serbia, Russia — wars, guns, drugs, genocide: all of that happens in Europe. Same shit’s going on everywhere.” “Yes, there is a mission,” Marley says. “Yes, we want to enlighten people. But we learned a lot working on this project. In a lot of ways the mission has been a self-discovery or a discovery of some of your own roots. So really it’s about sparking more conversation and learning more ourselves, too.”
There’s a balance to be struck, of course, between meaningful intervention and meddlesome platitudes. Whether they’re in a BBC studio recording a radio session or arriving mob-handed on a concert stage, the project’s predominant vibe of fraternal warmth is pervasive and infectious. Better, it helps Nas and Marley avoid the pitfalls that lie in wait for wealthy Western stars whose attitudes towards Africa may be no less noble, but who may end up being condescending when expressing them.
Their stated intent — to donate an unspecified amount of the record’s profits to a project to build a school in Africa — could have come across in precisely this way, but the pair are savvy enough to acknowledge the difficulties the well-meant gesture involves. “We’re still brainstorming on that,” Nas says when asked about where the money will end up. “We have a lot of ideas, but it’s not as easy as just to say it’s going to a school. We’ll figure it out.”
The idea that pop stars might meaningfully effect political change falls in and out of fashion, not least because handing the role of raising money and awareness for aid projects to celebrities gives the impression that this isn’t properly the job of politicians. But Marley is convinced that, sometimes, it’s too important a task to be left to elected officials.
“It’s not like a big brain science kind of thing,” he says. “The whole world is set up so that for places like Switzerland to exist, that are crime-free and with the best care for everybody, you have to have places like Sudan or Jamaica. But, really, there’s enough to share when you check it. It’s not that complicated, really. It’s probably less thinking and more feeling that’s required.”
And music, they both believe, has a role to play in helping to bring about the changes they believe are necessary. “Musicians have the revolution in their hands,” says Nas. “I think Bono does great work helping people. He’s not a politician, he’s a musician — but he’s a musician who cares. He makes it all about more than just the red carpet, the paparazzi and the record sales. When I see that, I know that I chose the right profession.” —