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“We’re gonna chase those crazy baldheads out of town,” he sang in “Crazy Baldheads” (“baldheads” being a Rasta pejorative for white people, whether reggae fans or not). And although Marley subscribed to a political belief system that preached peace and love to all peoples, he championed the underclass with a revolutionary zeal that made for uncomfortable listening at times. His philosophy was underpinned by a strict religious code: “The wages of sin is death/The gift of Jah is life”, he sang on “Johnny Was,” taking a high moral tone as he told the harrowing story of a woman whose son had been shot dead in a ghetto street fight. Marley’s belief in the power of music, marijuana, and Jah to solve the world’s problems never wavered. Rastas never cut their hair, training it instead into serpentine corkscrew curls known as dreadlocks, a look intended as a visual homage to the Lion of Judah, one of Selassie’s many official titles and an emblem often depicted on the flag of Ethiopia. For the committed Rasta, the act of smoking weed or ganja is thus undertaken as a means of engaging with Jah (God), not – as is more generally assumed by consumers and law enforcement agencies alike – for the illicit pleasure of getting stoned. Rastas believe that marijuana is a religious sacrament, and that smoking it is a rite on a par with taking Holy Communion. The Rastafarian creed was central to Marley’s life, music, and cultural worldview. Him create me,” was a simple statement of fact. Although it was not an idea of his own invention, Selassie, who died in 1975, aged 83, did little to discourage this belief as far as Marley was concerned, “I know that His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie is the Almighty. A religious sect that took root in Jamaica in the 1930s, the Rastafari movement was founded on the belief that Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, was God incarnate on Earth. Marley, who was brought up in the Catholic faith, was a devout Rastafarian. “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior/Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned/Everywhere is war,” Marley sang, a lyric which for all its ideological potency was more polemic than poetic. The “revolution” side of the equation was nowhere more evident than on “War,” a song which set to music the words of a celebrated speech by Haile Selassie to the United Nations in 1963.