"Don't care what them say, I and I
Live what them fear to try"
-- from Legalize It
The cost was isolation that deepened with every public statement. Tosh left the Wailers because he felt the international machine was softening the group's message for mainstream consumption. He wanted to keep the revolutionary edge intact. His debut solo album Legalize It in 1976 was a direct argument for marijuana decriminalization, released at a time when the topic was not discussed in polite company anywhere in the world. The album was banned in Jamaica but sold internationally, making Tosh a hero to the growing reggae audience outside the Caribbean. He followed it with Equal Rights in 1977, a song cycle that attacked apartheid, police brutality, and economic exploitation with a bluntness that Bob Marley had learned to wrap in melody. Tosh did not wrap anything. He said it directly, without metaphor or apology.
Equal Rights is the one. The title track is a statement of purpose -- "I don't want no peace, I want equal rights and justice" -- that refused the conciliatory tone that international audiences expected from reggae music. Tosh performed at the 1978 One Love Peace Concert and used the stage to criticize the politicians in attendance rather than celebrate the unity the concert was meant to symbolize. He was beaten by police in 1978, detained repeatedly, and shot during a robbery in 1979. None of it changed his approach or softened his message. He kept recording, kept touring, kept refusing to become the kind of reggae artist that white radio programmers found comfortable or safe.
Peter Tosh was murdered in 1987 during a home invasion at his Jamaican house, killed alongside his DJ and drummer. He was forty-two. His catalog is shorter than Bob Marley's and angrier, but it is no less essential to understanding what reggae was capable of saying when it was not trying to be universal. Tosh was not the ambassador. He was the truth-teller who refused to smile for the cameras, and the music he left behind still burns with the same fury it carried the day it was recorded.
