The most damning observations were reserved for the audiences. Cliff\u2019s were mainly white, whereas Marley\u2019s show drew, as the Globe<\/em> reported, \u201cblack street people, the sort who showed up … sporting Ethiopian colored hats and Haile Selassie buttons.\u201d In other words, Toronto\u2019s Rastafari had turned up for Marley, but not for Cliff.<\/p>\n Over the next three years, much would change in the reggae world, including multiple assassination attempts on Marley\u2019s life and the emergence of dub, a sub-genre of reggae that would influence the music of the diaspora.<\/p>\n In \u2018Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae<\/a>\u2019 (2003), a definitive history of the music and culture of Jamaica, David Katz explains how, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, reggae became intertwined with Jamaican politics.<\/p>\n For example, in October 1976, ten people were shot at a local PNP office, which was burned to the ground. In advance of elections that year, someone took a shot at Marley and he was targeted again in December, just two days before he was to take the stage at a concert for the people called \u2018Smile Jamaica.\u2019<\/a> Marley, his then wife Rita and manager Don Taylor were shot at his home at 56 Hope Road, Kingston. While Marley still performed, he left Jamaica for London, recording arguably his most iconic album Exodus<\/a>, released in 1977.<\/p>\n He returned in 1978 for the \u2018One Love Peace Concert\u2019 at Kingston\u2019s National Stadium<\/a>, alongside Peter Tosh<\/a>, who had left the Wailers in 1973, Dennis Brown<\/a>, U-Roy<\/a>, and Jacob Miller<\/a>, who tragically died in a car accident two years later. While Marley\u2019s aim was to stop the political violence, the concert could not unite the fractured parties.<\/p>\n When Jimmy Cliff returned to Toronto that year for a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the show \u2013 sponsored by CFNY-FM<\/a> (today 102.1 The Edge) \u2013 was infused with the politics of social injustice.<\/p>\n Wearing a white dashiki as a robe and spreading a message of love and acceptance, Cliff dropped the \u2018rebel without a cause\u2019 persona that Western audiences had come to expect after \u2018Harder.\u2019 Instead, he adopted a more overtly conscious vibe and Afrocentric wardrobe, which critics did not appreciate at all.<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike the old spark of raw, rebellious zeal, Cliff\u2019s aim now is universal love. And his new songs are just as dull,\u201d lamented the Star<\/em>. \u201cCliff still preaches freedom, justice and peace \u2026 but the testimony and spiritual bluntness of his new message dulls even his great rough-and-sweet talent.\u201d For the Globe<\/em>, the show, which attracted a mostly a white audience, included songs from \u2018Harder\u2019, but also from the album Give Thankx<\/em>, which included \u201cBongo Man<\/a>,\u201d a song inspired by Cliff\u2019s travels throughout Africa.<\/p>\n In the months leading up to Jamaica\u2019s 1980 general election hundreds were killed<\/a>, and the outbreak of violence further impacted the music, especially in the diaspora, where dub poetry was emerging. As music historian Klive Walker recounts in \u2018Dubwise: Reasoning from the Reggae Underground<\/a>\u2019 (2011), diasporic reggae surfaced with Canadian artists like Lillian Allen<\/a>, Clifton Joseph<\/a>, Afua Cooper<\/a>, and Carlene Davis<\/a>.<\/p>\n In November of that year, Third World<\/a>,<\/u> a stridently Rastafari group, opened for Cliff at Massey Hall. Founded in 1973, Third World had hit its stride, while critics felt Cliff had lost his. \u201cCliff bopped through a selection of drab new tunes, too rambling to be good rhythm and blues and hardly potent enough to be good reggae,\u201d decried the Globe’s <\/em>review, which lamented that reggae tended to \u201ctake itself too seriously.\u201d Cliff, the critic noted, had little to do with Rastafari, and dabbled in it only to \u201censure as wide an audience as possible.\u201d Today, the form is known as \u201croots reggae,\u201d and features deep bass riddims, overtly political lyrics, and elements of dub. In the early 1980s, however, these were not yet the riddims of Toronto\u2019s music scene<\/a>.<\/p>\n After 1981, everything in the world of reggae, and Toronto\u2019s appreciation for it, would change. That February, \u2018Rockers\u2019<\/a>, originally released in 1978, and starring Gregory Isaacs<\/a>, Burning Spear<\/a>, and Big Youth<\/a> screened at Cineplex Cinemas. Unlike \u2018Harder\u2019, \u2018Rockers\u2019 was a Robin Hood-themed film in which the lead characters \u2013 all Rastafari \u2013 had, as their goal, the restoration to the poor of what was stolen from them by the rich. Two years later, the Bamboo <\/a>opened on Queen West, offering a blend of reggae, Jamaican vibes, and Caribbean food.<\/p>\n The seminal event of the reggae world of the early 1980s, however, was Bob Marley\u2019s death, from cancer, in May 1981, at the age of 36. Citytv broadcast his funeral on The New Music, the only Canadian media outlet to cover it<\/a>. As co-host John (J.D.) Roberts recalled in a 2001 interview with the Globe<\/em><\/a>, \u201cThey drove his casket for three and a half hours through the hills of Jamaica to this little place called Nine Miles. When we got to the little valley where he was buried, the hills were lined with people in their choir clothes, singing hymns as they interred the body. It was extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n On location in Montego Bay, Roberts interviewed Leroy Sibbles and Olivia Grange<\/a> who, in addition to coordinating the funeral, had lived in Toronto and was one of the co-founders of Contrast<\/em>.<\/p>\n That summer, Roberts and other Toronto music journalists travelled back to Kingston, Jamaica, to cover the Reggae Sunsplash<\/a> music festival. As the Globe<\/em>\u2019s Paul McGrath wrote, \u201cEach year the number of white faces grows at the festival, both because some of the best who will be here \u2013 Jimmy Cliff, Third World and Toots Hibbert among them \u2013 have global distribution and because reggae has, slowly since 1975, come to infect white pop music in many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n Later that fall, Cliff and Peter Tosh headlined a four-night residency at the O\u2019Keefe Centre (now Meridian Hall), dubbed the \u201cDread & Alive\u201d tour. Another Cliff film, \u2018Bongo Man,\u2019 opened at the same time. It was about Cliff’s life, the contested Jamaican elections, and the emerging use of African drumming, jungle sounds, and staccato rhythm in reggae. \u201cAn inside look at Rasta ideology from the roots up,\u201d asserted the Globe<\/em>\u2019s Adele Freedman. \u201cCliff has one of the most versatile voices in reggae \u2013 it can cut as well as heal \u2013 and when he\u2019s really inside his songs, many of which have become classics, he moves with the grace and daring of an acrobat.\u201d<\/p>\n Cliff continued to perform in Toronto, at venues such as the Ontario Place Forum, the Concert Hall and the Copa, a popular Yorkville dance club on Scollard, which hosted many other reggae legends like Sly & Robbie, Maxi Priest, Freddie McGregor<\/a>, and Burning Spear<\/a>.<\/p>\n By the mid-1980s, roots reggae had been increasingly replaced by the explosion of dancehall, which emerged as the music of Jamaica\u2019s youth. Additionally, world music, following the success of Paul Simon\u2019s Graceland (1986) and afrobeat \u2013 a blend of jazz, funk, indigenous African rhythms and overtly political messaging that had much in common with roots reggae \u2013 also became popular in North America.<\/p>\n In 2009, \u2018Harder\u2019 was adapted into a theatrical production,<\/a> which ran for a month at David Mirvish\u2019s Canon Theatre. As part of its promotional efforts, Mirvish bought Cliff to town to help launch the show. Although Cliff did not appear in the show, his music was in every minute of the performance.<\/p>\n On July 19, 2010, Cliff, then 62, performed at Massey Hall as part of a North American tour. In an interview with the National Post<\/em> in advance of the show, he described what it was like to have become an unintentional symbol of Jamaica.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was when we were searching for our identity that the music took form. Out of what you might say was anger, Kingston\u2019s singer-songwriters started doing their own thing\u2026. I never wanted to be Jamaica\u2019s anybody \u2013 I wanted to be who I am. That\u2019s the way reggae music was formed.\u201d Three years later, Cliff performed at the Phoenix<\/a>, and then as a special guest of the Dave Matthews Band when they performed at Air Canada Centre.<\/a> They were his last shows in Toronto.<\/p>\n As of 2025, \u2018Harder\u2019 can still be streamed while Cliff\u2019s hit songs \u2013 \u201cMany Rivers to Cross,\u201d \u201cYou Can Get it If You Really Want\u201d and \u201cThe Harder They Come\u201d \u2013 have never left the music zeitgeist.<\/p>\n I wrote this homage to Cliff not because I am\/was his number one fan, but rather because of my love for reggae music. When I was growing up in Scarborough, reggae was as much a part of my childhood \u2013 memories I wrote about for Spacing in 2021<\/a> \u2013 as was the music of Anne Murray.<\/p>\n With Cliff’s passing, the inventors of roots reggae are nearly all gone. What remains is their music. My hope is that his contribution to reggae in this city is not forgotten. While critics often kept him in Marley\u2019s (and Tosh\u2019s) shadows, Jimmy Cliff never let their limitations become his own, proving that he was the hardest of them all. As he told one interviewer, \u201cI was the one who opened the gates for those to follow.\u201d<\/p>\n Cheryl Thompson is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Black Expressive Culture & Creativity, Associate Professor of Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is also author of\u00a0<\/em>Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812 \u2013 1897 (2025), Uncle: Race, Nostalgia and the Politics of Loyalty (2021), and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada\u2019s Black Beauty Culture (2019),\u00a0and can be reached on LinkedIn\u00a0<\/em>@cheryl-thompson-phd<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/02\/Black-History-Month-2026-2-Bob-Marley-performing-1975-publicity-600x846.jpg\")
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\nMusic Infused with Politics<\/h2>\n
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\nToronto’s Connection to Reggae<\/h2>\n
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