Special Guest Blogger: Bob Marley

Greetings, brothers and sisters, it’s your boy, Berhane Selassie or Bob, from a little island called Jamaica, a place where the sun kisses the sea and the rhythm seeps into your bones before you even learn how to walk.
Before we were the international symbols of revolution, we were just three skinny youths in Kingston trying to look cool, me, Bunny Wailer, and Peter Tosh.
While making our music I sold peanuts on the beach, answered phones for a record shop but we thought we could make a decent stab with our music so we called ourselves The Teenagers but eventually we became The Wailers, which sounded a lot more serious and a lot less like we were about to ask you to share a milkshake.
Peter was always the grumpy one, Bunny was the soul and I was just trying to figure out how to squeeze ska, rocksteady, and reggae into one pot without the whole thing exploding.
We were pioneers, but it didn't last long, i died at only 36 but in that short time we sold millions of records and I survived an assassination attempt to go play a concert two days later.
I showed the world that a half-caste kid from the hills of Nine Mile could tell the whole world to shut up and love each other and for a few minutes at a time, you actually listened because being a Rastafarian wasn't just about the hair (though, let's be real, the hair was iconic even though it did get quite heavy when it rained) but I fused the spirituality (along with protest, romance, and a penchant for the herb) into the music because if you don't have soul, you’re just making noise.
Music was my job, but football was my life and if you see a picture of me from the 70s and I’m not holding a guitar, I’m probably mid-air trying to bicycle-kick a ball and if had spent as much time in the recording studio as I did on the pitch, I probably would have released about 400 more albums.
My face was on posters on dorm room walls and I saw the kids wearing my face but listen, if my face on a t-shirt makes you think, even for a second, about peace, love, and not blowing each other up, then use my face to wipe your car windows for all I cared.
I was only 36 when the doctors told me the cancer beneath the nail on my big toe was aggressive and one of the options was to remove it to stop the cancer spreading but although i didn’t need ten toes to sing Three Little Birds, my Rasta faith meant we believe the body should remain whole so I declined and when i collapsed while jogging in New York, it was now in my brain, lungs, and liver but by then I had been baptised into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and went out as Berhane Selassie.