“Many Rivers to Cross” by Jimmy Cliff
The next song on the list also involves a Spaghetti Western mashup but in a radically different context. The Harder They Come was a surprise international hit—an independent, feature-length Jamaican film with an irresistible soundtrack that slowly climbed its way into cult classic status. More importantly, it offered Jamaicans the chance to see themselves represented on screen. Director Perry Henzell remembers huge crowds flattening the fence around the Carib Theatre in Kingston, busting through the doors, sitting three to a seat—it was a sensation!
Jimmy Cliff’s protagonist, Ivan, is a rural musician who journeys to Kingston to give his mother what is left of the money after his grandmother’s funeral. Seduced by city life, but with no real plan, he spends an afternoon at the theater watching Corbucci’s “Django.” Later, as his own fame grows around police killings and a hit single he cut for an exploitive $20, he begins to see his own life as a movie. The final shootout is intercut with shots of the audience cheering from the earlier “Django” scene—and of course the soundtrack itself would bring international fame to Jimmy Cliff and to Jamaican music generally, further mirroring the movie’s plot from without.
“Many Rivers to Cross” plays early in the film, after Ivan is turned down from a construction job and searches in vain for work. A housewife in a gated community sends him away; the valet at an exclusive hotel shoos him off; he is caught stealing from a fruit stand; homeless, he watches as families scavenge eggs from a garbage dump. “Many rivers to cross, but I can’t seem to find my way over.”
The Harder They Come was unapologetically radical. Jamaica’s many corruptions—class, religion, police/military extortion, politics, record industry exploitation, drug trafficking, colonial puppeteering—all got their turn. The police shut down production several times fearing the movie’s explosive political subtext.
I didn’t see it until many years later; my introduction was through the music. I remember a period as a kid eating flavorless Kashi cereal for breakfast, while my dad alternated each morning between a compilation of early recordings of Bob Marley as a teenager and The Harder They Come soundtrack. Dad had tickets to see Marley twice, but both shows were cancelled for increasingly tragic reasons. He did see Jimmy Cliff, which he said was transformative.
Watching the movie today or listening to the soundtrack it’s hard not to think of the even darker times yet to come to Jamaica—and with hindsight it’s tempting to call into question the playful ambiguity of the movie’s rude boy metafictions. But this mythmaking was itself one of the movie’s main subjects. Its radicalness wasn’t just its confrontational representations, or its call to rise beyond escapism, but also the very fact it was made in the first place—a reminder that sometimes revolt begins with the simple imperative: collaborate and create.
UP NEXT…. The sounds of Sci-fi
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