Aston 'Family Man' Barrett works the bass.

It’s just a day after online protests have brought down the SOPA internet piracy bill and I’m watching several hundred concert goers raise their fists to Jamaican revolution songs.

It’s a baklava layered with syrupy irony.

Here we stand inside the Knitting Factory on a snow-dampened night in a poverty-ridden city, a block from where at best a dozen protesters regularly gathered throughout autumn to resist America’s gaping economic schism. Onstage stand seven black men and women, Jamaicans most, if not all, sons and daughters of a third-world country frighteningly rife with economic and political injustice, inciting this den of hippies and yupsters to throw their fists in the air to Bob Marley’s ‘Get Up, Stand Up.’ For a crowd that dwarfed the strongest attendance Occupy Spokane ever mustered, with offer up our faux-revolutionary sentiments, our nonbinding and pleasurably vague commitments to justice.

Onstage is the remnant of Bob Marley’s seminal band The Wailers, the primary draw being its lone original member, bassist, songwriter and producer Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett.  The backline genius who authored the sickly simple bass lines for some of the catchiest songs of the 1970s, Barrett stands way in the back near the drum kit, swathed in grey sweats, a grey flannel, thumping away at a Fender Jazz bass under the protection of sunglasses and a knit hat.

Writing simple, catchy music is more an art than most people realize, as is properly maintaining a reggae beat. The interlocking rhythms between bass, drums and guitar aren’t just a simple up-and-down syncopation but a deep pocket of groove that pushes and pulls organically within itself: an aural hypnosis. I’ve come to watch these masters and to enjoy the songs penned by Marley and The Wailers. The only song request that bounced inside my head – and it did so from nowhere as I waited in the ticket lines with gaggles of aspiring teenage hippies and aging hipsters – was ‘Natural Mystic,’ the lead song off of Exodus. After a short instrumental intro by the backline – Family Man, a guitarist, a drummer and a keyboardist hidden behind a three banks of keys – one came the three vocalists, pushing straight into ‘Natural Mystic.” A sublime flower bloomed in my brain and erased the week.

And yet, I couldn’t help but think on revolution. Not that I lodge a grudge against the authenticity of The Wailers. They are essentially a tribute act, one with a claim and a message. They are not pretenders or imitators but torch bearers. But how does one react to watching music born of a revolution to being presented in a country paralyzed the commodity of rebellion and stricken with consensus to authority? A country born and reborn out of revolution where the notion barely rises past that of barely more than a T-shirt adornment, a fashion ploy? A country that fiercely protects the same freedoms it’s so reluctant to use?

It’s not a tangent. The Wailers were here in Spokane on their Revolution tour, where they played only Marley songs relating to said theme. [Can you imagine a Wailers Love tour, with ‘Waiting in Vain,’ ‘Stir It Up,’ ‘I Want to Love You,’ ‘Turn Your Lights Down Low,’ those lusty deep-pocket reggae grooves? That set could devolve into a massive orgy, though we’ve probably also lost our carnal fervor, preferring instead a culture of raunch and pornography – in other words, jokes and simulations.]

Pop anthems like ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ and ‘Get Up, Stand up,’ gems like ‘The Heathen’ and ‘Rebel Music.’ Songs born of religious, political and economic repression. The latter two, along with ‘Natural Mystic,’ ‘Exodus’ and ‘Funky Reggae Party’ came from the Exodus recording sessions. Those were conducted in England, after Marley, his wife and his manager were shot up in what was thought to be an act of retribution for supporting the Jamaican government at the time.

Just across street from The Wailers’ performance here the Spokane Police last week pepper sprayed a crowd. Not Occupy Spokane or any other social justice movement, but a gathering of drunks after bar close. A threat to authority in its pursuit of vomit.

I wondered what ‘Family Man’ Barrett, swaying away at his bass, would say about this. The man who lost his brother Carly, murdered in 1987, who used to sit just feet away at the Wailer’s drum kit. Whose singer and nameplate sensation Bob, who died in 1981 from cancer at age 36. Who likely lost countless others to the violence and vicissitudes of Jamaican slums.  [Peter Tosh, another Wailers vocalist who went solo in the 1970s was tortured and murdered in 1987 during a robbery at his house.] He’d probably say something something gratifyingly wise, like “Trust in Jah music.”

Can we?

These fans, the younger ones laced with dreadlocks, the older ones sporting the softness of middle age, were treated to a pre-concert lecture to abstain from smoking weed in the club. They roundly obeyed.

Perhaps the final irony belongs to the last song in the Wailer’s regular set: ‘We Don’t Need No More Trouble.’