It takes Damian Marley just 20 minutes to lose patience with me and ask himself the question I've been skirting around. "You wanna know what it feel like to be a Marley?" he erupts in magnificently defiant Jamaican-English. "It's difficult to explain because that's all I've ever been. I don't know. Because I've never been you, I can't explain how it feels to be you instead of being me. All I do know is that when I was growing up, a lot of people knew my father's name, then knew my name."
And Marley has long been aware of what it means to carry that name. "In my teens I started realizing what 'im [Bob] really meant to the world, as opposed to just being a singer. He's not the Rolling Stones or whatever. To a lot of people, he means much more than that.
"It's spirituality. And when I started to realize that, that's when I began to listen to the music and view the world in a different way."
Bob Marley -- "Tuff Gong" -- was 30 when the live version of No Woman No Cry first crashed reggae music into the mainstream charts in 1975. And Damian -- "Jr. Gong" -- isn't the only Marley offspring to attempt to live up to that legacy. However, where his elder siblings (notably Ziggy, with the Melody Makers) have mostly adhered to the sunnier, more palatable One Love and Three Little Birds blueprint, 27-year-old Damian has picked up the simmering anger and harder political content in his father's less well-known music. You can hear it in Welcome to Jamrock, the title track of his third album and Damian's first worldwide hit. An unflinching depiction of Kingston's gun crime and political corruption, it caused outrage within Jamaican tourist agencies -- and, he notes wryly, is currently equally topical in the UK. The approach is winning Jr. Gong celebrity fans (Kanye West described Jamrock as "the song of the year") and has sent the album into the US top 10 -- a feat Tuff Gong managed just once, in 1976, with Rastaman Vibration.
Perhaps the key to the siblings' contrasting approach to the Marley musical legacy lies in their different backgrounds. Four of Marley's musical children come from his marriage to Rita Marley.
However, Damian is the product of Bob's relationship with the 1976 Miss World, Cindy Breakspeare -- and it seems that some elements of Jamaican society have looked down on him as the illegitimate son of a Canadian-Jamaican beauty queen.
"I'll give you one instance," he says. "One time there was a tribute concert to my father. I was on stage but wasn't really prepared. So I did a freestyle lyric on Shabba Ranks' My Daddy Was a Bedroom Bully -- and went on to name my brothers and sisters. I was really saying, `My father had lots of kids, give thanks.' But some of the press had a feast. There was a comment about my mum: `What else can we expect of Damian when he was raised by the woman who was singing Turn Your Lights Down Low (Bob Marley's song, inspired by Breakspeare) in front of Marley's wife Rita?' My mother wasn't even at the concert," he spits, "never mind on stage." Marley, though, is nothing if not mischievously combative. "That kind of thing makes me want to hit back even harder. So now I do even more lyrics like Bedroom Bully." He grins.
Meeting Marley, it's hard not to see him as a natural rebel. Perhaps it's the way his dreadlocks hang down to his knees: he's refused to cut his hair since leaving school in 1997. He also looks younger and more handsome than in photos, his striking features conjuring a vision of Bob Marley played by Johnny Depp.
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