Bob Marley

Bob Marley: Politics You Could Dance To

On 3 December 1976, gunmen walked into Bob Marley's house on Hope Road in Kingston and opened fire. His wife Rita and his manager Don Taylor were badly wounded; Marley took bullets in the chest and arm. Two days later, with most of the Wailers missing or in hiding, he walked onto the stage of the Smile Jamaica concert and played to eighty thousand people. Whatever else the word genius means in his case, it has to account for that.

Nine Mile and Trench Town

He was born on 6 February 1945 in Nine Mile, in the Jamaican hill country, to Cedella Malcolm, an eighteen-year-old Afro-Jamaican, and Norval Sinclair Marley, a white Jamaican of Welsh descent roughly sixty years old. He was registered Nesta Robert Marley; a passport official, thinking Nesta sounded feminine, reversed the names. The mixed parentage marked him from the start — too white for one Jamaica, too Black for the other — and he wrote about it for the rest of his life.

At twelve he moved with his mother to Trench Town, the Kingston government yard that became reggae's incubator. He had already begun singing with Neville Livingston — later Bunny Wailer — at school in Nine Mile. In Kingston the two of them fell in with Peter Tosh, and a neighbour named Joe Higgs, himself a working singer, taught Marley guitar and vocal harmony for nothing.

Simmer Down

He cut his first solo sides at Federal Studios in February 1962 under the name Bobby Martell. Nothing happened. Then the vocal group — variously the Teenagers, the Wailing Rudeboys, the Wailing Wailers — was picked up by Coxsone Dodd, and in February 1964 "Simmer Down" went to number one in Jamaica and sold some seventy thousand copies. They became a Studio One house act, recording alongside Ernest Ranglin, Jackie Mittoo and Roland Alphonso. By 1966 the group had contracted to its permanent core: Marley, Tosh, Bunny Wailer.

A money dispute ended the Dodd relationship, and the Wailers went to Lee "Scratch" Perry and the Upsetters. That alliance lasted under a year and produced what many still consider the finest work the group ever made, before collapsing over recording rights.

Chris Blackwell's Bet

The break came in 1972, when Marley walked into Island Records. Chris Blackwell later explained his reasoning without much romance: "I was dealing with rock music, which was really rebel music. I felt that would really be the way to break Jamaican music. But you needed someone who could be that image. When Bob walked in, he really was that image."

*Catch a Fire* arrived in April 1973 and sold fourteen thousand copies — a critical success and a commercial nothing. *Burnin'*, later that year, carried "I Shot the Sheriff," and when Eric Clapton took it to number one on the *Billboard* Hot 100 in September 1974, the door opened. *Natty Dread* followed in 1974, and the live version of "No Woman, No Cry" on 1975's *Live!* became the song that broke him internationally. *Rastaman Vibration* reached the Top 50 of the *Billboard* soul chart in 1976.

Rastafari and the Politics

Raised Catholic, Marley came to Rastafari in the 1960s, grew his locks, and held that Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia was the incarnation of Jah. The faith organized everything: the diet, the ganja — "herb make you meditate," he said, "is only a natural thing and it grow like a tree" — and above all the politics. He was a pan-Africanist in the Marcus Garvey line, and it shows in "Zimbabwe," "Survival," "Blackman Redemption," "War" and "Exodus." He played the Amandla Festival in Boston in July 1979 against South African apartheid, and in April 1980 he was invited to perform at the celebration of Zimbabwe's independence.

The Jamaican politics nearly killed him. After the 1976 shooting he left the island for two years of self-imposed exile, recovering at Compass Point in Nassau and then settling in England. He came home in 1978 for the One Love Peace Concert and, mid-song, made Prime Minister Michael Manley and opposition leader Edward Seaga come on stage and shake hands.

Exodus, in Exile

The London records are the peak. *Exodus* (1977) folded blues, soul and British rock into the reggae frame and stayed on the British charts for fifty-six consecutive weeks, yielding four UK hit singles; *Time* would later name it the album of the century. *Kaya* followed in 1978, then the live double *Babylon by Bus*, then the hard-edged *Survival* in 1979. His last studio album, *Uprising* (1980), was also his most religious, and it closed with "Redemption Song" — a man alone with an acoustic guitar, quoting Marcus Garvey's 1937 speech in Nova Scotia.

A Toe, and Then Everything

In July 1977 doctors found acral lentiginous melanoma under the nail of his right big toe. The story that a football injury caused it is wrong; the lesion was the cancer. Doctors advised amputation. He refused on religious grounds, accepting only removal of the nail and nail bed with a skin graft, and kept touring.

He collapsed jogging in Central Park on 21 September 1980. The cancer had reached his brain, lungs and liver. He played his last concert two nights later in Pittsburgh, tried an alternative clinic in Bavaria, and boarded a plane for Jamaica that had to divert to Miami. He died there on 11 May 1981, aged thirty-six. His last words to his son Ziggy: "On your way up, take me up. On your way down, don't let me down. Money can't buy life."

Why Bob Is Called a Genius

The specific gift was compression: the ability to put a political argument inside a melody simple enough for a stadium to sing back. That combination is rarer than it sounds. Protest music usually sacrifices either the politics or the tune, and Marley's contemporaries mostly did. Bono, inducting him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, named exactly this quality — "love songs you could admit listening to. Hard but healing, politics without rhetoric, songs of freedom where that word meant something again."

There is also a formal claim. The Hall credits Marley with co-creating reggae itself: taking the quick tempos of 1960s ska and rocksteady, slowing them down, and adding the syncopation and deep grooves that became the genre's signature. He then made that regional form legible to a global audience without diluting its content — the Rastafari theology and the pan-African politics stayed in the songs all the way to the top of the British charts.

The counter-case deserves space. Marley was not a virtuoso singer; *Rolling Stone* places him ninety-eighth among vocalists while placing him eleventh among artists, which tells you where the value sits. He was one of three near-equal writers in the original Wailers, and the Tosh and Bunny Wailer contributions have been steadily flattened out of the story since 1974; the Lee Perry records that many rate highest are as much Perry's achievement as his. And the posthumous industry has done real damage. Dave Thompson's judgement is blunt: "That the machine has utterly emasculated Marley is beyond doubt... Of course it has assured his immortality. But it has also demeaned him beyond recognition. Bob Marley was worth far more." The man who wrote "Survival" is now mostly a dormitory poster. The genius was in the writing, and it is the writing that gets forgotten.

Legacy

Jamaica gave him the Order of Merit in February 1981, three months before he died, and a state funeral on 21 May that fused Ethiopian Orthodox and Rastafari rites; he was buried near Nine Mile with a red Gibson Les Paul, a Bible open at Psalm 23, and a stalk of cannabis laid in by Rita. Edward Seaga, the man he had made shake hands on stage, gave the eulogy: "He was an experience which left an indelible imprint with each encounter... He is part of the collective consciousness of the nation." He has sold more than 75 million records; *Legend* remains the best-selling reggae album ever made.

Achievements

• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 2001
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 1994
• Order of Merit — 1981
• Instruments: guitar and voice
• Genres: reggae, ska and rocksteady