100 Best Albums
- 3 JUNE 1977
- 10 Songs
- Legend – The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers · 1984
- Legend – The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers · 1984
- Legend – The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers · 1984
- Exodus (Deluxe Edition) · 1977
- Legend – The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers · 1984
- Legend – The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers · 1984
- Legend – The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers · 1977
- Legend – The Best Of Bob Marley & The Wailers · 1984
- Survival (2013 Remaster) · 1979
- Natural Mystic: The Legend Lives On (The Definitive Remastered Edition) · 1977
Essential Albums
- An unimpeachable monument to the reggae pioneer, this posthumous 1984 collection of Robert Nesta Marley’s most enduring tracks easily lives up to its grand title. And this is a best of in every sense. From blissed-out reimaginings of rock (“Stir It Up”, “Buffalo Soldier”) to politicised skankfests (“Exodus”, “Get Up, Stand Up”), Legend has the cohesive flow of a studio album and distills an artist—and a genre—into one irresistible groove.
- This celebratory Bob Marley & The Wailers album is, quite possibly, their most deeply spiritual work, joyous in its tone and unifying in its themes of commonality and tolerance. Songs like the soulful "Easy Skanking", the thunderously ominous "Running Away" and the enduringly tender "Is This Love" feel like hymns of praise for the Rastafarian lifestyle. Listen to this LP for yourself and the power of kaya—which can mean home, mindfulness or even marijuana—will feel vibrantly clear.
- 100 Best Albums Exodus opens with a warning: “Many more will have to suffer/Many more will have to die/Don’t ask me why/Things are not the way they used to be.” You can see where Marley was coming from: In the few years leading up to the album’s recording in early 1977, Jamaica had experienced a tremendous swell in political violence, with gang and paramilitary groups affiliated with the country’s two main parties—the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party—killing each other in triple-digit numbers. Marley, who had already ascended to a kind of godlike neutrality, had stepped in to try and alleviate the mood with the Smile Jamaica Concert shortly before the country’s elections in December 1976, only to be shot during a home invasion two days before the show. He played anyway. What you hear on Exodus, then, is the tension between the hope that everything will be all right and the creeping worry that it won’t. Marley recorded the album during a self-imposed exile in London, a distance that cast his optimism about Jamaica in a cautious light. And while his politics had never been of more public interest, the album’s most uplifting songs turned inward toward matters personal, romantic and spiritual: “Three Little Birds”, the lovelorn “Waiting in Vain”, the legacy-defining “One Love”. The overall feeling is one of victory through détente, of private peace as a foil for public rancour. As for the band, they remained borderline-peerless, not only in the province of reggae, but in funk, soul and whatever Venn diagram you could make of the three. (No group of musicians has ever sounded so precise while being in so little of a hurry.) And while Marley’s populism rippled through punk, the members of the Wailers maintained their own simmering intensity—abstractly on “Natural Mystic” and “Jamming”, and directly on “Punky Reggae Party”, on which Marley finds his inner hardcore kid a few years before the term was invented: “Rejected by society/Treated with impunity/Protected by my dignity/I search for reality.”
- There's no escaping how "No Woman, No Cry" dominates Bob Marley's 1974 studio album—and rightly so, as it's one of his most lyrically nuanced and musically tender tunes. But don't sleep on the tracks that surround it: "Lively Up Yourself" is a cool mood-setter that runs on slinky, lilting grooves, and "Rebel Music (3 O'Clock Road Block)" is a freedom cry bolstered by clever use of harmonica. The presence of vocal trio The I Threes helps smooth out any lingering rough edges.
- This is the confrontational album that made Bob Marley the Rasta legend he is today. On the anthemic chant of "Get Up, Stand Up”, his frustration, anger and hope feel powerfully, palpably immediate. His pointed lyrics bring the struggle directly to our ears on the call to arms "Burnin' and Lootin'" and his tirade against injustice "I Shot the Sheriff". But all that rawness is tempered by Marley's impish sense of playfulness, even on morality tales like "Small Axe".
- Bob Marley was already a hardened veteran of the Jamaican music scene by the time that Catch a Fire saw international release in the spring of 1973. He had recorded low-slung New Orleans style R&B with Leslie Kong, soaring Rocksteady with Coxsone Dodd and adventurous, uncompromising Roots music with the inimitable Lee Perry. Had his career ended in 1972 Marley would still be one of the pre-eminent figures in Jamaican music, but the release of Catch a Fire, one of the first internationally distributed Roots records, set Marley on the path to global superstardom and changed the general public’s conception of reggae forever. While singers like John Holt Desmond Dekker and The Heptones’ Leroy Sibbles had achieved commercial success in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in America with their lovelorn Rocksteady balladry and rowdily picturesque gunman anthems, Marley’s Catch a Fire was unique for its strident political stance and unadorned Roots textures. From the plaintive ghetto reportage of “Concrete Jungle” to the sufferers’ manifesto “400 Years”, Marley, along with fellow Wailers Bunny Marley and Peter Tosh, gives us a street level view of Kingston life with his stunning melodic sensibility and deft lyricism. While Marley would go on to even greater success with his next few releases, Catch a Fire provided a blueprint for his future triumphs, and remains one of the most revelatory Jamaican albums ever recorded.
Albums
- 2024
Artist Playlists
- The Jamaican icon defined and redefined reggae for the world.
- Lean back and relax with some of their mellowest cuts.
- Grab the mic and sing along with some of their biggest hits.
- 2009
Appears On
- Various Artists
- Bob Marley & The Chineke! Orchestra
More To Hear
- How a live performance took Bob Marley’s classic global.
- The global music saint crafts his most important relic.
- Reliving songs of the legendary Bob Marley and those he inspired.
- Estelle honors Black Music Month, plus live Bob Marley covers.
- Cheers to 45 years of Bob Marley's 'Exodus.'
- Showcasing rarities, influences, and stone cold classics.
- The late London MC is honored, plus a Docta Cosmic tribute mix.
About Bob Marley & The Wailers
Given the image of him as a smiling, joint-smoking peacenik that has proliferated since his death in 1981, it’s easy to forget jut how angry Bob Marley was. His music spoke to colonialism (“Small Axe”), poverty (“Them Belly Full [But We Hungry]”), the necessity of achieving political agency (“Get Up, Stand Up”) and the challenge of exercising it (“Burnin’ and Lootin’”) with a righteousness and frustration that made him as much a figurehead to punk rock as to the reggae he helped export to the world. He may have been ambivalent about politics (he once said it was pretty much the same thing as church—a way to keep people ignorant), but it wasn’t because of their underlying possibilities; it was the way the political system had been twisted by the tyranny and greed of people in power that troubled him. And if his music sounded sweet and made you want to dance, it’s because, as his sometime publicist Vivien Goldman once put it, he knew that if he hooked you with the melody, you’d have to listen to what he had to say. Born in 1945 in Nine Mile, a rural village about an hour and a half outside Kingston, Marley formed The Wailers with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer in his late teens, thickening from cheerful R&B-based ska to the more rhythmically substantive sound of reggae. As firm as his association is with Jamaica, the music he made had a dialogic relationship with a variety of Black styles, including funk (“I Shot the Sheriff”, “No More Trouble”), soul (“No Woman, No Cry”, “Redemption Song”) and even disco (“Could You Be Loved”, “Exodus”)—reggae, you could say, was just his concentration. Even as he settled into smoother, pop-oriented sounds (1978's Kaya, 1980's Uprising), he retained an urgency and sense of struggle that inspired generations of artists to recognise that music, while great for entertainment, can also be the delivery system for something bigger.
- GENRE
- Reggae