When Bob Marley died of cancer in May 1981, two of his most recent singles showed how far he’d come from the roots reggae that made him a global star. “Redemption Song” was a solemn, acoustic folk ballad, and “Could You Be Loved” was a glistening slice of reggae-tinged disco-pop that dialogued with Chic, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross. Marley’s hard-won stardom had come by softening his music for Western ears under the tutelage of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, the white man who grew up in a tony Kingston suburb as the scion of generational wealth owing to his mother’s imperial bloodlines.
Blackwell was a representative of what Marley dubbed the vampiric, westernized “Babylon System”—Marley’s one-time bandmate Peter Tosh dubbed him “Chris Whiteworst”—but Marley had his eyes on the prize more than most of his Rasta contemporaries, deploying his bottomless charisma and canny songwriting abilities to reap significant financial benefits from that same crooked business. A Billboard article published the week of Marley’s death illuminated the two sides of his public persona: It opened by noting that Marley would lie in state and receive Ethiopian Orthodox funeral services, before quoting a Warner Bros. representative complaining that the company’s distribution centers had been “hard hit” by a Marley LP shortage in the wake of his passing.
The critic Evan Eisenberg wrote that “record listening is a séance where we get to choose our ghosts,” which rings especially true once a musician cannot record anymore. The final gift that a dead musician gives their listeners is the capacity to hear their music anew: to mourn, to celebrate, but also to narrativize. What is their legacy, now that they’re finished releasing new music? Marley’s level of fame and influence meant that, after his death at 36, his legacy, his spirit, his brand was to be shaped by a record industry that could be callously indifferent to truth or quality at the expense of revenue. Four months after his death, a handful of late 1960s recordings Marley and the Wailers cut for American soul singer Johnny Nash and his business partner, Danny Sims, were rushed out on a slapdash compilation, abysmally titled Chances Are–the first cash-in of many to come. Pulling no punches, Rolling Stone critic (and Marley biographer) Timothy White savaged Chances Are for its poor quality and exploitative proximity to Marley’s death as “a tribute to unvarnished greed and maliciousness,” wishing “shame on anyone connected with it.”
In a press release, Blackwell also shamed Chances Are’s poor curation and terrible mastering, but he too was plenty busy meeting the sudden demand for new and old Marley material. In 1982, Island’s newly established video production subsidiary released a television documentary (also terribly titled: Caribbean Nights) that opened with footage of local laborers building Marley’s humble mausoleum in his rural birthplace of St. Ann, and, for the first time, told his life story with participation from family, friends, and collaborators. At the other end of the spectrum, Island produced the low-budget 1982 film Countryman, plotted around the titular, nearly naked Jamaican bushman—Rasta gadabout Edwin Lothan—who outwits powerful enemies with his jungle-honed wiles. An instant cult classic of Caribbean Orientalism, the film ended with a solemn dedication to Marley, though its plot couldn’t have been further from the singer’s actual life or beliefs. Whatever: it had a great soundtrack, loaded with Marley’s own music and cuts from reggae musicians Aswad, Dennis Brown, and Toots and the Maytals.
On the second anniversary of Marley’s death, Island released Confrontation, the final album of unheard Marley material. It was promoted with “Buffalo Soldier,” a slick, uptempo single honoring the Black U.S. soldiers who fought for the U.S. after the Civil War—a natural fit for late-period Marley, who believed that the African diaspora was fighting the same battles. He likens the Black U.S. soldier to the “dreadlock Rasta,” both of whom were “stolen from Africa” and forced to labor under the yoke of imperial powers. “If you know your history,” Marley keens in the third verse, “then you would know where you’re coming from.” But as White (among others) correctly noted in his best-selling 1983 Marley biography Catch a Fire, the U.S. used the Buffalo Soldiers as “part of a public relations move to justify and glorify the genocide of Native Americans,” and any irony that Marley intended in his lyrics was drowned out by the song’s a gaudy brass arrangement, evoking a stately medal ceremony. More depressingly, Marley had recorded and released several incredible songs about imperialist abuses of power during his short life, but a posthumously released track about formerly enslaved soldiers forcing Natives from their land became more popular than all of them.
Released into a rapidly changing musical landscape, “Buffalo Soldier” shared the airwaves with a glut of Caribbean-indebted new wave that was thriving in the wake of Marley’s island revolution. Culture Club, Men at Work, Madness, the Police, the English Beat, Blondie, and others proved that reggae and ska could attract U.S. radio listeners and MTV viewers—as long as attractive, fashionable young white people were the most visible part of the promotion. Unlike most FM radio programmers, however, the upstart MTV included reggae as part of its notoriously segregated format: “We are going after a rock audience. We play Bob Marley and Peter Tosh,” crowed an executive at a late-1981 music conference, pushing back on the racism claim while admitting that so-called “third world” authenticity was one of the few avenues for Black artists to get on MTV’s air. Blackwell duly commissioned a music video for “Buffalo Soldier,” and the results were as embarrassing for Marley’s legacy as Chances Are: Rastas dressed as 19th-century U.S. grunts puff ganja while fighting an unseen enemy in a generic wilderness. Intercut with unrelated footage of Marley himself at a studio mixing board, the video tacitly conveys his approval of an amateurish skit.
In 1984, with Marley’s musical legacy still largely underaddressed, Island finally met the demand with Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers, a compilation culled from Marley’s time on the label, including “Soldier,” “Redemption Song,” “Could You Be Loved” and 11 others, focusing on the catchy UK hits from the latter half of his career. In the U.S., Legend initially peaked at No. 54, accurately reflecting Marley’s inability to sell albums stateside (his biggest-selling U.S. LP, 1976’s Rastaman Vibration, wasn’t certified gold until 1996). It took a while for Legend' to find its initial audience–itreached platinum by 1988–but during the 1990s, it kept selling and selling, averaging nearly a million copies per year. By the turn of the century, Legend was certified diamond, commemorating the rare achievement of 10 million copies sold.
This was due, in part, to the compact disc’s arrival: When millions started replacing their cassettes and donating their vinyl records, a single CD standing in for “reggae” was an efficient investment. A much bigger hit across the Atlantic, Legend stayed on the UK albums chart for longer than any other album, save the greatest-hits comps from Queen and ABBA. By the end of 2024, Legend had sold more than 18 million copies, the sixteenth highest count for any album. Critic Michaelangelo Matos called Legend “the Kind of Blue of reggae—the one album of its type that everyone owns,” and indeed, if you play it for a music fan of a certain age, odds are that they’ll express their love for its simple beauty, yawn at its omnipresence, or complain that “Concrete Jungle” and “Natural Mystic” aren’t on there. Legend’s most widely-known songs—“One Love,” “Three Little Birds,” “No Woman, No Cry,” “Jammin’”—are simple, catchy, optimistic standards that have become part of the global vernacular, and “Get Up, Stand Up” became the de facto anthem of Amnesty International, subject to periodic superstar sing-alongs. More than four decades later, Legend still serves as a synecdoche for all reggae. At the end of 2025, Billboard’s year-end reggae chart was once again topped by Legend, while no albums released that year made the cut.
Legend’s sales numbers and cultural influence were buoyed by a new perceptual shift that sedimented during the 1990s: After the thawing of the Cold War, a relentlessly marketed new worldview posited, we now lived in a cosmopolitan global village, one that was knit together by satellite and internet linkups, powered by deregulated markets, soundtracked by exoticized musicians who’d never seen the spotlight before, and sold with the multi-culti vibe of a Benetton ad. The record business led the way: the year after Legend’s release came “We Are the World,” Live Aid, and Artists United Against Apartheid, reactivating the rock charity spectacle to feed starving Ethiopians and illuminate the horrors of South African apartheid.
The year after that, Paul Simon’s Graceland and Peter Gabriel’s So demonstrated the aesthetic and discursive value of apolitically integrating South African and Senegalese musicians into rock albums, laying a path that David Byrne took to Latin and South America for his 1989 album Rei Momo. After Billboard debuted its World Albums chart in May 1990, anything pop or rock-oriented that didn’t derive from North America or Western Europe fell under the umbrella of “world music,” and artists like Youssou N’Dour, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Ziggy Marley & the Melody Makers (featuring a few of Marley’s children) found wide audiences on their own merits. Predicting this moment of a globally empathetic, mildly progressive record industry was Legend, the modest compilation that was also the era’s biggest beneficiary.
“No one in rock’n’roll has left a legacy that matters more, or one that matters in such fundamental ways,” wrote Rolling Stone critic Robert Palmer upon Marley’s 1994 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Though Marley explicitly foreswore what he called “politricks” and pledged support only to his fellow Rastafarians, few musicians have ever woven themselves so deeply into their nation’s political sphere, and no other could remotely touch Marley’s global popularity. Through his music, he communicated with the Jamaican poor and working class with a depth that politicians couldn’t touch. Jamaican radio stations were reportedly loath to play his music in favor of more respectable representations of their local culture, but Democratic Socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley wedged himself into Marley’s 1976 “Smile Jamaica” benefit concert, and scheduled the country’s elections for 10 days later to ride the wave of public relations.
Though Marlon James’ sprawling 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictionalized account of Marley’s attempted murder the night before that concert, it’s rooted in Marley’s symbolic position in Cold War battles over Caribbean politics that—like all stories about CIA interventionism—toe the line between outlandish and “of course.” In exile in London for his safety, Marley titled his next album Exodus, and later translated his survival into a living musical myth. Marley’s return to Jamaica in 1978—brokered by party-affiliated local gang leaders—was the island’s biggest arrival since Haile Selassie’s 1966 visit, and he brought the opposing parties together in a symbolic display of unity during the epochal “One Love” concert that followed. In the years before his death, Marley became an unofficial ambassador for Pan-Africanist freedom movements, culminating with a performance at the official ceremony declaring Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.
You’ll learn little of this listening to Legend, which essentially replaces Marley’s politics and the religious beliefs that inspired them with the easier-to-swallow rags-to-riches story told in the compilation’s liner notes. This was by design. Marley’s reintroduction to the world was guided by Island executive Dave Robinson, whose goal was clear from the start: “My vision of Bob from a marketing point of view was to sell him to the white world,” and “stay out of the more political songs,” he explained. Mission accomplished. According to Blackwell, Robinson even insisted on keeping the word “reggae” out of the album’s marketing, because consumer research reported an aversion among the buying public to the term’s association with red-eyed Rastas chanting about revolution. The version of Marley’s ghost most amenable to the global marketplace is the one on the cover of Legend: a handsome, pensive Black singer-songwriter, not the class-conscious roots activist who recorded “Burnin’ & Lootin’,” “Slave Driver,” “War,” “Talkin’ Blues” and “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry).” Legend’s reinvention of Marley, to one critic, “magically crossed over all national and racial boundaries with a pluralist vision of ‘one love’ that legitimated the national narrative of a multicultural America.”
Tracking “One Love”—the song and the sentiment—across the 20 years from its first recording to its opening Side B of Legend reveals much about Marley’s ascent from rude boy to global superstar. The song was originally cut in 1965 by the Wailing Wailers—Marley, Tosh, and Bunny Livingston—belting spirited but amateurish three-part harmony over a hopscotching ska rhythm recorded by local impresario Coxsone Dodd on his two-track board. Marley’s lyrics, yet to be influenced by Rastafarianism, sampled and tweaked Curtis Mayfield’s epochal “People Get Ready,” released the same year and soon adopted by Martin Luther King, Jr. as the U.S. civil rights movement’s unofficial anthem. While Mayfield was slightly exclusionary regarding who could board the forthcoming train to salvation—“There ain’t no room for the hopeless sinner/Who would hurt all mankind just to save his own” is obliquely addressed to the racist political infrastructure of the U.S. south—Marley leaves salvation an open question, asking, “Is there a place for the hopeless sinner?”
Fast-forward to 1977, Marley is holed up in a four-story flat on Oakley Street in Chelsea, working on Exodus, listening to the Clash and the Damned, and spending his downtime with the reigning Miss World Cindy Breakspeare. Marley re-cut “One Love” with Blackwell in a posh London studio, slowed by a third and guided by Tyrone Downie’s glimmering piano and backing vocals by the I-Threes: Judy Mowatt, Marcia Griffiths, and Rita Marley. Marley was famous now, and Blackwell insisted that the song, which closed Exodus, be subtitled “People Get Ready” to acknowledge co-authorship (and possibly avoid the courtroom). The re-recorded “One Love” wasn’t issued as a single until Legend’s release in 1984, promoted by a Don Letts music video that starred a dreadlocked biracial child, featured appearances from Madness, Bananarama, Aswad, Musical Youth, and Paul McCartney, and spliced in archival footage of Marley dancing with a multiracial group of children. Three years after his death, Letts and Island had effectively re-cast Marley as a benevolent father figure, spreading love to the world’s young people. He was now the secular saint of “world music,” avant la lettre.
“One Love” has become Marley’s “Give Peace a Chance” or “All You Need is Love,” a simple tune with a politically naive message that arose out of specific conditions before spiraling into eternal circulation. Marley was unrivaled at delivering catchy slogans, and the only protest song to appear on Legend, 1973’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” is his best. Weaving Rasta grievance politics into the Black Power movement that had found many willing believers among the Caribbean underclass, “Get Up” expresses the Wailers’ disdain for the standard-bearers of Jamaican Christianity, who’d refused to officially acknowledge their religious beliefs. More politically confrontational than Marley, Tosh castigates the “-ism schism” of religious division in a seething proto-rap in the song’s third verse. The rest of the band, perhaps the most locked-in of the early 1970s, sounds flush with the thrill of introducing a genuinely new package of Black rhythm, image, and ideology from Kingston to the world.
Because “Get Up” is such a quintessential reggae tune—maybe the quintessential reggae tune—it’s easy to forget the flourishing world of early-1970s Black and Latin rock that the Wailers were dialoguing with at the time. They weren’t playing reggae, but what poet Linton Kwesi Johnson called “international reggae,” which broke from the more localized sounds of Kingston and London to lean into soul, R&B, and funk, courting the international rock market that had sent albums by War and Santana to No. 1 in 1973. The immediate context of the song was the religious economy of Jamaica, but it was cast in the mold of funky ’70s art-soul: a Stevie Wonder-style clavinet weaves its way through the sulfurously funky, deep-pocket groove dug by drummer Carlton Barrett and his bassist brother Aston, while Marley pushes his threadbare smoker’s rasp to its breaking point. Sharpening the hook from War’s “Slippin’ Into Darkness” for its chorus, “Get Up” also echoes the soulful calls to action of erstwhile Wailer tourmates Sly and the Family Stone, channels the sinister spirit beneath “Payback”-era James Brown, and dialogues with the funk-inspired Afrobeat of Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti. Looking back, it’s shocking that “Get Up” didn’t hit more broadly in the U.S. during this moment, amid a loose coalition of funky Black rock bands (including Parliament/Funkadelic and the Isley Brothers) that would soon be programmed out of existence by record labels and radio executives who insisted that rock was a white person’s format.
Speaking of which: In 1974, Marley and the Wailers hitched a ride into that other crossover lane: a famous white musician covering your song. Eric Clapton’s wan take on “I Shot the Sheriff” introduced Marley to most of America, and once listeners started digging out the copies of Catch a Fire and Burnin’ lingering on record store shelves, significantly raised his profile. Marley’s original version was a take on the Marty Robbins-style gunfighter ballads that were so popular on the island in the 1950s and 1960s, mixed with a bit of the pseudo-mythmaking perfected by Dylan and Johnny Cash, its chorus sung in high, ’60s-style harmonies by Tosh and Wailer. Marley swaggers through his imagined self-defense—unfurling “but they say it was a cap-i-tal oh-fense” like Muhammad Ali rapping at a crowded press conference.
Endless discussions about the lyrics’ putative “reality” are feints: “Sheriff” instead mythologized the heated late 1960s ferment, in the U.S. and Jamaica alike, when many existentially threatened young Black men were—symbolically and literally—taking aim at authority figures. Five years earlier, Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton was convicted of killing a real cop (in self-defense) and injuring (but not killing) that cop’s partner in an Oakland showdown that was witnessed by no one and instantly transformed into legend. The same year “Sheriff” was released as a single, Newton, whose conviction was overturned, released Revolutionary Suicide, covered with an image of the activist in full Panther regalia, sitting in a peacock chair holding a spear. While Clapton’s version spoke directly to white AOR radio programmers, Marley’s original was participating in a parallel conversation, with Newton, Ali, Angela Davis, Dick Gregory, and many other Black public figures in what the scholar Paul Gilroy dubbed the alternative public sphere of the Black diaspora.
Thanks to “I Shot the Sheriff” and the slow absorption of the 1972 Jamaican music biz/gangster flick The Harder They Come into American counterculture, reggae blew up in the U.S. Throughout 1975 and 1976, seemingly every newspaper and magazine sent reporters to Kingston, where Marley entertained their oft-oblivious questions while sitting on the hood of his BMW in the yard of his Hope Road compound, spouting Rasta theology, chain-smoking spliffs, and leaning hard into his Kingston dialect. Though Marley “could moderate the sometimes nigh-impenetrable patois enough to facilitate greater understanding,” speculated Lester Bangs in his Creem profile, “then he would not be so apparently the most prominent media front-man for the Rasta Revolution.” Regardless, Marley’s music—especially in concert—spoke volumes: critics and musicians alike cite Marley and the Wailers’ 1975 tour of the U.S. and UK as the moment that sealed them as the most exciting band in the world. Letts called the July 1975 Lyceum Theatre concert he attended “probably the single most exciting music moment of my life…the closest I ever got to a religious experience.” Future PiL bassist Jah Wobble cites Aston Barrett’s bass playing during the show as a formative influence on his musical future. Veteran critic David Hepworth, who wrote a terrific book on the subject, said that the Lyceum show “anoint[ed] Bob Marley as the first rock star of the third world,” and he still rates it as the best concert he’s ever seen. A year later, Marley was flinging his dreads on the cover of Rolling Stone.
