Bob Marley : classic or dud?

Okay :-D. It's satisfyingly crunchy. It's also made me think how rarely I've heard Drum'n'Bass use genuine Reggae vocals.

So you are disputing that the production became more conventionally Western and that Bunny and Tosh's contributions were intentionally marginalized?

I am not disagreeing that he wrote great songs later on or that the Wailers were a great band.

i mean i don't see nongs with coltrane t's.

Meet the typical reggae snob. Perhaps the biggest problem with Marley is the people who like him, as a wander round Camden Market of a weekend will prove. I think he's a tremendously important figure, all that "first ever 3rd World superstar" stuff happens to be true but I'm not his greatest fan. In particular, I'm not a fan of his voice, which I find thin and irritating and overly influenced by Lee Perry - he had an incomparably better singer in the band, Bunny Wailer. Also, in a Syd Barrett type ting, he apparently wrote all his best songs in a brief period and hardly wrote anything else afterwards.

oh and am i the only one to find it rather distasteful how danny baker keeps banging on gleefully about how he gave bob marley cancer?

It's not the "nong's" I'm concerned with - it's the vast massed ranks of tokenists who only actually need about a dozen CD's because a copy of Legend tells them everything they need to know about reggae just as their copies of Kind Of Blue and A Love Supreme tell them everything they need to know about jazz....

You know these people, they are moving amongst us in every day lives - their collection also includes Revolver, Sgt "Peppers and either: Blood On The Tracks, Dark Side Of The Moon and Astral Weeks (if they're over about 35); or Automatic For The People, OK Computer, (What's The Story) Morning Glory and Nevermind (if they're under about 35).

I prefer coconut.

how the fuck is it not racist to say this, about a genuwine black person? mindboggling

Anyway, letting the stupid mannerisms and attitudes of certain fans of an artist/band ruin that artist/band for you is self-conscious and dumb.

In reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the term Uncle Tom, as I understand it, is an epithet applied to blacks who are perceived to act in a shuffling, subservient manner to please white folks. Its use is, if not necessarily racist, at the very least extrodinarily racially-loaded, especially for a white person to apply. I still haven't quite wrapped my head around Robert Christgau's use of it to describe Jimi Hendrix in his infamous Monterey Pop review.

So, Marcello's not necessarily racist in applying it to Bob Marley, just wrong. Boot polish? That's racist.

1. Duppy Conquerer
2. Kaya
3. Small Axe
4. A Hammer
5. Lively Up Yourself
6. 400 Years
7. Put It On
8. Soul Rebel
9. Rastaman Chant
10.Redemption Song

but unfortunately the predictable attacks indicate yet again that your voice is not your own, you are the product of a discourse.

marley ripped off lee perry's vocal stylings and grafted it clumsily onto clapton's love-me-rich-white-man sickening succour.

sinatra can make me weep. coltrane can make me scream. marley just makes me yawn. go and listen to proper reggae, i.e. dr alimantado, joe gibbs, pablo, culture, burning spear, congos (did marley ever do anything as sheerly VISIONARY as any given nanosecond of "Row Fisherman Row"?) et Al (Green).

...it's Bernard Sumner.

LOL

Well played, sir.

Having been moderately engaged by Legend for years, taking the time to get into early Marley/Wailers last year was fun and enlightening.

I'm here to chime in: “Misty Morning" and “Crisis” are amazing songs.

Confrontation is all time.

If there is one artist who can be universally hailed as a classic . . .

Not according to Marcello Carlin, a terrible man for sure.

Exodus is a masterpiece

Marcello did offer a mea culpa of sorts.

Oh, that guy! I wouldn't have put the two together.

I honestly couldn't get through Catch a Fire. I've been meaning to give it another go for decades.

x-post

"of sorts" is covering a lot of bases there.

Yes, doesn’t own the toxic attitude as his own, just a historical error made by others as contrast to his own apparently nuanced take.

MC has a curious literary style - mixing a tone of certitude and authority with some way out WTF-ery:

Charles Shaar Murray was in attendance, to review the show for the NME, and despite the somewhat regrettable wording of his piece, did manage to give his readers a good idea of how significant and guard-changing an occasion this was; the aroma of ganja was inescapable, you didn’t trespass on the known territory of others, you had to keep a keen eye on your handbags or wallets. Overall the air was of a revivalist gospel meeting, as is evident throughout “No Woman, No Cry” in particular – or perhaps Sankey’s Sacred Songs And Solos, published one hundred and two years earlier, was still remembered – although by all accounts the intensity and atmosphere were more redolent of a Grounation ceremony.

Skanktankerous

how great is “who da cap fit”?

Love "Corner Stone", especially given its backstory

On top of everything, he's a great singer. Sounds at times like Otis Redding.

TIL Rita Marley wrote "Johnny Was". Realized about a month ago listening to Hanx! that i still LOVE SLF's version of that

Gotta be honest … I like the uk version of catch a fire w the muscle shoals guitars and such, idk

― xheugy eddy (D-40), Friday, August 18, 2023 9:33 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like both versions, but those session guns played their asses off. i do think tosh's two songs are much better without the overdubs tho.

never realized there were two versions! I do have two LPs worth of the Perry stuff (Rasta Revolution and African Herbsman) and yeah they are great

there was just one version, which was the one w/ overdubs from american roots/rock musicians bc island was trying to position marley as a reggae artist for a rock audience...to me its aged better than ie aerosmith on a run dmc album

i've never done a truly deep dive on Bob but in all honesty everything i've ever heard from him is borderline best-case scenario for the type of music that finds its way into absolute unquestioned mass acceptance, in terms of the sentiments of the songs and the quality of the work across the board.

the deluxe edition of catch a fire (from 2001) included the "unreleased original jamaican versions," alongside the album that was actually released

Feel like there are multiple Bob Marleys in play and the real Bob Marley and the Wailers as well as the original Wailers were actually pretty good and not just some kind of all-purpose filler of various niches.

yea I think the argument for the overdubs would be that reggae itself was still being defined as a genre and that part of what reggae *is* is the influence of rock and funk music...some of the overdubs were also stuff like the clavinet stevie wonder was using at the time/was big in funk music, the idea behind reggae was that it was in part a global genre which was in dialogue w what was happening creatively in america & that this was bob's vision as much as it was chris blackwell's

Gotta be honest … I like the uk version of catch a fire w the muscle shoals guitars and such, idk

― xheugy eddy (D-40), Friday, August 18, 2023 9:33 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like both versions, but those session guns played their asses off. i do think tosh's two songs are much better without the overdubs tho.

The material on that Trenchtown rock set which I think is largely the early prefame band recorded in JA though possibly augmented by local musicians is pretty great. Has some later material recorded late 70s with Perry on the second disc.great set as were most of the Sanctuary Trojan 2cds I've come across so far.