Bob Marley : classic or dud?

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).

I don't think he ripped off Perry.

The Perry-period stuff is marvellous and rightly gets great respect. The Studio 1 material is, I think, very mid-60s Coxsone business and too often overlooked, at least by comparison.

marley was beloved of a white audience. the lyceum '75 audience was 80% white, for example. do any blacks even bother listening to him these days?

classically DUD.

Lee Perry is not the most reliable of sources, though, is he?

Marcello, several of the names you mention above will have, at certain points in their histories, have attracted audiences in the UK which were substantially white, and I'd be very wary of trying to map that on to musical quality.

My understanding is that Bob Marley is enormously popular in many black communities around the world, and I know he's listened to where I live. Certainly he garners enormous respect on the reggae lists and newsgroups I've read over the years, including from people who know their reggae inside out.

I'd never really thought about this until I read that David Katz biography of Perry where (i think) Jimmy Riley and Clancy Eccles both point out that not only did Marley's vocal style change as a result of working with Perry but he began to sound like Lee Perry. One of them said something like "Listen to Marley after he worked with Perry, that's Lee Perry's voice you're hearing". It's not so much a case of Marley ripping Perry off as of Perry coaching Marley musically and vocally.

(It's probably also fair to say that the likes of Mr. Eccles know what they're on about much more than the likes of me. But it's nice to try to make my own mind up sometimes...!)

If they did would that make him good?

This is a joke, right?

However, after learning more about Reggae and reading up on some of the backstories of some of his songs ("Burnin' & Lootin'" etc), I realised that a lot of his stuff was based not in abstract ideas of how the world is fucked up, but in experiencing the world's fucked-upness firsthand.

So my question, to try to put it in specific enough terms, is: do you think that there's a specific point at which Marley's lyrics stopped being about trying to get the ppl in his backyard to stop shooting each other, and started to be about trying to get ppl everywhere to stop shooting each other? A specific point in time when it stopped being about preaching to a very specific community and started being about more-or-less universal messages?