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.īorn 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. 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. His music spoke to colonialism (“Small Axe”), poverty (“Them Belly Full ”), 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. 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.
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