Deep Album Cuts Vol. 347: Bob Marley & The Wailers
As I get up into a few hundred entries in this series, I feel more self-conscious about any major artists I haven't covered yet, and Bob Marley is one of those really transformative figures of 20th century music that I knew I always needed to get to at some point. The new biopic Bob Marley: One Love that opened in theaters last week doesn't seem to me like it would be a particularly good movie, but still, a good excuse to look back at his catalog.
Bob Marley & The Wailers deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. Midnight Ravers
Bob Marley & The Wailers deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. Midnight Ravers
2. Concrete Jungle
3. Slave Driver
4. Small Axe
5. Burnin' And Lootin'
6. Put It On
7. Talkin' Blues
8. Natty Dread
9. Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)
10. Trenchtown Rock (live)
11. Crazy Baldhead
12. Night Shift
13. So Much Things To Say
14. Guiltiness
15. Natural Mystic
16. Kaya
17. Crisis
18. One Drop
19. Africa Unite
20. Bad Card
21. Real Situation
22. We And Dem
Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Catch A Fire (1973)
Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Catch A Fire (1973)
Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from Burnin' (1973)
Tracks 7, 8 and 9 from Natty Dread (1974)
Track 10 from Live! (1975)
Tracks 11 and 12 from Rastaman Vibration (1976)
Tracks 13, 14 and 15 from Exodus (1977)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Kaya (1978)
Tracks 18 and 19 from Survival (1979)
Tracks 20, 21 and 22 from Uprising (1980)
Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer formed The Wailers in the mid-'60s and made a few albums before their international breakthrough, Catch A Fire. The availability of the stuff before that album on streaming services today is spotty, so I just started at Catch A Fire and Burnin', which were intially credited to just The Wailers. After that, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer left the group, and everything from there was billed as Bob Marley & The Wailers. It's kind of unfortunate to leave out the early stuff produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry, but a lot of those early songs were re-recorded on the later records, so I'm still covering a lot of that material.
It's kind of astonishing to think about what Bob Marley accomplished before dying at only 36 years old. The posthumous 1984 compilation Legend, which was a deliberate attempt to soften Marley's image with a focus on less political material, has become one of those greatest hits albums that casts a long shadow over the artist's catalog. It's sold over 15 million copies in the U.S. alone, whereas none of his proper studio albums are platinum in America and only a few of them are gold. So making a playlist like this really feels like a chance to make a counterpoint to Legend, to highlight important Marley songs that are left out of that portrait of his catalog.
"Crisis" was recently sampled on the latest Hot 100 hit by a member of the Marley family,"Praise Jah In The Moonlight" by YG Marley, aka Lauryn Hill's son Joshua Marley. I do not like that song, but I like "Crisis." I remember weirdly hearing Charlie Hunter's excellent 1997 cover of Natty Dread before hearing the original album, that's a pretty cool record. My favorite songs on here are probably "Small Axe," "Night Shift," "One Drop" and "Concrete Jungle."
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