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. While Marley would go on to even greater success with his next few releases, Catch a Fire provided a blueprint for his future triumphs, and remains one of the most revelatory Jamaican albums ever recorded. From the plaintive ghetto reportage of “Concrete Jungle” to the sufferers’ manifesto “400 Years”, Marley, along with fellow Wailers Bunny Marley and Peter Tosh, gives us a street level view of Kingston life with his stunning melodic sensibility and deft lyricism. While singers like John Holt Desmond Dekker and The Heptones’ Leroy Sibbles had achieved commercial success in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in America with their lovelorn Rocksteady balladry and rowdily picturesque gunman anthems, Marley’s Catch a Fire was unique for its strident political stance and unadorned Roots textures. Had his career ended in 1972 Marley would still be one of the pre-eminent figures in Jamaican music, but the release of Catch a Fire, one of the first internationally distributed Roots records, set Marley on the path to global superstardom and changed the general public’s conception of reggae forever. He had recorded low-slung New Orleans style R&B with Leslie Kong, soaring Rocksteady with Coxsone Dodd and adventurous, uncompromising Roots music with the inimitable Lee Perry. (No group of musicians has ever sounded so precise while being in so little of a hurry.) And while Marley’s populism rippled through punk, the Wailers maintained their own simmering intensity, abstractly on “Natural Mystic” and “Jamming,” directly on “Punky Reggae Party,” where Marley finds his inner hardcore kid a few years before the term was invented: “Rejected by society/Treated with impunity/Protected by my dignity/I search for reality.”īob Marley was already a hardened veteran of the Jamaican music scene by the time that Catch a Fire saw international release in the spring of 1973. As for the band, they remained borderline-peerless not only in the province of reggae, but also of funk, soul, and whatever Venn diagram you could make of the three. The overall feeling is one of victory through detente, of private peace as a foil for public rancor. And while his politics had never been of more public interest, the album’s most uplifting songs turned inward toward matters personal, romantic, and spiritual: “Three Little Birds,” the lovelorn “Waiting in Vain,” the legacy-defining “One Love.” Marley recorded the album during a self-imposed exile in London, a distance that cast his optimism about Jamaica in a cautious light. What you hear on Exodus, then, is the tension between the hope that every little thing will be all right and the creeping worry that it won’t. ![]() Marley, who had already ascended to a kind of godlike neutrality, had stepped in to try and alleviate the mood with the Smile Jamaica Concert shortly before the country’s elections in December 1976, only to be shot during a home invasion two days before the show. ![]() ![]() Exodus opens with a warning: “Many more will have to suffer/Many more will have to die/Don’t ask me why/Things are not the way they used to be.” You can see where Marley was coming from: In the few years leading up to the album’s recording in early 1977, Jamaica had experienced a tremendous swell in political violence, with gang and paramilitary groups affiliated with the country’s two main parties-the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party-killing each other in triple-digit numbers.
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