Somewhere along the way, Bob Marley’s Legend was accepted as absolute truth.
Legend, the hits collection released three years after the iconic singer’s death, is by leaps and bounds the best-selling reggae album of all time, moving more than 12 million copies in the U.S. and an estimated 25 million copies globally — a perennial chart blockbuster that for many listeners defines both Marley’s career and reggae as a whole. Legend did not just make history, however: it also changed history, reframing Marley’s music and message to make him more palatable to a broader audience, primarily by de-emphasizing his signature songs of resistance and revolution while foregrounding lighter, more uplifting fare — a modus operandi established with the retrospective’s opening track, the buoyant “Is This Love.”
“Greatest hits collections are notoriously bad showcases, but Legend was a doozy — a defanged and overproduced selection of Marley’s music,” Field Maloney wrote for Slate in 2006. “Listening to Legend to understand Marley is like reading Bridget Jones’s Diary to get Jane Austen.”
Understanding Marley instead starts by temporarily extricating hits like “Is This Love” from Legend’s framework, and reconsidering their proper place within the context of his life and times. “Is This Love” first appeared on Kaya, Marley’s tenth studio album, released in March 1978, a month ahead of the One Love Peace Concert, the all-star showcase heralding Marley’s first performance in his native Jamaica in more than a year. Marley was by this time reggae’s most popular and influential performer: since surfacing in 1963 as one third of the Wailers, the pioneering group that also launched the careers of Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, he’d reeled off a series of now-classic songs like “I Shot the Sheriff” (covered in 1974 by Eric Clapton, who scored his first and only number one on the Billboard Hot 100), “No Woman, No Cry” (a highlight of 1975’s seminal Live!) and the human rights anthem “Get Up, Stand Up,” arguably the purest, most universal expression of the devoutly Rastafarian Marley’s political and spiritual ideals.
“Marley sang about tyranny and anger, about brutality and apocalypse, in enticing tones, not dissonant ones,” Mikal Gilmore wrote for Rolling Stone in 2005. “His melodies take up a resonance in our minds, in our lives, and that can provide admission to the songs’ meanings… He was the master of mellifluent insurgency.”
Soon after the release of 1976’s Rastaman Vibration — Marley’s commercial breakthrough in the U.S., reaching the Top 50 of Billboard’s soul charts — Marley was the target of an assassination attempt. On Dec. 3, two days ahead of his scheduled headline performance at the Smile Jamaica Concert (a benefit to combat political violence), seven armed men stormed Marley’s Kingston residence: the singer was shot in the chest and arm, wife Rita Marley was shot in the head, and two others, manager Don Taylor and associate Louis Griffiths, were wounded. Miraculously, there were no fatalities, and just 48 hours after the shooting (the inspiration behind Marlon James’ Man Booker Prize-winning 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings), Marley played a triumphant 90-minute Smile Jamaica set. But the attack prompted him to relocate to England, home of his label, Island Records. This self-imposed 14-month exile yielded both Kaya (Jamaican slang for “dope”) and its immediate predecessor, 1977’s Exodus, recorded simultaneously at London’s Basing Street Studios.
While Exodus featured some of Marley’s fiercest broadsides to date, including the stirring title track (his first single to earn widespread airplay on America’s Black radio stations, expanding his music’s U.S. audience beyond its core base of white college students and Caribbean expats), Kaya shifted gears from the political to the personal, highlighted by the slinky, sunkissed “Is This Love,” a paean to domestic bliss dedicated to Rita, also a member of Marley’s backing vocal unit the I-Threes. “I wanna love you, and treat you right/I wanna love you, every day and every night,” Marley sings, an unabashedly romantic declaration that inspired critic Lester Bangs to dub him “the Barry White of Montego Bay” in a savage review of Kaya (“quite possibly the blandest set of reggae music I have ever heard”) published in Rolling Stone’s June 1, 1978 edition. Bangs was far from alone in dismissing the album: many critics took issue with Kaya’s more introspective sensibilities and softer-edged production, and some even suggested Marley had sold out his political beliefs. “Me never like what politics really represent,” Marley told Hot Press around the time of Kaya’s release. “’Tis music. It can’t be political all the while.”
Decades removed from Kaya’s initial reception, it’s difficult to find fault with “Is This Love.” Marley did not lead a simple, straightforward romantic life: in his final years, he entered an affair with Miss World winner Cindy Breakspeare, the mother of his son Damian, and later wooed Prescaline Bongo, the daughter of Gabon’s former president Omar Bongo, as well as a woman named Yvette Crichton, who gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Makeda, less than three weeks after Marley’s death on May 11, 1981 from acral lentiginous melanoma. Yet against all odds, “Is This Love” is a simple, straightforward love song. It shimmers and sparkles, like sunlight on water. Isolate Marley’s lead vocal here in KORD if you question the sincerity of his desire for Rita, or alternatively, isolate the I-Threes’ rapturous backing vocals if you question whether she still felt the same longing for her husband. Add to the mix a charming music video filmed at London’s Keskidee Youth Centre (yes, that’s seven-year-old future supermodel Naomi Campbell in the audience), and it’s easy to understand how “Is This Love” reached number nine on the U.K. singles chart — and, ultimately, why it was selected as the perfect song to lead off Legend. If “Is This Love” is your first exposure to Marley’s music, you’re going to fall hard.
Legend is the brainchild of music industry veteran Dave Robinson, the co-founder of Stiff Records, the pioneering British independent label synonymous with landmark records from Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello and Ian Dury, among others. In late 1983, Island Records acquired 50 percent of Stiff, and Robinson was installed at the helm of both labels. His first order of business was a compilation of Bob Marley hits to follow on the heels of Confrontation, a collection of unreleased material completed prior to Marley’s passing. Robinson was shocked to discover that despite Marley’s worldwide renown, his records were never big sellers: Exodus, his most successful studio album, shifted only about 650,000 units in the U.S., and fewer than 200,000 in the U.K. Robinson blamed Island’s decision to market Marley as a champion of the dispossessed — a tireless fighter against the forces of greed and oppression — and determined a makeover was in order.
“My vision of Bob from a marketing point of view was to sell him to the white world,” Robinson told The Village Voice’s Chris Kornelis for a 2014 investigation headlined “The White Album: How Bob Marley Posthumously Became a Household Name.” Robinson theorized that suburban record buyers were turned off by Marley’s media persona — “that of a gleeful Rasta with a croissant-sized spliff clenched in his teeth, stoned silly and without a care in the world,” per the obituary Marley biographer Timothy White wrote for Rolling Stone — so Island contracted a market researcher named Gary Trueman to conduct focus groups with white suburban record buyers across England. Trueman’s efforts proved Robinson’s hypothesis correct: more conservative listeners loved Marley’s music, but couldn’t abide its political and devotional trappings.
Robinson set about rebuilding Marley’s image from the ground up. He selected for Legend’s cover a photo of Marley at his most peaceful and pensive, recruited Paul McCartney to make a cameo appearance in the video for the set’s first single, “One Love/People Get Ready,” and launched an expensive but effective radio and television campaign that deliberately excluded the word “reggae” from all advertising copy. Last but certainly not least, Robinson spent months painstakingly arranging Legend’s running order, frontloading the track listing with Marley’s most empathetic and hopeful hits — “Is This Love” precedes the Live! recording of “No Woman, No Cry” and “Three Little Birds” on Side 1 — while shunning his most stridently polemical material.
It all worked exactly according to plan. At the time of this writing in March 2023, Legend has spent just shy of 800 nonconsecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 albums chart — the second longest run in history behind Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, released 11 years earlier. It’s a force of nature and a rite of passage, especially for college students (“Bob Marley Rises from Grave to Free Frat Boys from Bonds of Oppression,” reads a 2005 headline from satirical newspaper The Onion). No, Legend does not represent Marley’s musical vision comprehensively or accurately, but people like what they like, and for whatever reason, they really, really like Legend. For many, it’s the only reggae album in their collection — maybe the only one they’ve ever heard. “It doesn’t just define a career, it defines a genre,” SoundScan analyst Dave Bakula told The Village Voice. “I don’t think you’ve got another genre where you’ve got that one album.”
That makes a simple song like “Is This Love” profoundly meaningful. Legend doesn’t work if “Is This Love” doesn’t work — if it doesn’t so effortlessly seduce listeners of all ages, all races, all orientations, and all beliefs. First impressions are everything, after all. And think of how differently this all plays out if Legend doesn’t work: because the album still sells week over week, month over month, year over year, Bob Marley is in death far bigger than he ever was in life, an eternal megastar as recognizable and as overexposed as Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe — a cottage industry whose image and name are licensed for everything from t-shirts to headphones to coffee to his own cannabis brand, Marley Natural. In 2021, Forbes ranked Marley number 11 on its bi-annual list of the world’s highest-paid dead celebrities, with estimated annual earnings of $16 million — a strange fate for a man whose final words were “Money can’t buy life.”
It’s more than some fans and scholars can bear. “Bob Marley ranks among both the most popular and the most misunderstood figures in modern culture,” laments Dave Thompson in his 2002 book Reggae and Caribbean Music. “That the machine has utterly emasculated Marley is beyond doubt. Gone from the public record is the ghetto kid who dreamed of Che Guevara and the Black Panthers, and pinned their posters up in the Wailers Soul Shack record store; who believed in freedom; and the fighting which it necessitated, and dressed the part on an early album sleeve; whose heroes were James Brown and Muhammad Ali; whose God was Rastafari and whose sacrament was marijuana. Instead, the Bob Marley who surveys his kingdom today is smiling benevolence, a shining sun, a waving palm tree, and a string of hits which tumble out of polite radio like candy from a gumball machine. Of course it has assured his immortality. But it has also demeaned him beyond recognition. Bob Marley was worth far more.”
We’ll never know what Marley himself would have thought about the Legend phenomenon. Dave Robinson speculated that the album might never have been authorized for release if Marley had lived and recorded past the age of 36. “Greatest-hits projects, the ones that really work, unfortunately work mainly because the people are dead,” Robinson told The Village Voice. “A living artist will tell you that the greatest song he’s ever written is the one he’s last written.”
An interview cited in Gregory Stephens’ 1999 book On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley nevertheless supplies a telltale clue about how Marley would have responded to the commercial calculations behind Legend’s existence. Asked about the preponderance of white fans responsible for purchasing his records and attending his live performances, Marley acknowledged the schism between the audience he attracted and the audience he sought to inspire.
“There should be no more war between white and Black,” Marley responded. “But until white people listen to Black with open ears, there must be, well, suspicion.”
Is This Love (KORD-0003)
