That’s a somewhat pointless title, because everybody loves
Bob Marley. I love him, you love him, they love him. I would be willing to put
money on the Taliban listening to Iron Lion Zion after a long day of providing
the idiots of the world with a highly negative stereotype to apply to the rest
of Islam. My point is that everybody loves Bob. This is not so much a ‘you
should totally listen to him’ type post, so much as a ‘wow he’s great, it’s a
real shame he’s gone’ kind of post. Everyone would be so much more chilled out
if Bob was still here.
I personally have known about him growing up, mainly off my
mum, because she loves Bob (and I mean more than you do). She had to write
about a musician when she was at school and she wrote about Bob Marley. There’s
a framed jigsaw puzzle of his head in our living room, right above a jigsaw of
Che Guevara, and my family loves Communism (off-topic trivia: there are about 38
different bits of Cuban Revolution memorabilia scattered around the flat), so
that’s a place of honour. I failed to do well in Music before I dropped it (weird considering that I'm writing this on a music blog), in part because they expect me to have
an innate knowledge of how to play piano and compose music, and in part because
I managed to save most of Bob Marley’s best hits to my personal file on the school
system and just listened to those instead.
What I love about Bob Marley is that he manages to make
music about pretty serious issues like the slavery and racism in the USA, and
keeping true to his faith and stuff, but he manages to be really chilled out
about it – although, considering the weed, is that really surprising? If you’ve
ever seen the Channel 4 documentary about the recording of one of his big
albums (I can’t get google to give me a proper answer about what the doc’s
called), then you will know that Bob’s rasta teacher is the most stoned man to
ever walk the earth. They got him on to be a talking head and give some really
deep comment, and he just started going on about whipping people with his
dreadlocks. But yeah, he manages to make songs like One Love, about just
chilling out and recognising his connection to Jah (through weed, yes, but it
is a part of the Rastafari religion), and he manages to also make it not sound
like he’s claiming the moral high ground or suggesting that you’re only able to
feel that kind of happiness and content by following his religion – although,
yes, he does disagree with Abrahamic religions in songs like Get Up Stand Up, I
don’t think he’d be too annoyed about it as long as you stopped attacking
people for pointless things all the time (that goes for atheists, too, if you’re
going to leave your life down to your own morals then make sure you’ve got good
ones).
What’s also awesome is that his songs sound brilliant as
well. There’s no boring songs of his that I know of, and they all sound
distinctly different to each other – nobody’s going to confuse I Shot TheSheriff with Three Little Birds, are they? All brilliant, wonderful songs, even
if you can’t tell what he’s saying (I don’t care what he says, I still think it’d
be better if he was saying ‘jamming right straight from York’).
Here are my top five songs of his that I haven’t already
mentioned.
That should be enough proof as any that, if you don’t already
love Bob Marley, you should do. Come on, he has the face of a lion. An iron
lion, you might say. If not that, then love him because he can make you feel
really chilled out even if you’re not as high as a kite.
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