Manufacturing Bob Marley | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/manufacturing-bob-marley
No one metric captures the scale of Bob Marley’s legend except, perhaps, the impressive range of items adorned with his likeness. There are T-shirts, hats, posters, tapestries, skateboard decks, headphones, speakers, turntables, bags, watches, pipes, lighters, ashtrays, key chains, backpacks, scented candles, room mist, soap, hand cream, lip balm, body wash, coffee, dietary-supplement drinks, and cannabis (whole flower, as well as oil) that bear some official relationship with the Marley estate. There are also lava lamps, iPhone cases, mouse pads, and fragrances that do not. In 2016, Forbes calculated that Marley’s estate brought in twenty-one million dollars, making him the year’s sixth-highest-earning “dead celebrity,” and unauthorized sales of Marley music and merchandise have been estimated to generate more than half a billion dollars a year, though the estate disputes this.
At this point, books about Marley tend to be self-conscious about the risks of further mythologizing him, even if they end up doing so anyway. Steffens tries to avoid this by framing “So Much Things to Say” as four hundred pages of “raw material,” drawing from interviews he conducted over three decades with more than seventy of Marley’s bandmates, family members, lovers, and confidantes, some of whom have rarely spoken on the record. Occasionally, excerpts from interviews and articles from other authors are reprinted, too. What emerges isn’t a different Marley so much as one who feels a bit more human, given to moments of diffidence and whim, whose every decision doesn’t feel freighted with potentially world-historical significance.
Yet Marley was troubled by the demographics of his growing number of disciples. In September, 1980, he arrived in New York. He was touring “Uprising,” his most religious album yet. He was scheduled to open for the Commodores at Madison Square Garden—a strange booking, given that Marley himself was world famous. He had already played more than thirty dates in Europe, including a concert at Milan’s San Siro stadium that drew a hundred and twenty thousand people—more than the Pope had drawn a week earlier. The Commodores, meanwhile, were on the downside of a career highlighted by the featherweight soul hits “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady.” But they still drew the predominantly African-American audience that Marley craved. His failure to dent the black-radio market in America had been one of the lingering frustrations of his career.
Part of this failure had been by design. In the seventies, Blackwell marketed Marley to white, college-educated rock fans and maturing hippies, who were drawn to reggae as earthy and authentic. But in return for performing with the Commodores, Frankie Crocker, arguably the most powerful black-radio d.j. and programmer of the late seventies, promised that his station would play Marley’s new single, “Could You Be Loved,” every hour on the hour for three months. And Marley, who was sandwiched on the bill between Kurtis Blow and the Commodores, was confident that his live show would eviscerate everyone else’s. He was right. As Alvin (Seeco) Patterson, the Wailers’ drummer, recalls, “I remember when Bob finish, everybody walked out.”