Bob Marley & The Wailers – Exodus

1977, Island / Tuff Gong

One thing I find interesting about Bob Marley’s discography is how every album has diehard fans that pick it over all the many others. There are those who swear by Catch A Fire, those who love Natty Dread, those who love Burnin’, even some who love Soul Rebels, or Kaya. But if there was only one Marley record it would obviously be Exodus. You can pick your favourite (I pick Soul Revolution Part II), but you can’t pick the most iconic. Even if you have nothing but fire in your heart for Chris Blackwell, or as you might call him, Chris Whiteworst. The matter is not up for debate.

This is definitely a Blackwell album – not his most obnoxious work, but the production is decidedly non-Jamaican. Backup singers are used too much, there are guitar solos inserted in positions that almost make you roll your eyes, the arrangements are more noticeably more ambitious and ‘progressive’ than any contemporary in 1977, and Turn Your Lights Down Low is very conspicuously not reggae. For as big as Marley’s music became internationally, not least of all this record, it musically didn’t make many waves in Jamaica. In the eighties almost everyone sounded like Dennis Brown, and a handful of artists sounded like Gregory Isaacs or Horace Andy. Johnny Clarke laid out the ‘reggae canon’ or ‘reggae standards’ if you will, and most of the best deejay cuts were done on the back of his music. Meanwhile, nobody sounds like Bob, and Exodus stands far in left field. 

It is possible to find music that has been obviously touched by Exodus, but they are much fewer and further between than you would expect from a record as massive as this. I think it is safe to say that Ten Commandments by I-Roy is an outlier – for those who haven’t heard it, it could be called a ‘gimmick’ record wherein all ten riddims are the ten tunes on Exodus, performed by Canadian group Chalawa. Also worth a BKH writeup. Anyway a more conventional example of Exodus’ influence in the wild would be I Don’t Want To Wait For Your Love by Jah Batta, which I could have sworn already featured in a BKH writeup, but I can’t find it on my own site. It is, of course, a reimagining of Waiting In Vain.

Speaking of which, Waiting In Vain is a wonderful tune, isn’t it!! I will offhandedly call it within the top three lover’s rock tunes and leave the onus on someone else to maybe, but probably not, prove me wrong. Tunes like this are why Exodus is untouchable in the Bob/Wailers discography. Exodus, Jammin’, and Waiting In Vain back to back to back is a phenomenal run of tunes. On Youth Man Vibrations by Noel Philips, he drops Money Man Skank, Jungle Living and Love Light in a similar triple whammy, and those three tunes are such pingers & poppers that they can go toe to toe with our Exodus hat-trick, but then Exodus also sports Natural Mystic, So Much Things To Say, Three Little Birds and One Love. Absolutely monumental tracklist. And the other tunes are fine too. Noel Philips ends up looking like the coughing baby in this comparison.

However the One Love we see here on Exodus is not the original, as many a non-reggae-head doesn’t know, but a reggaeified version of the original Wailers tune dropped in 1966 on their debut The Wailing Wailers (which is also yet another strong contender for ‘best Wailers record’). Had One Love never become one of the most popular and iconic reggae tunes in history, it would have seemed like a ridiculous idea to try to make a reggae version of it in the first place. Like many “reggae” tunes of the seventies, it comes from “proto-reggae” Jamaican music, in this case not rocksteady (as is usually the case) but ska. Slowing a tune down from rocksteady to reggae usually makes a tune slightly awkward but still comfortably enjoyable (here is a good example), but going from ska to reggae is definitely a stretch. The more you listen to the original One Love, the stranger the Blackwell version sounds. “Let’s… get… together, and… feel… all… right”. Legato from the backup singers on ‘feel’ and ‘all’ does little to cover up the quite literally stretched melody here. 

And despite being identifiably (but not offensively) Blackwell, Jammin’ is to me one of the quintessential steppers tunes out there and is my personal favourite pick on this record. This is what reggae sounds like when you write reggae instead of turning ska or rocksteady into reggae. The space between notes and lines is a feature, not a bug, and there is a lot of it. The best part for me is the chord sequence (Bm | E7 | G | F#m7), which you would struggle to call ‘imaginative’, but there’s just something about it. Beauty in simplicity or something like that. Easy to pick up and jam on. I hope you like jamming too.

Exodus is a real gift. A treat for us to enjoy at the end of a hard working week. It gives us three things:

1. A collection of seven mega tunes with three fine tunes as an extra bonus
2. Something to talk about with our non-reggae friends
3. The only Jamaican tune that appears on any karaoke machine, which is of course, the only one that isn’t reggae, and it’s not even on this record, because it’s the Bob + Lauryn Hill cut of Turn Your Lights Down Low, which is such an uninspired choice that I’d rather just make a fool of myself trying to do Stevie Wonder instead.

Bim count: 0
My picks: Exodus, Jammin’, Waiting In Vain