I have been writing variations in this exasperated key for ten years now and a fat lot of good it’s done. Despite my howling into what increasingly appears to a great yawning void, more and more people continue to attribute more and more quite often inane quotes to Bob Marley. It seems the world has decided that he was not a revolutionary, messianic figure, the first superstar from the Global South, but instead merely a guru of suburban romance, a love doctor for angsty White twentysomethings, a master of relationships with few rivals.
It’s weird, because this role has been assigned to him in spite of the fact that he had so many children even his fan site can only estimate their quantity. That would be 11 acknowledged, with two more possibles, by six-to-eight different women, only three of which were by his wife, Rita. (Who is believed to have had one by another man, but whom Marley raised as one of his own. Marley also raised another of hers that predated their relationship.)
Which is fine. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em…But his cavalier attitude toward monogamy is at complete odds with the image today’s Internet has stamped upon him: that of a square with utterly conventional whitebread views on love and romance, one who was ever-eager to wax inspirational with reporters on this subject and/or wax inspirational more generally rather speak about his true passions: uplift for the downtrodden, music, Rastafarianism, ganja, and soccer.
No, according to today’s Internet, he was an agony aunt, a dreadlocked shoulder to cry on, and an airy declaimer of milquetoast aphorisms.
To wit, here is a page one Google hit of “14 Bob Marley quotes that will change your perspective on life.”
Of those, less than half are attributable to Marley. There’s “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain” which comes from the Wailers’ song “Trench Town Rock”; the justly famous “emancipate yourself from mental slavery” line from “Redemption Song,” in which Marley is very lightly paraphrasing Marcus Garvey; and this one:
In which that (sadly rather bad) graffiti artist had the wherewithal to correctly cite the origins of those words. Which is far more than most people on the Internet do.
Another legit quotation comes from “Judge Not,” Marley’s very first single, and FFS, with all those fake Marley quotes out there, the last thing we need are for Marley’s to get assigned to other music legends, but nevertheless, here we are:
So…correct words, wrong artist. If music is your religion, Mr Meme Maker, you have sinned.
To complete the circle of asshattery, I made this meme:
Moving on, apparently at some point Marley did say “Better to die fighting for freedom than be a prisoner all the days of your life,” because it says so in his 1981 Miami Herald obituary. I was unable to source it beyond that, but such near-contemporary accounts from major newspapers are reliable more often than not.
And then there’s “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time,” which…. yeah, it’s in the pre-breakup Wailers’ “Get Up Stand Up,” but originally in a Peter Tosh verse, so crediting that to Marley is like memeing up John Lennon with “Oh I believe in yesterday.” Right band, wrong songwriter.
And it’s not like the sentiment was original to Tosh or Marley. In fact it’s a variant of a true-blue OG of a misattributed quote. No, contrary to what the whole world seems to believe, Abe Lincoln never said anything of this sort. It’s now believed that a version of this quote was originated by one Jacques Abbadie in French in 1684 and started getting attached to Lincoln 20 years after his death. (Worlds fairly often collide in this genre: was it PT Barnum, Mark Twain or WC Fields or Will Rogers who didn’t say this, or William Tecumseh Sherman, George Patton or Douglas MacArthur who didn’t say that?)
Okay, so that’s six of the entries, one of which should be probably belong to Peter Tosh.
The other eight are all misattributed. We’ll begin with a two-fer:
That “truth is, everybody is going to hurt you” bit is what set me off ten years ago. I could not get through a day on social media without seeing it a dozen times. Since then, instead of going away, it’s proliferated and has now even mutated into a two-headed monster of falsity: “truth is” has simply been appended to the “if she’s amazing…” quote. You see them separately and you see them together, and Bob Marley never said any of those words either way.
Bob Marley: slut-shamer? Come on.
And in what scenario do people imagine Marley having these conversations? Talking to a reporter? Giving a seminar? Did he write a self-help book I don’t know about?
Next, we have:
No, Marley didn’t say that. Roger Miller did, but hey Miller, Marley, what’s the difference? (This one is occasionally misattributed to Bob Dylan.)
Next we have: “The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.”
Oh come on. That sounds less like Marley than Warren fucking Buffett. Marley was not given to pontificating about the “greatness” of abstract men and their abstract integrity. Positive vibrations, yes, not that other folderol. Seriously, if it sounds like somebody posting on LinkedIn, Bob Marley did not say it.
Moving on:
“The winds that sometimes take something we love, are the same that bring us something we learn to love.”
See above. Another way you can tell a quote is bogus is if you can’t find it sourced to any date before Facebook and Twitter came around. This one seems kinda new in the canon of fake Bob Marley quotes, and the pontificating, subpar Hallmark card tone is not one Marley was known for.
Next, there’s:
The biggest coward of a man is to awaken the love of a woman without the intention of loving her.
There is absolutely no reason to believe he ever said this. And what does “loving her” mean in the context of Marley’s unconventional love life? Woo, impregnate, and move on? Because he did plenty of that, and maybe had he lived long enough he could have kept up with the Wailers’ bassist, the aptly named Aston “Family Man” Barrett, who by his own estimate now has sired 41 children. (The courts claim the number is actually 52.) Again, I am not knocking this fecundity or stumping here for monogamy; it’s just that I think that the people who make these memes don’t have a freaking clue what Bob Marley really thought about love and sex.
Here is one we can clearly attribute to the real source: Birdee Pruitt, Sandra Bullock’s character in Hope Floats, so ultimately the credit is due screenwriter Steven Rogers, who most recently wrote and produced the critically-acclaimed I, Tonya.
So no, this little nugget of downhome wisdom did not come from Trench Town.
And finally, we have: “Just because you are happy it does not mean that the day is perfect but that you have looked beyond its imperfections.” This is another disputed one; some attribute it to Marley, while others claim it comes from the mind of Gerard Way, lead singer of My Chemical Romance. Not sure if either of those is correct, but I am almost certain it is not a Marleyism.
Why does this matter, J’Nova? Well, I’ll tell you.
First, it’s just inaccurate, and it displays how gullible we’ve all become. The voices of the few of us who try to debunk these errors are swept away by torrents of people believing what they want to believe rather than what is true, and yes, that is the key to the tribalism and self-defeating lunacy of Trumpism, with its fake news and alternative facts.
Secondly it dishonors Bob Marley’s legacy. The man was as revolutionary a musician as has lived in my lifetime, a genuine threat to established oligarchies not just in Jamaica but all over the Global South and even in Europe and the USA to a certain extent. That’s not the Bob Marley we get in these means: we get a cuddly and avuncular advice machine, a singing fortune cookie, horoscopes set to a reggae beat.
I blame Legend. As of January 2020, it had spent a combined 1541 weeks on the pop charts of the US and UK. It has sold 25 million copies worldwide. It defines not just Bob Marley but the entire genre of reggae for its purchasers, many of whom probably barely know who Jimmy Cliff is or who Toots Hibbert was, much less Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown, or the Heptones.
And it’s a great album, but here’s the deal: it completely defangs, neuters, hobbles, dilutes…whatever word for rubbing away Marley’s rough edges. Which in his case were not necessarily the edges at all, but the center of his being.
Per a 2014 Phoenix New Times article, which is a companion piece to this feature, both of which I recommend:
What's missing from Legend? The earlier sounds of the songs Marley and the Wailers recorded in Jamaica, as well as his most explicitly political songs. Remember, in 1976, Marley was shot just before performing a concert in Kingston in support of Jamaica's People's National Party.
As Dave Robinson, who constructed the tracklist for Legend, tells writer Chris Kornelis in this week's cover story, the tracklist for Legend deliberately was designed to appeal to white audiences. Island Records had viewed Marley as a political revolutionary, and Robinson saw this perspective as damaging to Marley's bottom line. So he constructed a greatest-hits album that showed just one face of the Marley prism, the side he deemed most sellable to the suburbs.
And, apparently, the suburbs do not buy politically provocative records. Therefore, you get the exclusion of "Talkin' Blues," from 1974's Natty Dread, which starts with descriptions of poverty -- "Cold ground was my bed last night, and rock was my pillow" and then rejection of Christianity. "'Cause I feel like bombing a church / now that you know that the preacher is lying'" (Bob Marley and the Wailers: the original black metal band). You get the exclusion of "Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)," one of Marley's greatest songs, an explicit call-out to wealth inequality. Nowhere in sight is "War," a song whose lyrics derive from a speech Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, who, for much of Marley's life, was a living god to the followers of Rastafarianism.
If you're looking for mass-market appeal to secular-progressive America, you don't include songs that invoke collective guilt over the slave trade, nor do you address the inconvenient truth that the bucolic Jamaican lifestyle of reggae, sandy beaches, and marijuana embraced by millions of college freshmen, exists only because of the brutal slave trade.
Is it any wonder that a Marley built only off what made it on to Legend would end up seeming like some combination of a dreadlocked Dr. Phil, your coolest uncle, and Forrest Gump?
I will say this, Bob Marley had more sense in his big toe than most people have in their whole bodies.