No musical genre is as synonymous with an artist as Reggae is with Bob Marley. Nirvana's hold on grunge music might be the closest parallel, but even Cobain had plenty of worthy competitors in Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell. Hell, the most famous Reggae artists after Bob Marley are his bandmates (Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer) and his kids (Damian, Ziggy, Stephen and Julian).
Closing in on the thirty-year anniversary of Marley's passing, his music is as relevant as ever, with his greatest hits collection, Legend, currently fifth on the Reggae Billboard charts. Live Forever, the last recorded Marley concert performance, offers a first look at the end of his remarkable career. Recorded at the final show of his 1980 Uprising Tour, Live Forever makes up for what several previous Marley live albums lacked.
First of all, 1975's Live! and 1978's Babylon By Bus combine for just over one hundred minutes and 20 tracks, whereas Live Forever reaches 90 minutes and 20 tracks on its own. Also, both Live! and Babylon By Bus contain songs from several concerts, creating a sense of discontinuity that is never present in the seamless Live Forever.
Furthermore, while the limited length of Live! and Babylon By Bus prevent them from offering many deep cuts, Live Forever has no such limitations. In addition to the eight Legend tracks, Live Forever serves up a handful of lesser-known gems such as ""Zimbabwe,"" ""Zion Train"" and ""Comin' in from the Cold.""
By 1980, guitarist Peter Tosh and percussionist Bunny Wailer had left Bob Marley & The Wailers, and several times the band seems off without them. Nowhere is that as evident as when the band plays their hits. The guitar solo in ""No Woman, No Cry"" is distastefully out of tune, and several inaudible instruments and mic feedback taint ""Jamming.""
The sloppiness doesn't stop at the musical level, though. Several times, the recording quality is just plain atrocious. While no discredit is due to the band, tracks such as ""Work"" are impossible to endure thanks to the recording quality.
Those details, however, shouldn't overwhelm the basic truth that Marley's music was perfectly suited for—and executed on—the live stage. The fact that Marley was already ailing from the cancer that would kill him eight months later is undetectable, and his vocal performance is nearly flawless.
One can only guess where Bob Marley's music would have ventured had he lived longer, but the Live Forever rendition of ""Could You Be Loved"" drops some surprising hints in the form of LCD Soundsystem-esque electronic bloops. Considering electronic music's origins in Reggae and dub, this shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but it still sounds extremely uncharacteristic of a Marley song. The heavy wah, delay and other effects that dominate the guitar work on trucks such as ""Is This Love"" also captivate one's attention. Thirty years later, this concert performance sounds like as much a glance into the future of Reggae music as it does a synopsis of Marley's iconic career.
When it comes to posthumous releases, there seems to be a prevalent trend: the longer after a musician's death an album is released, the worse it is. Live Forever, however, doesn't fit this bill.
