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Bob Marley Remixed

Remixing Bob Marley is a good way to make enemies. Twenty-one tracks argue that, done by the right hands, it can also honour him.

The most argued-over catalogue in music

Few bodies of work are as fiercely guarded as Bob Marley's, and remix projects have drawn genuine criticism over the years — the charge being that they smooth a revolutionary catalogue into background music for people who have not listened to the words.

Sometimes that charge lands. What makes this selection interesting is that it includes several remixes that clearly do not deserve it — particularly the ones handled by people with a real relationship to the music, and the ones by producers with the nerve to actually change something rather than just add a beat.

What to listen for

The Bill Laswell remixes are the essential ones. Laswell — the bassist and producer behind Material and countless dub-adjacent projects — approached the Marley catalogue in his Dreams of Freedom project by stripping tracks back to bass and space rather than adding to them. "Waiting In Vain" and "The Heathen" here are genuinely ambient dub, and they honour the material by trusting it.

The Kaya 40 mixes — "Satisfy My Soul," "Crisis," "Running Away" — were produced by Stephen Marley for the fortieth anniversary of Kaya, and family involvement changes the calculation entirely. Stephen is one of the finest producers in reggae and treats the tapes with obvious care.

The hip-hop pairings are the boldest. "Johnny Was" with Guru, "Rebel Music" with Krayzie Bone, and "Rastaman Chant" with Busta Rhymes and the Flipmode Squad come from the Chant Down Babylon project. Opinions vary sharply; the Guru track is the one most people concede works.

"Turn Your Lights Down Low" with Ms. Lauryn Hill is the exception nobody argues about — recorded in 1999, and one of the most beautiful things either artist was involved in.

Go deeper

If any of this works for you, the honest recommendation is to go to the originals: Exodus, Natty Dread, Kaya and Survival — the last being the most explicitly political and the least played.

For dub as a discipline, King Tubby, Lee "Scratch" Perry and Scientist are the architects, and remixing reggae is really a return to a tradition Jamaica invented rather than an imposition on it.

Stephen Marley's own Mind Control and Revelation albums deserve far more attention than they get.

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