Where the livin’ is hardest.

The problem with Bob Marley in white America is one of perspective. Many of Marley’s songs are about resistance and violent revolution. The threat implicit in the lines ‘Them belly full but we hungry/ A hungry mob is an angry mob’ or the song ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’‘ isn’t too far from the surface. But lyrics about armed resistance make America’s secular-progressive middle classes — those most responsible for the cult of Marley as a cuddly ‘One Love‘ Rastafarian — uneasy.” Contending that “[l]istening to Legend to understand Marley is like reading Bridget Jones’s Diary to get Jane Austen.,” Slate‘s Field Mahoney argues the merits of Bob Marley’s back catalog, and suggests that US fans tend to overemphasize the stoner and underemphasize the revolutionary.