Exodus

On December 3, 1976, gunmen shot Bob Marley, his wife Rita and his manager Don Taylor at his Kingston home, two days before a free concert intended to ease political violence ahead of Jamaica's election. Marley survived and performed at the concert two days later with a bullet still in his arm, then left Jamaica for London. Exodus, recorded at Island Studios and Chris Blackwell's Basing Street Studios in London between January and April 1977, was made in that exile. Blackwell, Island Records' founder, later said Marley arrived depressed but found in London an audience that loved him, and the album channeled that recovery. Island released Exodus on June 3, 1977, Bob Marley and the Wailers' ninth studio album and the one that carried reggae to an international audience at a scale no earlier record had reached. Time magazine named it the best album of the twentieth century in 1999. The record's two sides are often read as deliberately different registers, the title side turning outward to migration, judgment and liberation, the second side turning toward love songs, though Marley resisted separating the political from the personal in his own account of the record. Musically it shows the Wailers absorbing the London sessions' polish without losing the one drop rhythm that had carried Jamaican music since the late 1960s.

The title track reads Jamaica's history through the Book of Exodus directly: Marley cast Rastafari, downtrodden and often persecuted in Jamaica for their beliefs, as Israelites awaiting deliverance, with Africa, and specifically Ethiopia under the reign of Haile Selassie I, as the promised land repatriation would reach. Rastafari theology holds Selassie as a divine figure and reads the Hebrew Bible's exodus narrative as literal history repeating for the African diaspora, a reading scholars trace to Leonard Howell's earliest preaching in the 1930s. Marley had been raised nominally Christian and adopted Rastafari belief and practice after his 1966 marriage to Rita Marley, and by 1977 he carried the movement's theology openly rather than folding it into metaphor, as reggae songwriters before him more often had. Academic treatments of reggae and religion, gathered around the album's fortieth anniversary, describe Exodus as the record that carried Rastafari cosmology to a global pop audience with the theology largely intact rather than smoothed into generic uplift, reassuring Rastafari listeners in Jamaica that their beliefs held even under continued persecution while introducing those same beliefs, for the first time at this scale, to listeners who had never encountered them. The album remains the most cited case study in religion and popular music courses that address twentieth century new religious movements.