An Album Made in Exile

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.