Bob Marley’s ‘Legend’ Turns 40
Legend, the greatest hits collection by Bob Marley & The Wailers, marks its 40th anniversary this week. The 14-track album was released via Island Records on May 8, 1984, some three years after Marley died from cancer at the age of 36.
It is the best-selling Reggae album of all time, with more than 18 million in sales and streaming equivalent units moved in the United States, according to data provided to DancehallMag from Billboard’s sales tracker Luminate. This includes 13 million in pure album sales and 5 billion streams in the country as of May 2024. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the album 15X Platinum in 2014.
Legend had debuted at No. 54 on the Billboard 200 in 1984. It was a regular fixture on the chart until 1991—when Billboard made “old” albums ineligible for the listing. In 2009, Billboard repealed that rule and the album returned to the chart and later peaked at No. 5 in 2014 when the Google Play store discounted the album to 99 cents during a promotion.
Earlier this year, following the release of the Bob Marley: One Love biopic, the album surged to No. 17 on the 200 chart after it registered 30,000 units in sales and streams for the week ending February 22.
Last week, Legend shifted 19,000 units, according to Luminate, including 4,000 copies in pure album sales. This placed it at No. 37 on the Billboard 200 chart dated May 11. It has spent 833 weeks on the all-genre listing, making it the second album, after Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (990 weeks), to hit more than 14 years on that chart.
The album continues to dominate the Billboard Reggae Albums chart dated May 11, having spent 226 weeks on the list and holding the No. 1 spot for all but one of them.
In the United Kingdom, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has certified the album as 14x Platinum, recognizing over 4.2 million units sold, as tracked by The Official Charts Company.
On the UK Albums Chart dated May 8, the album is at No. 28 for its 1132nd week on the listing. Only ABBA’s Gold: Greatest Hits (1154 weeks) has logged more time on the chart.
Despite its success, Legend has been criticized for selectively featuring Bob Marley’s less political songs to avoid offending listeners and maintain high sales. In 2014, David Accomazzo of the Phoenix New Times highlighted that the album’s curator, Dave Robinson, had intentionally crafted the tracklist to appeal to predominantly white audiences.
“Island Records had viewed Marley as a political revolutionary, and Robinson saw this perspective as damaging to Marley’s bottom line,” Accomazzo wrote. “So he constructed a greatest-hits album that showed just one face of the Marley prism, the side he deemed most sellable to the suburbs. […] If you’re looking for mass-market appeal to secular-progressive America, you don’t include songs that invoke collective guilt over the slave trade, nor do you address the inconvenient truth that the bucolic Jamaican lifestyle of reggae, sandy beaches, and marijuana embraced by millions of college freshmen, exists only because of the brutal slave trade.”
The album includes all ten of Bob Marley’s Top 40 UK hit singles to date, alongside three tracks from the original Wailers featuring Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer: Stir It Up, I Shot the Sheriff, and Get Up, Stand Up. It also features Redemption Song, the closing track from the album Uprising.
The biggest sellers are Three Little Birds (1977), taken from Exodus, and Could You Be Loved (1980) from Uprising. Both are currently certified double platinum in the United Kingdom for sales exceeding 1.2 million units each.
No Woman, No Cry (1974) from Live!, One Love/People Get Ready (1977) from Exodus, Jamming (1977) from Exodus, Is This Love (1978) from Kaya, and Buffalo Solider (1983) from Confrontation are all currently certified platinum in the UK, having sold more than 600,000 units each.
Redemption Song (1980) from Uprising and Waiting In Vain (1977) from Exodus are currently certified Gold in the UK for moving 400,000 units each.
Get Up Stand Up (1973) from Burnin’, Exodus (1977), I Shot The Sheriff (1973) from Burnin’, and Stir It Up from Catch A Fire (1973) are certified Silver for 200,000 units each.