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Bob Marley's significance as a popular cultural icon, both during his initial emergence in North America in the 1970s and after his death in 1981, has been a constantly evolving phenomenon. As American society and culture has adapted to the presence of new, racialized, West Indian immigrants, so too has Marley's legend been adapted to fit the changing moods of the past three decades. This article identifies and examines three aspects of Marley's changing image in the United States. From the Rastafarian outlaw of the 1970s through the natural family man of the 1980s to the natural mystic in the 1990s, Marley has represented ideologies of national liberation and black power, multiculturalism, universal pluralism and, most recently, transnationalism. In this article, I show how the construction of Marley as the ‘natural mystic’ reflects the growth of the multinational corporation and mass media industries in this era of postmodernism and late capitalism. The resources and networks available to American record labels have been central to the wide-scale promotion of Marley‘s message across the world. However, in addition, Marley’s life and work also profoundly benefited from a rich, century-long tradition of black internationalist movements and ideologies, which I term ‘black transnationalism’. This black transnational legacy tells a larger story, one which contests the more mainstream versions of Marley which have made him more palatable to a white liberal audience in America. He therefore stands as an interesting case study ofthe impact of black transnational cultural production on American popular culture.
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