Between Revolution and the Market: Bob Marley and the Cultural Politics of the Youth Icon

Abstract

By tracing shifting interpretations of Bob Marley, this chapter demonstrates how youth icons are collectively reimagined across social and political boundaries. Prestholdt analyzes how a figure that represented a relatively obscure musical genre at the beginning of the 1970s became a globally recognized voice for diverse social and political movements by the end of the decade. By the 1990s, however, fans and marketers simultaneously de-emphasized the militant edges of Marley’s message, reimagining him more as a transcendent mystic than a revolutionary. The chapter identifies the central developments and actors that drove this process of collective reimagining.