Sometimes it's nice to put down the chalice, for once, and realize that Bob Marley was not the second coming of Jesus, or a hippie, for Chrissake. He was a flawed man! A new biography tells us just how flawed.

For full background on Bob Marley, please see one of the many fine books about him. There are a lot! The latest biography, Chris Salewicz's Bob Marley: The Untold Story, includes the following examples of Bob's un-Jesus-like behavior, per Robert Christgau's review in Salon:

  • Womanizing. Duh.
  • Bob "delivered the occasional beatdown" and had thugs on the payroll who did the same.
  • He failed to recognize how evil Robert Mugabe was.
  • "Salewicz reports [Marley] watched the private executions of three men who'd tried to assassinate him shortly before his 1976 Smile Jamaica concert — a comeuppance that came down a week or so after his 1978 One Love Peace Concert."

He was just a normal man like you or me, with better songs and a greater likelihood of being assassinated by the CIA. Actually, he was better than us. Bob Marley would never tell the fucking hippies to turn off Redemption Song, already.