The room › Artists › Bob Marley & The Wailers
Where to start with Bob Marley & The Wailers
Start with Coming In From The Cold — Uprising, 1980. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 18 Bob Marley & The Wailers tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.
This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 18 Bob Marley & The Wailers tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 18 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.
The collection leans hard on one record: 11 of the 18 tracks come from Uprising alone.
The years need a caveat: 11 of 18 dated tracks land in the 1980s and come from 1 record, while the rest come from elsewhere — the mark of a reissue carrying its own date rather than the music's. Read the year column below as the date on the copy in this room, not the date the music arrived in the world.
Three ways in
The one track, if you only play one
Coming In From The Cold — Uprising, 1980. Of the 13 Bob Marley & The Wailers tracks here that have actually been listened to, this one sits closest to the average of them across the four knobs the room runs on. The other 5 arrived carrying the default for their genre, and averaging a placeholder in would move the centre towards nothing. It is the least surprising thing among the tracks that were read, which is what an entry point should be.
If you want the sparse end
Redemption Song - Band Version / Bonus Track — Uprising, 1980. The lowest density reading of any Bob Marley & The Wailers track in the room (49 out of 100). This is as far towards sparse as the collection goes.
If you want the wall end
Trench Town Rock — Africa Unite: The Singles Collection, 2005. The highest density reading here, at 74 out of 100 — a 25-point swing across the collection towards wall.
Where Bob Marley & The Wailers sits in the room
Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Bob Marley & The Wailers's average coordinates and the range they cover.
All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.
What is here, record by record
| Album | Year | Tracks |
|---|---|---|
| Uprising | 1980 | 11 |
| Catch A Fire | 1973 | 1 |
| Africa Unite: The Singles Collection | 2005 | 1 |
| The Birth Of A Legend (1963-66) | 1977 | 1 |
| Roots, Rock, Remixed: The Complete Sessions | 2007 | 1 |
| Exodus | 1977 | 1 |
| Legend - The Best Of Bob Marley And The Wailers | 2002 | 1 |
| Destiny: Rare Sides From Studio One | 1999 | 1 |
Every Bob Marley & The Wailers track in the room
| Track | Album | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Concrete Jungle | Catch A Fire | 1973 |
| Exodus | Exodus | 1977 |
| It Hurts to Be Alone | The Birth Of A Legend (1963-66) | 1977 |
| Bad Card | Uprising | 1980 |
| Coming In From The Cold | Uprising | 1980 |
| Could You Be Loved | Uprising | 1980 |
| Forever Loving Jah | Uprising | 1980 |
| Pimper's Paradise | Uprising | 1980 |
| Real Situation | Uprising | 1980 |
| Redemption Song | Uprising | 1980 |
| Redemption Song - Band Version / Bonus Track | Uprising | 1980 |
| We And Dem | Uprising | 1980 |
| Work | Uprising | 1980 |
| Zion Train | Uprising | 1980 |
| White Christmas | Destiny: Rare Sides From Studio One | 1999 |
| Stir It Up | Legend - The Best Of Bob Marley And The Wailers | 2002 |
| Trench Town Rock | Africa Unite: The Singles Collection | 2005 |
| Sun Is Shining - Yes King Remix | Roots, Rock, Remixed: The Complete Sessions | 2007 |
Near neighbours in this room
These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Bob Marley & The Wailers's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.
- Where to start with Stevie Wonder — soul, 16 tracks
- Where to start with Prince — funk, 206 tracks
- Where to start with Marc Ribot — latin, 10 tracks
What the open databases say
MusicBrainz lists Bob Marley & The Wailers as a group, from Kingston, Jamaica and formed in 1970. Its contributors tag the artist reggae, roots reggae, ska, dub and rocksteady. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.
Questions
How many Bob Marley & The Wailers tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?
There are 18, across 8 albums. 18 of them carry a date, running from 1973 to 2007. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.
Is this a best-of, or a ranking?
No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.
Where do the knob numbers come from?
They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. 13 of these 18 tracks have been read that way. The other 5 arrived with the default for their genre and nobody has listened to them yet, so they are left out of the centre, the ends and the spread quoted above.
Can I listen to these here?
Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 18 of these 18 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.