Bob Marley: One Love

The musician biopic trend that really reignited around the mid-2010s with Straight Outta Compton appears to have no end in sight, with Bob Marley set to get his due in the new year. After a six-second micro-teaser (complete with countdown) that helps set a context with a snippet of the 1977 hit “Jamming,” we’re greeted with a massive crowd clapping to the beat. We hear what’s identifiably a split-second sample of the piano from “Jamming, ”repeating in synch with the light until it fades in a wave of reverb at 0:16, when we get our first look at the eponymous king of reggae, played by Kingsley Ben-Adir. “From the beginning,” Marley quips when asked where he wants to start—and the soundtrack responds in kind, with the iconic drum intro to “Jamming.”

From here, the soundtrack is pretty consistent, allowing the song to play out undisrupted as we’re treated to scenes from the studio, a media scrum, a concert, in transit, and more. Marley gives us a monologue about reggae as music by, for, and about the people, noting “there’s a war going on… you can’t separate the music and the message. And what is the message? Peace.” The music abruptly stops for a moment, again drenched in that epic trailer style reverb, to emphasize the last word—which is accompanied by Marley’s face on-screen.

This presages the scene about to unfold where Marley notes that “life is worth much more than gold”—a stark contrapuntal irony to the gunfire about to go down on screen. Strings accompany the title card “based on a true story,” as spare piano and thundering percussion build an arrangement steeped in modern dramatic trailer music conventions. This leads into a vocal pulled from “Exodus,” also a 1977 track. In this case, rather than playing the track outright as in “Jamming,” here the editors have chosen to dramatize and emphasize Marley’s vocals. They place them amid a dramatic trailerized arrangement, this time devoid of the rhythms Marley is known for. It’s arguably a bold move, but the contrast with the first half emphasizes both Marley’s voice and the stakes he contended with in Jamaica in the mid-1970s, a period rife with political violence. Moreover, it’s a firm signal to the trailer’s audience that the film will cover much more than the music itself—Marley contended with a lot in his brief life, including an attempted assassination in 1976 (as depicted in this trailer).

Throughout the last segment, the lyrics often echo the on-screen action. For example, at 2:26 Marley sings “we know where we’re going” from “Exodus” as a child runs across a field away from a blaze; elsewhere, Marley asks us to “open your eyes and look within” as we see him pointing towards his heart on screen. The trailer music arrangement builds throughout, with a notably dissonant climax as an organ ascends the major scale and rests on the leading tone (one half-step away from the bass note, sounding very dissonant as a result)—and at 4:45, with an audiovisual blackout, we perceive no resolution.

A quick return to the reggae beat from the first half of the trailer rounds things out as we see the main title card and the release window. Overall, the trailer spends roughly equal time introducing or reminding viewers of Marley’s music undisturbed by trailer music conventions, while working in an epic trailer music arrangement in the second half. This approach serves to excite and intrigue regarding Marley’s life beyond the music, while also preserving the original recordings, which are of course paramount in a musician biopic. Bob Marley: One Love comes to theatres in 2024.

— Curtis Perry