Bob Marley – B Is for Bob (Tuff Gong, 2009)
purchase from Amazon
A perfect blend of the utterly crass and the undeniably entertaining, Tuff Gong’s latest Bob Marley compilation stitches together a dozen previously released tracks — eight of them with subtle remixing and repurposing from Ziggy Marley — bundles them with a whole bunch of nifty bonus content, and serves them up for one more round of consumption. On the one hand, it’s label tomfoolery at its most repellent — how much Marley product do these people need to sell? — but on the other, it’s really sort of brilliant; after all, now that Legend has passed the 10 million-in-sales mark, is there a reggae fan left on Earth who doesn’t own his greatest hits? It’s time to start building new ones, which is where B Is for Bob comes in. Though I doubt most people have ever thought of him as a children’s artist, a lot of Marley’s music is quite kid-friendly — simple, catchy, and carrying messages of peace, love, and happiness — and though it seems safe to say the original versions of these songs would have worked just fine, Ziggy’s remix job hasn’t done them any harm; in fact, unless you’re a dedicated Marley disciple, you probably won’t even notice a difference.
Adding value to the compilation is a raft of extra online material, unlockable when you insert the disc into a Web-connected computer.
In exchange for purchasing these songs for the umpteenth time, you get things like coloring book pages, a music video, and a one-year subscription to Parents magazine. None of it is truly essential, of course, but it’s a fun little package, and something that’ll make a terrific gift for any budding Bob enthusiasts in your life.
You might get more sparkle from a more contemporary artist, but for classic songs that will last a lifetime, this batch is just about impossible to beat.
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My wife and I went to our first pre-school tour a couple months ago. We live in Los Angeles and had been frightened into action by a friend who was visiting for coffee. The friend was admonishing us for waiting so long to start the waiting list process. After all, Zoe was already eighteen months old. For all intents and purposes, we were “too late to get into any good schools.” The way she said it made it sound as though we had consigned our daughter to a lifetime in the service industry after four years at a