Last year's Kaya was the first Bob Marley and the Wailers album I liked since Natty Dread, but they were very different records. Marley the shouter, the budding international pop star whooping and hollering revolution in 1975, had become Marley the crooner, the established international pop star missing his girlfriend and writing beautiful songs about the weather. Kaya is music anyone could like. But because the lyrics are dippy compared to Marley's eloquent reports on the life of the Jamaican poor—waking up in a curfew, sharing cornmeal porridge, making love in a single bed—a lot of his old fans don't like it. Marley doesn't write about being poor in Jamaica anymore; his condemnation of Babylon is at large again, however, on Survival. Kaya's lyric sheet ended with a tag line, "to be continued …" Survival is its political better half; one of its sharper songs is "Zimbabwe"—which...