Essay About Music Of Bob Marley As And Music Of Robert Nesta Marley

Songs Of Freedom
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SONGS OF FREEDOM:
THE MUSIC OF BOB MARLEY AS
TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION
W. Alan Smith, Ph.D.
Florida Southern College,
Lakeland, FL
Open your eyes and look within
Are you satisfied with the life youre living?
We know where were going; we know where were from
Were leaving Babylon, were going to our fatherland.
n Bob Marley, “Exodus”, 1977
The music of Robert Nesta Marley, the late Jamaican musician who introduced both reggae
music and Rastafarian religious beliefs to an international audience, combines a “feel good,”
slow-paced rhythm with a militant call for justice and freedom from oppression. Born in the lush
countryside of Jamaica, he moved at a young age to the crushing squalor of Trench Town, one of
Kingston, Jamaicas most hopeless “government yards” where he, like other “Rude Boys”
abandoned formal education for the promise of the street gangs, only to discover music as his
way out of life among the “sufferahs.” Bob Marley has been called a prophet, a psalmist for the
Rastafarian religion, an advocate for an African homeland for the descendants of slavery still
struggling to develop a sense of identity in what he called “Babylon,” a peace- maker, a troublemaker,
a musical genius, and the first Third World superstar. Marley was a complex man housed
within an apparently simple guise. His speech sounded, to the uninitiated, like the ramblings of a
“pothead” (ganja, or marijuana, was a part of both his religion and his philosophy), yet contained
revelatory and revolutionary truth for those who had ears to hear. The brief quotation from his
1977 hit song, “Exodus” is a case in point: it calls the hearer to self-examination and selfdevelopment
while also pointing metaphorically toward a vision of an African exodus from their
exile in the “Babylon” of western slavery and oppression back to the “fatherland” of Africa.
Marleys music and lyrics were his ways of going about what he called “me Faddahs business.”
(White 2000, 306) He believed Jah (the Rastafarian name for God, which is shortened from the
name Jehovah) gave him his music and that through this gift he was placed on the earth to call
his people to work toward justice and freedom: “”It is not me say these things, its God if God
hadnt given me a song to sing, I wouldnt have a song to sing.” (Sheridan 1999, 80). His songs
contain themes drawn from the Bible, from Jamaican folk- lore, from the African Diaspora, from
the mean streets of Kingston, from the “superstitious” world of “Duppies” and “obeyahmen”
(White 2000, 24), from a commitment to African unity, and, ultimately from a vision of One
Love and One World.
The paper explores some of the ways Bob Marley used his musical voice to bring about change
in the contentious, poverty-stricken world of post-colonial, newly independent Jamaica. He
demonstrated how one can combine religious faith with political activism and militancy to
transform the situation of some of the most desperate people in the Western world. His use of
language, metaphor, rhythm, symbol, and even ritualized action became one of the most
influential forces in popular music during the 1970s and early 1980s, not only in Jamaica and the
Caribbean, but in Africa, New Zealand, Great Britain, and throughout the Third World. What is
striking about the music of Bob Marley as transformative education is the variety of forms of
resistance that can be identified in his lyrics, his musical form (reggae), and the message he
delivered through this music to the disenfranchised of the world. As an organizing device for
presenting Marleys music, Gregory K. Stephens discussion of a “hybrid third space” of
intersubjectivity and “mutually created language” will be employed (Stephens 1996, 4-5).
Creating Mutual Language
Gregory K. Stephens dissertation, On racial frontiers: the communicative culture of multiracial
audiences (presented to the University of California, San Diego in 1996), examines the functions
of language and other forms of communication within multiracial communities. He uses Bob
Marleys family background, the syncretism of Rastafarian religion, and Marleys music as
illustrations of how this multiracial system of communication develops and functions. Stephens
claims that multiracial or multicultural audiences engage in a form of intersubjective
communication to achieve a “mutually created language” that allows understanding to emerge
from the exchange of symbols and gestures. Referring to the work of R. Rommeveit, Stephens
states, “Communication aims at transcendence of the private worlds of the participants.