Songs Of Freedom

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 you're living?

We know where we're going; we know where we're from

We're leaving Babylon, we're 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, Jamaica's 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.

Marley's music and lyrics were his ways of going about what he called "me Faddah's 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, it's God... if God

hadn't given me a song to sing, I wouldn't 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 Marley's 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

Marley's family background, the syncretism of Rastafarian religion, and Marley's 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.