Remember Bob Marley! The Social Justice Crusader, the Voice from the Forgotten World!

The Music Icon, Social Justice Crusader, the Voice from the Forgotten World!

Arguably, there is no musician that has had a lasting influence on humankind than Bob Nesta Marley. Thirty-nine years after his death, the Jamaican singer, songwriter, and musician still exert great influence in a world perturbed by a plethora of challenges. Born in a small rural Jamaican village called Nine Miles, Marley grew up in the face of injustices and grueling poverty.

His first-hand experience of what it means to be poor and oppressed, was later to become his main asset when it came to songwriting. This made his songs effective and enduring because they were anchored on his lived realities which the majority of Jamaicans and the world at large, could easily relate to. Being a superb melody writer as he was, his songs’ insinuating pop hooks pull the listener into the realities that he was describing.

Bob Marley had a rare talent. He sang about social injustice, tyranny and anger, about brutality and apocalypse, in enticing tones, not dissonant ones. His songs weren’t about theory or conjecture, or an easy distant compassion. “His songs were his memories; he had lived with the wretched, he had seen the downpressors and those whom they pressed down, he had been shot at. It was his ability to describe all this in a palpable and authentic way that sustains his body of music unlike any other we’ve ever known”.

Marley’s message of resistance, of spirituality as a means to confront and defeat social injustices, inequalities, oppression, and claim one’s inherent rights, clearly emerges as his most powerful and the cardinal legacy he has bequeathed humankind with. Well, there are many other musicians that have sung and spoken to these same concerns, but with the exception of maybe Tupac, these voices addressed injustice, intolerance, deprivation, and oppression from outside the living heart of that experience. Marley was different and unique. He risked his life to say the things he believed, and as a result, both his art and his example managed to uplift or embolden others — particularly members of the African diaspora and the millions of people worldwide who live in the rut of poverty — in cultures and conditions that no other Western pop star has entered with such authenticity.

As the world grapples with the unpleasant realities of COVID 19, perhaps a dosage of Bob Marley music on a day like this one when we commemorate his demise may go a long way to heal our anxieties, depression and uplift our downtrodden souls.