on Bob Marley...

It is to my utter embarrassment that I am going to admit that I have never heard a single song of Bob Marley prior to the recently concluded ACLE that we had in DS121. Although I know for a fact that there is a singer named Bob Marley, beyond that I didn’t know anything. I thought at first that he was very famous because he sported those oh-so dreadful locks of his, from which I wrongly concluded that it was a trademark or signature look that he did to promote the sale of his records (kinda like Avril Lavigne with her punkish look or Carlos Santana with his decorated guitar). Also I know for a fact that he had a double-digit number of species of creepy crawlers in his head and from then on I didn’t really bother to know more about him.
As it turns out, I am one of those people that he complains about and condemns in his song. I was overly biased and prejudiced. I thought all reggae artists came up with songs that you could dance to and groove with, yet another embarrassing fact that I have to admit. And again, since Bob Marley was dark-skinned I thought that he was the ghetto type of singer who transferred the volume of bling-bling instead to the volume of hair he had.
I am a lyrics person. The melody and rhythm of a song seldom mattered to me because, not unless I get to know the lyrics first I wouldn’t really appreciate anything. It’s such a shame that I have never encountered Bob’s songs earlier on, I feel that it’s such a loss. Justice, freedom, and truth are the major themes of his songs and they contain as much reality as can be possible. I am saddened about the fact that mainstream artists keep on singing about their pitiful emotional wallowing or magnified attraction towards sexuality. Seldom do socially significant songs catch up on the market and get famous and sadly even if they do, are perhaps not considered for their intrinsic value.
Not everybody is brave enough to talk about hunger, a detrimentally stratified and unjust society and the dirty politics that is involved in religion. For someone to sing about it and make the world aware of his opinions is something truly to be recognized and celebrated. No wonder that even if Bob Marley has long since passed away, his music still continues to inspire and kindle awareness. The youth are the most vocal about their affinity with music, and most probably so will they be the direct beneficiaries of various artists who care enough about the rest of the world to include reality in their songs no matter how harsh it may seem.
I agree with Bob when he said “so much trouble in the world”, but what’s more disturbing about this fact is that people are not conscious of it. If more singers could only sing, more poets could only write and more painters could only paint about how much the world needs to be transformed from its current state then perhaps there is hope for all of us. Partial redemption can afterall come in a form of enlightenment and freedom from the darkness of ignorance. If, in our everyday lives what we see, hear and read reminds us that there are people who are trapped in a vicious cycles of poverty and starvation, of lawlessness and injustice and of violence and apathy, then I believe it would be abnormal not to be moved into praxis.
A picture can paint a thousand words, a poem can capture a thousand paintings and a song could captivate more than a thousand minds. Art is a special medium by which messages can be creatively passed across. Bob Marley is just a single person who wrote and sang of the various injustices that he had witnessed that all of us (I presume) experience anyway. Personally, I believe that its hard to dance to his reggae knowing that what he is singing about is the struggle of humanity to uplift itself from its awful state. I consider myself to be a convert, from non-knowing to enlightened and appreciative. Its really ironic that it is from an artist that I have looked though that I would learn so much with just a single song. But I guess that’s just part of the irony of life that everyone have repeatedly refused to look into.