Songs of Freedom

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Paris ≠ When we got on the Metro train the other night, a slender Rastaman who later told us his name was Fred was singing Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." He was busking ≠ playing for change ≠ a respectable trade I plied myself for a time.

    Drawn in by that transcendently beautiful song, which itself asks over and over for participation ("won't you help me sing these songs of freedom"), we began to shyly move our lips to the lyrics. Two young men across from us, white and black, started bobbing on the backbeat. Beside us, a pierced-up couple with a baby began to sing too. Pretty soon, more or less the whole carful of strangers, mixed in age and race and nationality (and doubtless musical taste as well), was singing along. A group of teenage Parisian boys surrounded Fred and led the cries for more Marley when the song ended, and he segued into "Three Little Birds."

 

Rose up this morning

smiled at the rising sun

three little birds

by my doorstep

singing sweet songs,

melodies pure and true,

saying, this is my message to you:

Don't worry about a thing.

Cause every little thing is gonna be alright.

 

    "Three Little Birds" is about taking hope from something real and small, and I took a little hope from that song on the subway. I've given up expecting a sudden profound transformation of politics or economics or even of my own personality. But all of us can still find effortless moments of union and freedom, brought about through and in something small in life and in the art that attends to it.

   It's false that every little thing is going to be alright, and I wonder how Bob Marley felt singing that song as he was dying of cancer. But even in the terminal illness of a man or a people, it is possible to find the small moment of felicity, the moment of peace in which every little thing seems sufficient or tolerable, in which it is still possible to sing redemption songs.

     One can become cynical about Bob Marley. He's been merchandised to and in death in the contemporary manner, and indeed my fifteen-year-old son told me he met a French kid in a Marley t-shirt who kept his tobacco in a Bob Marley pouch, rolled it in Bob Marley pure hemp papers, and lit it with a Bob Marley lighter.

    But even this is a response to the real power and hope in the music. Marley emerged from the ghetto in Kingston, Jamaica and became the world's first truly global pop superstar. With the intensity and sincerity of his politics and his religion, he inspired a hundred counter-cultures.

    His image is now one of the most potent and ubiquitous symbols in the world ≠ instantly recognizable, crystallizing resistance to Babylon, as Rastas refer to the systems of economic, spiritual, and political oppression that have such headquarters as Washington, Moscow, and even Paris.

    It would be hard for any body of work to sustain the weight of adoration that Marley's has on it. Marley was no saint, and it's worth saying that the Jamaican reggae scene from which he emerged featured many great artists, some of comparable profundity, who were neglected as Marley and reggae music came to be synonymous.

    And Marley's own music ("Burning and Looting" springs to mind) flirted with violence and apocalypse. He was no Gandhi.

    Nevertheless, his music has inspired artists and political resistors from Africa to American Indian reservations, of all races and religions, to work for peace and freedom.

   Marley's power is almost only a song. Three little birds are precious little to pit against the overwhelming realities of power and violence and money: against the insane radomized violence of an Osama bin Laden or the pointedly sane, systematic violence of a Dick Cheney.

    But if there's a place of peace in this world, it starts in small moments, in coming to presence in the everyday: singing Marley's song together, three little birds.

 

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Six Names of Beauty."