Essays

ESSOESS ESSOESS

Redemption Song

An exploration of the afterlife of ancestral sound, Redemption Song explores the spiritual legacy encoded in music, memory, and resistance. It’s instruction. A portal through which song becomes strategy, and remembering becomes action.

You don't erase a people by burning their books. Just silence their elders and teach the smoke like gospel.

Truth that remembers its source does not beg for volume. Redemption Song was Marley’s psalm of resistance—an acoustic transmission for the colonized, the censored, the spiritually severed.

When Marley asked, “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”, he wasn’t searching for sympathy. He was indicting systems. Naming what the archive refuses to say out loud: that colonial powers didn’t just enslave bodies—they executed prophets. They burned the libraries carried in tongues. They outlawed the keepers of creation. The griots, the priestesses, the herbalists, the water diviners, the ones who knew the timing of storms by the sway of trees—all labeled witch, savage, pagan, threat.

This is historical record wrapped in breath.
Political memory scored in melody.

Marley’s lyrics enter the tradition of spiritual resistance that includes Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who used coded songs to lead her people to freedom. It includes Fannie Lou Hamer, who said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It includes poets like Lucille Clifton, who wrote, “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life?” All of them carried language that didn’t just name pain—it preserved a pulse.

Colonialism didn’t just break backs. It ruptured frequency.
It disrupted the line of spiritual succession. And in its place, it installed pulpits and protocols, borders and broadcast licenses, turning divine instruction into legal liability.

Bob Marley was not spared. He was surveilled. He was almost assassinated. He died with cancer in his toe, but the infection was in the air around him. The systems that later sold his face on T-shirts once tried to silence the very messages now played in yoga studios and beachfront cafés. This is what theorist Christina Sharpe calls “the afterlife of property”—where even the dead can be commodified, where the rebel can be sold as aesthetic once his truth becomes inconvenient.

But Marley’s voice refused conversion.

In Redemption Song, he did not chant down Babylon with a full band. He stripped everything away. One voice. One guitar. A return to the unaccompanied call—ancestral in function, instructional in purpose.

To sing is to remember.
To sing while exiled is to refuse the terms of forgetting.

And that’s what prophets do.
They don’t predict.
They remind.

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Our first songs tuned the body to the land. They taught us when to move, how to plant, where to pray.

Before captivity, before borders, before paper and pulpit, there were tones—held in breath, passed through bone, anchored in ceremony. Our ancestors did not sing to be heard. They sang to remember. To name the stars. To calm the storms. To teach the babies how to enter the world and teach the dying how to leave it. Song was creation before it was category.

Across the continent and throughout the diaspora, sound functioned as a coded archive. The Yoruba etched proverbs into skin. The Igbo named their children like poems. The Akan used talking drums to send messages across miles without ever touching ink. In the Americas, Indigenous nations turned every river bend into melody, mapping terrain through echo and rhythm. This was data. Doctrine. Direction.

Marley stood inside a tradition of sound as strategy—where melody wasn’t style, but instruction.

When he sang “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,” he didn’t cite the system. He confronted it. He was channeling Marcus Garvey, yes—but also the elders who knew how to encode instruction into breath. Marley didn’t just sing. He invoked. He remembered through vibration what had been redacted in print.

Audre Lorde once wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Our ancestors knew this long before English translation. That’s why they didn’t wait for permission. They tuned their mouths to the pitch of land and blood and wind and bone. They passed down worlds without paper, without podium. This was curriculum. Sound as method. Song as map.

Even under surveillance, even in chains, the singing didn’t stop. It shapeshifted.

The Negro spiritual wasn’t a song of submission. It was encrypted cartography. Wade in the Water meant, move now. Swing Low meant, hold steady. The plantation heard praise. The people heard escape.

This is the lineage Marley stood inside when he picked up that guitar and stripped away the noise. In Redemption Song, he returns to the unaccompanied voice—the one before production, before policy, before performance.

This is sound, returned to its original function.

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The system is fluent in appropriation. It knows how to turn resistance into retail, prophets into playlists, and liberation into lifestyle branding.

There was a time when the messages inside Redemption Song got people watched, fired, exiled, killed. Now they play softly in boutique hotel lobbies while candles flicker and eucalyptus burns. The industry that once feared Marley now sells him in box sets. The same powers that silenced his teachers, demonized his symbols, and raided his people’s homes now license his face for fragrance, headphones, and festivals.
It’s cultural laundering in real time—cleansing the message while selling the messenger.

Marley sang of mental emancipation.
The market responded with merchandising.

The clarity in his voice—once forged in survival and resistance—has been diluted into mood. Aestheticized. Neutralized. What once carried ancestral instruction is now sliced into twenty-second samples, drained of consequence, and sold as ambient culture.

You don’t have to silence the prophets if you can sell them first.

Scholar bell hooks warned us: “The commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption where desire is focused on the Other, but only so long as the Other can be commodified.” That’s why dreadlocks are policed in school, but praised on runways. That’s why African spirituality is feared when it’s practiced in ritual, but adored when it’s staged for content. That’s why prophetic Blackness is safe only once it’s been archived, packaged, and stripped of the fire that made it “dangerous.”

And still—some things refuse translation.

He wasn’t performing style—he was preserving signal. And even stripped down to one guitar, Redemption Song still refuses dilution. The tremble. The breath. The conviction behind each string. It resists commodification not because it is immune to consumption, but because it lives in a different register.

You can sample the sound, but you can’t sell the source.
You can remix the rhythm, but you can’t own the root.

Redemption, in its truest form, will never be marketable. It is too unruly. Too divine. Too ancestral. Too alive.

As philosopher Fred Moten writes, this is “the resistance of the object.” Even when commodified, some truths retain their refusal. They leak. They disturb. They disobey the terms of the transaction.

That’s the paradox we sit inside now:
The song plays everywhere—yet so few are listening.

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Some songs never fade. They shape the air until someone with ears to hear breathes them back to life.
A tuning fork for memory. A call to right relation.

To hear Marley now is to recognize the song didn’t age—it aged us.
It found us in moments when we were still uncertain, still searching, still silent—and offered us not answers, but agency.

Because the work of redemption was never finished. It was always ours to continue.

The line “None but ourselves can free our minds” is the assignment.

Ancestral instruction doesn’t rest in melody. It moves through embodiment. Through the daily disciplines of remembrance: what we eat, how we speak, how we gather, what we rebuild. It reminds us that our inheritance is not just endurance—it’s design. Our task is not just to awaken—but to act.

Scholar and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter reminds us that, “What it means to be human is no longer self-evident.” In a world of dislocation, automation, and curated disconnection, Marley’s voice becomes a spiritual benchmark—a return to the real. A reminder that freedom is not conceptual. It’s relational. Embodied. Rooted in how we see one another, how we carry the wisdom of those who walked before, and how we plant it forward.

This is the work now.
To build a future from the wisdom kept alive beneath the ash.

Because Redemption Song continues every time we use our voice with intention. Every time we protect the story of where we come from. Every time we teach the children to recognize a song not just by melody, but by meaning.

It is one thing to hear the song.
It is another to live it.

And still—Marley asks us:
Won’t you help to sing… these songs of freedom?”

What he left behind is a living map—etched in melody, encoded in song. A quiet instruction. A portal we are still learning how to walk through.

The song is not over.
It’s waiting for your answer.

One love, ESS xo

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References

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Premature Prophets

An editorial on the rise of self-ordained spiritual leaders and the commodification of sacred work. It unpacks the dangers of spiritual bypassing, the beauty of slow mastery, and the responsibility that comes with being truly called.

The new priesthood was born in a checkout cart.

There are those who walk with Spirit because they were summoned.
And there are those who walk with Spirit because it sells.

We are living in an age where a broken heart and a logo are enough to launch a healing business.
Where trauma is treated as credential.
Where initiation is self-declared.
Where spiritual work has become influencer performance—high on aesthetic, low on integration.

But sacred work isn’t for everyone. And that’s the part no one says aloud.
Some of us are here to hold space.
Others are here to learn how to sit with their own.

In today’s spiritual economy, readiness has been replaced by branding.

We are witnessing the rise of self-ordained seers—
guides with no grounding,
healers with no humility,
mentors with no memory of what it means to actually be a student.

They don’t wait for initiation. They declare it.
They don’t listen to Spirit. They leverage it.

The danger isn’t just misinformation—it’s misembodiment.
Because when we skip the journey, we skip the integration.
And when we teach from an unintegrated place, what we pass on is not wisdom. It’s residue.

This is about reverence.
This is about responsibility.
This is about remembering that some tools require time, tears, and tending before they are safe to pass on.

In spiritual work, the cost of false authority isn’t just confusion.
It’s karmic collapse.

And too often, it leaves someone bleeding on an altar they were never meant to build.

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Spiritual maturity cannot be streamed, styled, or sold in six easy payments.

Yet the current landscape rewards performance over process. In a culture obsessed with immediacy, many mistake spiritual sensitivity for spiritual authority. They confuse intuition with readiness. Vision with integration. Presence with preparation.

But access doesn’t equal embodiment.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias identified by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, explains how those with the least experience often overestimate their skill—and lack the self-awareness to recognize their deficits. In spiritual spaces, this manifests as “coaches” who haven’t done their own shadow work. Readers who channel but haven’t integrated. Practitioners who teach what they’ve barely begun to live.

And because we’re swimming in a capitalist current that turns everything into content, these voices get amplified—while the slow, quiet work of becoming gets buried.

Studies in spiritual narcissism—a phenomenon where ego latches onto spiritual identity—show that bypassing isn’t just misguided. It’s dangerous. According to Verywell Mind, spiritual bypassing can become a psychological defense mechanism: a way of using rituals, teachings, and language to avoid personal responsibility, suppress emotional work, and posture enlightenment. Add a ring light and a monetized link tree, and that becomes a business model.

We’ve created a marketplace where the metrics for leadership are aesthetic fluency, social media virality, and curated “vulnerability.”
Not depth.
Not embodiment.
Not lived initiation.

But spiritual technology—real spiritual technology—has never been safe in the hands of the unprepared.
What looks like a gift can be a liability when not grounded in time, practice, and deep ancestral accountability.

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There is an intelligence in delay.
A wisdom in waiting.
A medicine in not being ready yet.

But our culture treats slowness like a failure. We rush toward mastery because we are terrified of being in the middle—where things are messy, uncertain, unbranded. Where there’s nothing to sell, only something to learn.

Yet in every sacred tradition that has survived colonization, commodification, and crisis, there has always been one constant: apprenticeship.
Time spent under the eye of someone who holds more than you.
Time spent in stillness, watching, tending, unraveling.
Time spent not performing wisdom, but being reshaped by it.

In many African and Indigenous systems, you are not permitted to lead spiritual work until your elders have watched your life—not just your rituals, not just your visions, but how you move through grief, failure, community. It is your being, not your branding, that confirms your readiness.

But in the rush to monetize the mystical, we’ve replaced that with click funnels and trauma-as-testimony.
We’ve made the sacred marketable.
And in doing so, we’ve taught people that spiritual power is something you can unlock.
Not something you must earn.

True readiness is not a certificate. It’s a frequency.
It comes not just through study—but through endurance. Through death and rebirth. Through surviving your own teachings before daring to offer them to someone else.

And no—
Not everyone is meant to teach.
Not everyone is meant to guide.
Not everyone is meant to stand at the front of the circle.

That doesn’t make you less powerful.
It makes you honest.
And honesty is the first altar.

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We don’t need more courses.
We need more courage—
the kind that speaks truth even when it costs you a launch date.

We need teachers who know when to step back.
Healers who know when they’re not ready to hold anyone.
Leaders who understand that silence is sometimes the highest form of service.

There’s no shame in not being ready.
The shame is in pretending you are.

Because sacred work is sacred for a reason.
And the consequences of mishandling it don’t always arrive on our doorstep.
Sometimes, they show up in the people we claim to serve.

The altar doesn’t care about your aesthetic.
The spirits don’t care about your following.
But they will care how you use your voice.

So ask yourself—
Would you still want this if no one was watching?
Would you still offer it if you weren’t being paid?

Who called you?
And who confirmed it?

Because real power doesn’t announce itself.
It arrives when you’re quiet enough to receive it.
And responsible enough to carry it.

The spiritual work I do did not come through convenience.
It came through collapse. Through grief. Through years of being stripped down to the bone until only truth remained.
It’s rooted in real life—in loss, in listening, in learning to sit with things no one else could name.
It is the slow, unsexy, inconvenient, ancestral work of becoming someone who can actually hold what Spirit dares to give.

And if you’re just here to be seen—
if what you really want is attention wrapped in incense—
then step aside.
This work will chew you up and call it a ceremony.

But if you stay,
if you commit,
if you surrender to the kind of becoming that breaks you open just wide enough for the Divine to move through—
you will not come out the same.

You will come out forged.
Clear-eyed.
Called.
And finally, ready.

One love, ESS xo

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References

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