Essays
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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