OK folks, time to pony up with your favourite protest/political songs. While I would argue that entertainers rarely have opinons worth having, let alone broadcasting, there are exceptions. Think lateral people, this isn't just a contest for the best folk song (though there are some fine examples in that genre) or the most obviuos antiwar anthem. There a a lot of songs & a lot of topics. I'll kick off with a few classics & a few notes on each.
Redemption Song has always been one of my favourite Bob Marley tracks. Simple, beautiful.
I've also thrown in a wonderful Joe Strummer version. Two greats. Gone but never forgotten.
Redemption Song has always been one of my favourite Bob Marley tracks. Simple, beautiful.
I've also thrown in a wonderful Joe Strummer version. Two greats. Gone but never forgotten.
Lifting material from a speech by pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, calling for a second emanicipation from "mental slavery", "Redemption Song" is a simple call for awakening that is at once hopeful protest and heartbreaking resignation. The final line of the chorus, "All I ever had, redemption songs", reads like an epitaph for Marley's struggle.
While the anthem of that struggle was "No Woman, No Cry", "Redemption Song" is the antidote. The narrator is powerless: "Old pirates, yes, they rob I/Sold I to the merchant ships/Minutes after they took I/From the bottomless pit". At the same time, he is divinely empowered: "We forward in this generation triumphantly".
The idiomatic uses of "I" for "me" and "We forward" root the song in its Jamaican context, in the same way as the imperative "No Woman, No Cry". From this idiom, Marley had an ability to create honest protest songs such as "Get Up, Stand Up" that surpassed his own Rastafarian beliefs, and to reach beyond a strict identity:
"My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white."
With two verses, a repeated chorus, and a simple chord progression, "Redemption Song" is a folk singalong from the reggae tradition. Written at the time of Marley's diagnosis with cancer, it evidences the increasingly religious nature of his songwriting on the 1980 album Uprising. The spiritual does not, however, overshadow the call to awaken against tyranny, and the message is the possibility of redemption, no matter how slim.
While the anthem of that struggle was "No Woman, No Cry", "Redemption Song" is the antidote. The narrator is powerless: "Old pirates, yes, they rob I/Sold I to the merchant ships/Minutes after they took I/From the bottomless pit". At the same time, he is divinely empowered: "We forward in this generation triumphantly".
The idiomatic uses of "I" for "me" and "We forward" root the song in its Jamaican context, in the same way as the imperative "No Woman, No Cry". From this idiom, Marley had an ability to create honest protest songs such as "Get Up, Stand Up" that surpassed his own Rastafarian beliefs, and to reach beyond a strict identity:
"My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white."
With two verses, a repeated chorus, and a simple chord progression, "Redemption Song" is a folk singalong from the reggae tradition. Written at the time of Marley's diagnosis with cancer, it evidences the increasingly religious nature of his songwriting on the 1980 album Uprising. The spiritual does not, however, overshadow the call to awaken against tyranny, and the message is the possibility of redemption, no matter how slim.
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