DB's Song of the Day (day 356): "REDEMPTION SONG" (1980) Bob Marley

This day—the day after solstice—in 2002 we lost the mighty Joe Strummer, former frontman for The Clash. Today’s song, by Bob Marley, is a song that Strummer recorded with his band of the early 21st century, The Mescaleros. He also recorded it with Johnny Cash, not long before the death of both (Cash died in September of 2003). The duet appears on Unearthed, a collection released posthumously in November 2003.

Marley’s version, solo on acoustic, was released on his final album Uprising; Marley died in 1981.

All of which is a way of saying that the song has a definite “late in life” feel to it, if only by association. In the case of Marley, who was already very sick by the time the album was released, it feels like a final affirmative statement, a song about dedication to a cause and about belief in the triumph of the spirit. In all the versions I mentioned, the proximity to death of the singers makes of the song a kind of last testament, “We forward in this generation / Triumphantly.”

Whether or not you see evidence of such triumph, the point of such a song is to attest to the sense of progress, to provide a rallying cry. Marley begins by describing slavery and lets the forward movement from those dark days speak for a sense of eventual emancipation. But, like Christ who was always quick to point out that the fulfillment of his talk about the “kingdom of heaven” wasn’t likely to take place in this world, nor as a political nor material advantage, Marley—borrowing from Marcus Garvey—makes a statement about the kind of incentive for change he has in mind: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds.”

The idea recalls to me both John Lennon saying “you better free your mind instead” and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus laughing “to rid himself of his mind’s bondage.” “Mental slavery,” we could say, is a habit of mind, a way of being chained, by your own lack of knowledge or imagination, to burdensome ways of thinking, to ignorance, to unjust, uncharitable, unenlightened views. The notion of the free play of the mind, of the mind as unshackled by its own materiality, is one of the mainstays of philosophy and of some religions. (Which recalls to me my boy Rimbaud: Par l’esprit on va à Dieu! Déchirante infortune! [Through the mind we go to God! A wrenching misfortune!])

But, whether or not our minds can lift us to God and whether or not that in itself is a form of mental slavery, I’ll leave aside at the moment. Well, maybe not. Since Marley does invoke some of that sense of fulfillment when he sings: “How long shall they kill our prophets / While we stand aside and look / Some say it’s just a part of it / We’ve got to fulfill the Book.”  The book here is the Bible or at least a prophetic tract. The idea being that the killing of prophets is something that happens regularly in “the Book” and so it’s almost pointless to inveigh against it as it seems to be a fulfillment of God’s plan, which “the Book” is taken to be the text of.

That kind of thinking for me, frankly, smacks of mental slavery. And what I like about a song like Marley’s, as can be found in some of the lyric utterances of Dylan or Lennon and others, is that it can support various interpretations. The intention of the song, as stated in its recurring refrain, is to invite the singing of “songs of freedom,” while the line “’Cause all I ever have / Redemption songs” makes a comparison between songs of freedom and redemption songs. They may be one and the same, or it may be that the call for freedom and the call for redemption are not always the same call.

In other words, “what profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul”? If “freedom” means you can do as you please and can ignore what must be done and can retain your vain pursuit of nothing but your individual happiness, then better to have “redemption”—a calling beyond “success in life” to, perhaps, action to a purpose or even simply to prayer or to utterance—as for instance songs—that can speak to the spirit and offer it a guide, a signpost, a banner even.

That, to many, is what Marley’s song is. A redemption song because its message is about the need for redemption, maybe even the promise of redemption. The point, within the tradition of the Spiritual or hymn, is simply to attest to that sense of need and promise, for without some sense of redemption the world is a much less valuable, much more limited place. It all goes back to suffering—and the trials of life—as having a purpose beyond the merely factual or purely utilitarian. And so Marley’s great late song is, in that sense, as much as anything a cry in the wilderness.

Long, long ago, the time of year of the winter solstice in the northwestern hemisphere became the time to celebrate the birth of Christ. The confluence is meaningful, as all sun myths must take stock of the shortest day and the longest night. Reason enough to sing a song of redemption and a song of birth.

My boy Rimbaud again: “Quand irons-nous, par-delà les grèves et les monts, saluer la naissance du travail nouveau, la sagesse nouvelle, la fuite des tyrans et des démons, la fin de la superstition, adorer—les premiers!—Noël sur la terre! [When shall we go, across the shores and mountains, to hail the birth of new labor, new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, to adore—the very first!—Christmas on earth!] How's that for redemption?

’Cause none of them-a can-a-stop-a the time

DB's Song of the Day (day 233): "JUNCO PARTNER" (1980) The Clash

Here’s someone I was sad to see go (in 2002). Joe Strummer, born this day in 1952 as John Mellor, was the main voice of The Clash and more or less its primary figurehead. Though, truth to tell, I preferred to see the band as a real band (and perhaps it was for a time) with Strummer and Mick Jones providing intertwined leadership. Strummer, though, was the one spouting most of the ideological stances that were part and parcel of The Clash view. But today I mainly want to pay tribute to him as a vocalist.

Which is why I’ve chosen a song, from the first of the six sides of Sandinista!, that was cribbed by Strummer and company from older versions of the song dating back decades. The song “Junco Partner,” or some variant thereof, is primarily in the voice of an inveterate down-and-outer—a familiar of prisons, drugs, shady deals, and, we might say, one helluva survival instinct. While not sporting any references to how politics is corrupt—both on the right and the left—or how our culture raises its airy head thanks to thugs and bombs that do our leaders’ bidding (areas The Clash generally liked to get into), “Junco Partner” puts out there—on the street—a vision of what it’s like to scrape by in the underclass. Both “subterranean”—as in The Beats—and subaltern, as in the indigenous anywhere the colonizers took all the best stuff for themselves. Which is why one feels a certain island style to the song—one suspects that the version The Clash is cribbing most closely comes with cajun flavoring. Indeed, the reference to “Angola” is the Louisiana State Penitentiary—one of the most dismal in the country—where Lead Belly was discovered by Alan Lomax.  The line “I was born in Angola / Serving 14 to 99” carries the grim realities of the song lightly. An early death—at 14—is contrasted with “a life sentence”—99 years. We might assume we’re dealing with the child of an inmate, literally born in prison, or, more metaphorically, imprisoned by the conditions of a life that might be cut brutally short or extend forever. Existential prison, in other words.

The song has long been my favorite Strummer vocal because he does things with it that are wholly unpredictable, sometimes unintelligible. He mutters, he gasps, he chortles, he rasps, he drawls and cajoles and dances about the beat, keeping his eye on the bouncing ball. The song, in The Clash version, is a strut, an in-your-face proclamation and confession (“I would’ve pawned my sweet Gabriella / But the smart girl, she wouldn’t sign her name”) that fantasizes raising tobacco (i.e., being a big plantation owner) and admits to pawning everything, having once “had me a great deal of money”—the implication is that the “junco partner” has lost everything for the sake of “junk.” Yet the speaker is unabashed—and Strummer provides him an amusing voice with asides like “take a walk, take a walk” and “don’t bother me.” He begins by denigrating what we assume is his most recent sentence—6 months to a year, “ain’t no time”—since the harsh realities of his existence are a far worse punishment.

The song concludes with a variation on lines found in various other blues songs in one form or another: Let me eat when I’m hungry, let me drink when I’m dry—though here the sentiment is altered to “pour me out a good beer when I’m dry / Just, just give me whiskey when I’m thirsty / Give me headstone when I die.” The play on “giving head” is deliberate as we might assume this last verse is the speaker demanding a list of pleasures for their own sake—drink and sex, fine. But instead the notion of the inevitable end, bound up with junk, provokes the notion that “headstone” better suits the occasion. Strummer trails off on a “down the road” that refers back to the opening (“down the road, down the road, came a junco partner”) but also comments on when the headstone will be needed: down the road, which is to say, eventually.

More than anything, the song is a groove, as The Clash present it, matching the dub and reggae aspects of the album to something that might be a more straightforward blues. This gives the song its oddly bright, sly, and grinning indifference to its speaker’s dereliction. Many songs on Sandinista! champion the underdogs and the outcasts, and “Junco Partner” infuses all that with a sense of mercurial possibility, if only because one is “knocked out loaded, loaded, loaded, loaded, loaded / Wobbling all over the street.”

Strummer’s vocals in The Clash are something I prize greatly, full of a performative edge that’s both passionate and amused, it seems to me. The stance is of one perennially outside the mainstream and enjoying the vantage, despite the shittiness of the surroundings. Those dealing the hand always have the upper hand, but you can always sing while you slave. Let Joe Strummer show you how.