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Dear Bob,
It's been thirty-four years since your death, yet no other singer or songwriter has articulated both the condition of the marginalized and the humanistic potentials of psychic decolonization more than you. And, arguably, no other public intellectual has illuminated the role racism and classism play in shoring up the neocolonial political economy as poetically as you have. When people gathered together to resist not being seen as people, as they did in Tahrir Square at the beginning of the Arab Spring, they called on your rhythms. When the agony of downpression exceeds me, when images of social equality recede, I draw from your beats.
Some say your oeuvre has become cliché. This is more reflective of the way in which people listen over the meaning of your words than of your ideas becoming irrelevant. Still, what remains after all these years is your spirit. A spirit able to use words as transport. A spirit able to use the sound of poetry set to music to create images. Most importantly, a spirit able to shift affect from numbness to something near empathy, so that thought and recognition may rise in tandem with the concrete jungles you expose.
In spite of what you left us with, Bob, I am growing weary of backward steps in consciousness, of political regressions that grow Babylon, and by the daily slaughter of unprivileged people's lives and bodies. I am, increasingly, relentlessly, thinking about psychic revolt, a distinctive way of thinking and feeling that fuels our acting against Babylon. It is imperative for us to interrogate the world by going into our interior with integrity, made possible by scrutinizing our relationship to social realities. I...