Sublime covers this song in 40 Oz. to Freedom. I like any song covered by them :)

I feel stupid. This is the first time I ever heard the original, and I always thought Sublime originally sung this.

Sublime covers this song in 40 Oz. to Freedom. I like any song covered by them :)

WTF?

Can't listen to this song without one indelible, horrifying image:
...
http://blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/2003/06/index.asp

Can't listen to this song without one indelible, horrifying image:

One definition of "trauma" is any experience that radically, jarringly reminds you that the world is not the way you think it is. Only rarely does the word describe a media experience, though September 11, 2001 is the common exception. For me, watching videotaped footage of Liberian rebels torture President Samuel Doe to death while singing the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon"--that was somehow worse.

I haven't brought myself to review the scene, from last year's documentary, Liberia: America's Stepchild. But I can't get it out of my mind, especially now, as Liberians face another possible bloodbath in Monrovia, the electricity-less capital surrounded by rebels.

Judging from Nexis, the presence of that song at that moment in September 1990 went completely unremarked by history. I can't imagine how it got there: Was warlord Prince Johnson a reggae fan? Did descendents of Marcus Garvey number among the executioners?

For whatever reason, there it was: the gorgeous melody sung in boisterous unison by men cutting off the ears off a helpless dictator. Nothing postmodern about that--this wasn't "Stuck in the Middle With You" in Reservoir Dogs, or "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet. This was real. And I cried as I watched it.

Doe was a mass murderer, so I wasn't exactly mourning. And the execution itself, while revolting, was somehow at least recognizable as part of a terrible world I'm acquainted with. What got me was the song. "Rivers of Babylon" is the most beautiful Jamaican hymn ever recorded. It's the obvious highlight of a roundly perfect 1972 soundtrack to the reggae movie The Harder They Come, which introduced Jamaica's pop reserves to the world. Hearing it in this context was nauseating, like walking into a crime scene and finding an old friend who never hurt anybody among the victims. The lyrics, adapted from Psalm 137:1 by vocalists Brent Dowe, Tony Brevette, and Trevor McNaughton in 1969, appear as follows on the soundtrack record's liner notes:

By the rivers of Babylon
Where we sat down
And there we wept
When we remembered Zion

But the wicked carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
How can we sing King Alfa song
In a strange land
Cause the wicked carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
How can we sing King Alfa song
In a strange land

Sing it out loud
Sing a song of freedom sister
Sing a song of freedom brother
We gotta sing and shout it
We gotta talk and shout it
Shout the song of freedom now

So let the words of our mouth
And the meditation of our heart
Be acceptable in Thy sight
Over I
So let the words of our mouth
And the meditation of our heart
Be acceptable in Thy sight
Over I

Sing it again
We've got to sing it together
Everyone of us together

By the rivers of Babylon...

This is the biblical story of the Israelites in Babylonian exile, asked to sing by their tormentors even as Jerusalem was being razed. It's not hard to see why the descendants of African slaves might hear their own tune in this old number.

But how easily the tormented become tormentors. Maybe, to those soldiers, "Rivers of Babylon"'s loping rocksteady harmonies were a call for revenge.

http://blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/2003/06/index.asp

Yeah, finally made it through LRC! Thanks everyone for voting!

Yeah, finally made it through LRC! Thanks everyone for voting!