Bob Marley and Sixto Rodriquez both were very creative and successful in the sense that they were able to think systematically about how things that affected them personally. These hardships the two composers faced were really social issues that were widely shared by others born in a similar time and social location to them (Mills 6). This ability to connect personal experiences with broader issues is what allowed Marley to create a sub-culture and improve internal peace-relations among rival factions in Jamaica, and what allowed Sixto Rodriquez to inspire and initiate the Afrikaans Movement in South Africa during apartheid. This process, synthesized through our sociological imagination, allowed Marley and Rodriquez to question communities around them and call for social change. They took pre-existing religious resources, social imaginations, and political visions and created it into a world where others wanted to be a part of- an objective reality- which was catalyzed through the subjective meaning their followers shared. .
Rodriquez's music borrowed from local issues and themes in Detroit, which became globalized toward South Africa. Meanwhile, Bob Marley's music took local issues and themes and intentionally brought it to a global scale. Despite the fact that both broke symbolic boundaries, social norms, and grew up in certain cultures that triggered these awe inspiring lyrics, the "success " of the two artists is not an element of "good " and bad luck, but rather a series of sociological units that can be connected as a whole. In addition to simply analyzing the key aspects of each artist, it is extremely important to establish connections, and similarities as well as obvious social differences the two singers possessed. .
Culture, the system by which meaning is transmitted from large groups to individuals through social interactions and a practice in which tools are used for social action, (Sewell 2005) is the predominant factor in the achieved success of Bob Marley and Sixto Rodriquez.
