By the very definition of what they are, epiphanies come at us uninvited. In my case, becoming involved in a musical career as a young man, one such awakening came in Toronto when I migrated there in the late 1950s and suddenly became aware, through some Trinidadian friends, of the astonishing legacy of calypso music that country had produced. I say “awakening” because while I knew about calypso as the popular music of the day then in the region, I was quite ignorant of the staggering repertoire of music that had been built over the years in Trinidad, going back to the early adventurers in the field from Atilla the Hun, through Spoiler, Lord Superior, Radio, Growler, etc. It is somewhat of a phenomenon that it was an evolution almost totally driven by Trinidad, and, in particular (I have mentioned this previously) that the people writing and performing the music at carnival and throughout the year were taking the singular approach of writing, literally, about every subject under the sun. In mankind’s popular music, as a rule, the subject matter is usually romance or emotion; not so in Trinidad. I don’t know enough Trinidad history to attempt to explain this oddity, but oddity it is, and the other oddity is that it was a Trini evolution. Yes, others copied it once it had begun to roll – Jamaica, Barbados, and to some extent Guyana, mainly with Bill Rogers – but the thing began and grew in Trinidad and what is most striking is the span of it. Trinidad writers were going at every subject under the sun – a ship sinking in the Gulf of Paria, the development of their prisoners being put away on the separate island of Carrera, the presence of a US naval base in the main island of Trinidad, and even the seemingly bland subject of a pay raise for policemen as Sparrow would later produce. As someone engrossed with subjects for my own song-writing efforts, this was akin to a massive door opening in front of me, leading to a wide open horizon. Much of the time, of course, I was in the dark concerning the subjects of the Trini songs and had to ask about this, but in the process I saw doors opening for me that, frankly, I had never considered before. To put it simply, everything became song material, as I would later demonstrate in my own work when I wrote about the advantages in the life of household dogs in the Caribbean (I Want to be a Puppy), or Guyana’s diffidence for memorials (Where Are Your Heroes) or seeing animals as being more astute than mankind (Civilisation). As I look around at the music scene in other countries, this wide canvas we have in Caribbean popular music is, the rhythmic ingredient aside, the most enthralling aspect of our music.
The sociologist may have an explanation for the emergence of it, doing something unique in pop music; I am simply grateful for its presence and our writers should value it highly. I know that right now, for example, a range of songs are in the offing over the spectre of oil in Guyana; time will tell how good they are, but they are coming, sooner or later, and more likely sooner.
The subject I am dealing with here is actually a book, but since this is not the forum for that, I close my case by citing an example of the power of this form that Caribbean writers have in this Trinidad creation of “any subject is okay, padna.” It is a song by Calypso Crazy from a few years back, in which Edwin Ayong (that’s his given name, not his chosen one) talks to us under the heading of In Time To Come. Here we have a calypsonian looking around and imagining what may be ahead, and what is striking about it, lyrically, is how often Crazy’s predictions have already come true. Well ahead of Obama happening in America, Crazy predicted a black President for that country, and he posited a female Prime Minister for Trinidad before Kamla came. In a time when many probably laughed at the notion, he predicted marijuana becoming legal, (“marijuana will sell in the shop”) and he was foreseeing same gender romance being acceptable, as we are now seeing, and breakfast and lunch “in a pill.” In a somewhat comical calypso, he said “buses and cars will fly in the sky” and he posited mankind “operating by remote control;” in 2018, not comical at all.
Of course, not all of Crazy’s predictions have come to pass. He said “government will ban cigarettes” and that we would see a “world government” coming into being; those things have not happened yet. But it is striking how often Mr. Ayong is on the money. In a way, one could say that his predictions are not out of the blue – some indications were already there – but that only demonstrates that, calypsonian or not, those musings are coming from an individual in very prescient touch with his world – Crazy has his antenna out – and many of his early predictions are now in place. And that, too, is the legacy of the calypsonian as it emerged in Trinidad, later emulated here by writers like Bill Rogers, Lord Canary and King Fighter, and myself. I have no problem agreeing that I am borrowing from that tradition in producing Where Are Your Heroes, Copycats, Civilisation, Women in Love, I Want To Be A Puppy, as well as Is We Own, and Not A Blade Of Grass and Cricket In The Jungle. The kaiso canvas is wide open; it allows you to enter from any side, on any topic, with any slant. It’s no longer the popular music of the day, but it’s still there, with that proviso, for those who have an important point to make, and in this frenetic information age we should be grateful we have it. Listen to CroCro and other Trini writers of today in that ilk. Listen to Edwin Ayong’s masterpiece In Time To Come. You will see what I mean.
