Changes in the nature of what we refer to as our “popular music” of the day are part and parcel of the form. Time and again we see alterations taking place; sometimes substantial ones result in various recriminations from various voices, as is currently the case, with some voices vehemently describing current popular music trends as “not music”, or “garbage”. Perceptions will vary widely on these matters – I have expressed mixed feelings about them – and a column in the past week’s Stabroek News by Indranie Deodat, on the subject of a calypso written by the legendary Mighty Spoiler, served to trigger one of them, which is that while there is certainly room for differences of opinion in the music discussion, regardless of what position one takes regarding our popular music, I would argue that the decline in popularity of the calypso art form – and decline there has been – is truly a loss to the Caribbean.
While I respect whatever choice you make in our popular music of the Caribbean, the loss I am referring to is (a) in the subject matter, and (b) in the life view that our best calypsonians continually put before us, year after year, as calypso came to the fore in the region after the Second World War ended in 1945. Our kaiso men, operating powerfully in Trinidad, produced a kind of popular music the world had never seen because while most popular music around the world was chiefly about romance, the kaiso men in Trinidad tackled everything under the sun; no subject was taboo – from the Queen of England, to a ship sinking at sea; from our education system to a mosquito outbreak; our forerunners sang about them all. And even when I came to the genre as a songwriter in the mid-1960s, that wide open canvas was one of the things that drew me to calypso. It is little-mentioned difference, but it is a stunning one and the examples are there in the thousands.
We have, for example, an hilarious song by the late Lord Blakie, “Chinese Accident,” in which Blakie has taken, yes, a Chinese truck driver in a traffic accident, and composed a classic calypso, playing havoc with his mimicking of the Chinese man mangling the Queen’s English in song: “My lolly, goin up; he lolly coming dung. De two lolly was in collision wid a car driven by a woman. Well he lolly jam she behind, and push de lady car dung; so somebody, please tell me, who blasted lolly more long.” The humour is in the pronunciation (you have to be able to sing Chinee) and in the incident itself, and, since it is kaiso, there is the double entendre meaning of the word “lolly”, but my point is that no story about a traffic accident would make it into the pop music of any country outside the Caribbean, it just wouldn’t happen, but in kaiso we take everything and make a popular song.
Imagine, for example, that there is a crisis about a textbook in the school system in America or England or France. It would never end up as a comical piece in the popular music of those countries; their comedians might deal with it, but never their musicians. Yet, we have the Mighty Sparrow, in Trinidad, no problem padna, composing a song, “Dan Is The Man,” about a truly comical schoolbook text, written by the Englishman Coleridge, and foisted upon Caribbean people by the colonial British, and it’s a kaiso, so there is no public outcry about it. Indeed, the song, although by no means a party or fete song, was a hit; many of you know it. People would call the radio station to play it, or request it in fetes. Tradewinds played it, as did many popular bands of the day, crowds would sing the chorus with you. The song was a subject we all knew about, a leaf from our daily lives, heard by our children, and it was simply accepted as part of this culture. Unimaginable in London or Belfast or Toronto or New York or Paris, everywhere, but no big deal in the Caribbean. I don’t have the room to list more examples, but they exist by the thousand. Kaiso is a totally clean slate; whatever you write on it, that’s fine.
And of course, the comedy; some of the most hilarious comedy you will ever hear; you know the examples as well as I, like Blakie’s “Chinese Accident” story mentioned above. Straightforward jokes – “Honeymooning Couple” was one such – put to music. But for me, above all, the door wide open to sing about anything under the sun; a door wide open; nothing is taboo. Think about it, cast your mind back over the scores of calypsos you know; no subject is left out. Politics, income tax, a new space satellite by the Russians; an excursion boat sinking off the coast of Grenada; a political leader in Barbados proposing segregated beaches in the island; all subjects for kaiso, bands playing them in concerts and in fetes and people gyrating and frolicking..
And that is what we have lost in our popular music: the subjects of the day, and the freedom to laugh at anything, and to hear the incidents in our life, the items in the newspapers, coming back to us in song, sometimes with a different slant, like “Honeymooning Couple,” but sometimes straight on, like “Copycats.” Those dimensions are not found in our pop music today, and we are worse off for that. I close my case with a verse from “Tell Me You Love Me,” one of my Tradewinds kaisos:
Rohan Beharry working in the dew
Planting cassava, planting callaloo
He bounce up Rohini, he nearly faint away
He hold she by she hand and say
Love is a motion, deeper than the ocean
Heavy with emotion, burning like a lotion
Love is a thing does cut like a cutlish
Make you feel dotish, and leave you kind o’ brokish
But love like a crab curry, one smell and you basodee
You belly full, but you still hungry,
Tell me you love me
And you don’t know bottom from top
And once you start you can’t stop
And when you should hip, you hop
Tell me you love me.
