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Calypso and the World Music Market Gordon Rohlehr

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Calypso and the World Music Market Gordon Rohlehr “We Getting the Kaiso That We Deserve” Calypso and the World Music Market Gordon Rohlehr Over the past six decades, calypsonians have had to produce their songs for that many-headed monster, the market, while retaining close contact with their communities and struggling to maintain aspects of ca- lypso tradition in a rapidly changing world. Market forces have steadily pushed calypso toward commodi- fication, teaching singers to do for profit what their ancestors did for fun, entertainment, relaxation, edifi- cation, or self-knowledge. Synchronized now to the heavy life-pulse of a so-called “world music,” calypso has emerged beyond the confines of its original small communities. It has begun to behave like other popular musics. Calypsonians are not naive; they are aware of real dangers as well as the possibility of tan- gible rewards of playing for the world market. A growing appreciation of the paradoxical nature of commodification can be heard in many of the calyp- sos which over the past three decades have monitored change and erosion in Trinidad’s musics, festivals, and performance styles. Calypsonians have maintained a bitter and ominous discourse about the state of cul- ture and the situation of art and artists in the post- independence era. Some of these calypsos or calypso-influenced songs in which such discourse has taken place have been Stalin’s “Steelband Gone” (), “If I Did Know” and “Where Limbo Gone” (), and “De Jam” (); Chalkdust’s “We Is We” (), “Kaiso versus Soca” (), “The Spirit Gone” (), “Uncle Sam . Gregory “G.B.” Own We” (), “Quacks and Invalids” (), and “Kaiso Sick in the Hos- Ballantyne performing at pital” (); Relator’s “Radio Stations” (ca. ); Sparrow’s “Songs of Your Dimanche Gras, . (Photo by Jeffrey Chock) The Drama Review , (T), Fall . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420498760308481 by guest on 02 October 2021 Calypso Land” (); Ras Shorty I’s “We Ting, Endless Vibrations” (), “That Ent Good Enough” (), and “Latrine Singers” (); Tambu Herbert’s “Cul- ture” (); Tigress’s “We Getting the Kaiso That We Deserve” (); Short Pants’s “Lost Generation”; Lancelot Layne’s “Blow Way” () and “Get off the Radio, Canboulay” (); Mudada’s “Tourist Jump” () and “Mecca of the Steelband” (); and Commentor’s “Satellite Robber” (). In all of these—and there are many more—is a concern for cultural self-definition and beyond that a more ominous concern for the future of the culture in the face of forces of erosion, appropriation, indifference, the neglect of artists and other cultural workers, the absence of any coherent cultural policy, and the pressure from external cultural influences powerfully promoted by the foreign media. Mudada’s “Tourist Jump,” for example, protests the paradox of the ne- glected artist on the one hand and the State’s recognition of the economic re- wards that could possibly accrue to the nation if its citizens learned betimes how to “jump for the tourist, wine for the tourist, do this for the tourist and that for the tourist.” There are, on the other hand, scores of calypsos—perhaps ten hours or more of them—celebrating the steelband. Such songs illustrate an important as- pect of cultural process in Trinidad and Tobago, by which one indigenous “folk” form validates and legitimizes another. Calypsos specially composed for the steelband have steadily grown in structural complexity and melodic so- phistication. Along with calypsos claiming Carnival, tassa, parang, limbo, and calypso as the cultural property of Trinidad, calypsos on the steelband are a form of cultural self-affirmation that runs counter to and is at the same time partially inspired by the feeling that the nation is under cultural attack. So the contemporary calypso describes two contradictory impulses. The first is parochial, inner-directed, quite often defensively aggressive, in which the citizens of a small “postcolonial nation” reassure themselves by celebrating what they have created and by claiming themselves and the works of their hands and minds in the face of an appropriating world that at times includes rival Carib- bean states, many of which have their own Carnivals and their own competing calypso or soca music. The second impulse is externally oriented and involves calypso’s ongoing encounter with a world market that imposes its own terms, standards, and conditions of access. This market exists in different places: . Within West Indian communities living in North America, Canada, other West Indian islands, and the United Kingdom . Radio and television networks in North America, Canada, and the United Kingdom . Europe, where there are hundreds of steelbands in Switzerland, and growing enthusiasm for the calypso in places such as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and France . Japan . Africa . Latin America, a market that a few singers have begun to probe Calypsonians, pannists, and mas’ designers access different sectors of this market according to contacts they may have developed over time, personal initiative, and the drive or know-how of their managers and recording agen- cies. But from the testimonies of practitioners such as Sparrow, Chalkdust, David Rudder, Arrow, Eddie Grant, Pelham Goddard, Byron Lee, the late Lancelot Layne, Reynold Howard, and Lord Superior, one concludes that the marketing of calypso music outside of the Caribbean has been a sort of free- for-all. It is uncoordinated, retaining the characteristics of home-grown indi- vidualism and the parochialism of inter-island small-town rivalries. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420498760308481 by guest on 02 October 2021 Gordon Rohlehr . Calypsonian David Rudder performing his hit song “High Mas” on Car- nival Tuesday in the open- ing sequence of Peter Minshall’s Red at the Grand Stand, Port of Spain, February . (Photo by Jeffrey Chock) Yet—and such is the contradictory nature of the calypso phenomenon— there exists a countertendency in which the musical and manufacturing re- sources of the region are exploited and shared by various artists throughout the region. Sparrow has recorded with Byron Lee, who has for years been a significant presence at the Trinidad Carnival and has recruited musicians from the southern Caribbean to play in his band. Barbados has for some time been a center of record-production for Caribbean artists. Trinidad’s Leston Paul has arranged music for singers and composers from various islands. Eddie Grant, Guyanese by birth, British by upbringing, and Barbadian by residence, has purchased and is doing the compact-disc repackaging of a substantial part of Trinidad’s calypso heritage. The conflict between the parochial and the international is intense and confused, but inevitable. Sometimes the same singer can on the same disc project contradictory signals as to the direction in which he believes the music should be taken. This was particularly true in with Shorty’s (Ras Shorty I’s) We Ting, which counseled Trinidadians to remember that calypso, mas, steelband, and parang were “we ting, we very own ting” that Trinidadians should acknowledge in the midst of all their enthusiasm for such foreign mu- sic as soul and pop. On the same album, the most popular calypso, “Endless Vibrations,” proclaimed the urgent need for changing the accent, vocabulary, and musical structure of the calypso in the direction of the rival American popular music, while “Soul Calypso Music” illustrated just what Shorty in- tended with its hybrid, crossover, and uncalypso-like sound. A conflict of options, then, lies at the center of all calypso discourse and is part of the greater conflict between competing ethnic cultural enclaves within the multiethnic state. Beyond this it is also part of the contestation that occurs when the beleaguered culture of the small neocolonial state struggles to affirm its identity and distinctness within the homogenizing space of the foreign marketplace. The tendency of the calypso over several decades has been to Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420498760308481 by guest on 02 October 2021 Calypso move toward a musical resolution of internal ethnic and aesthetic conflicts by blending two or more of the available musical idioms: for example, calypso and reggae/dub/ragga; or calypso and chutney or parang or soul or zouk. In past decades calypso has intermarried with various Latin rhythms: meringue, samba, mambo, etc., while retaining an awareness of the original deep struc- ture of the kalinda call-and-response trope. Today so-called soca singers ex- ploit a wide variety of traditional musical rhythms: from Orisha/Shango rhythms employed by David Rudder and André Tanker, to the Shouter/Bap- tist performance style of Superblue and Calypso Rose, to the dhantal and dholak-driven rhythms of Brother Marvin and Ras Shorty I or the Jab Jab jourvert beat that, recalled by Penguin in (“The Devil”), has taken up permanent residence in the current compositions of Super Blue (“Jab Jab”), Shadow (“Pay the Devil,” ) and various other singers. What Eddie Grant calls “Ring Bang” is Jab Jab music blended with old time Guyanese masquer- ade rhythms which bear some resemblance to Jab Jab. If calypso has dealt with internal variety by blending rhythms, it has tried to cope with the pressures of foreign popular musics and market forces by a strat- egy that is part confrontation and part accommodation. The desire to take the music “out there” has been intense. Most of the about songs recorded each year are market-oriented, “international” in their trajectory. Market forces de- termine the shape, the content, the message, and the performance style, as well as the uniformity in rhythm and melody. Thus, if Trinidad’s multiethnic situa- tion offers the singer or composer rich possibilities for a hybrid music that is various and multidimensional, the market demands—or is seen to demand— songs that are simplified, homogenized, and one- or non-dimensional.
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