82 / tank Radio Tank: for centuries, carnival’s liberating celebrations have contained the blueprints for another world. Art by José Luis Pescador, words by Adam Bychawski

Scan every time you see this symbol to listen along. Go to page 28 to see how. Carnivals as we know them today are no To understand the story of carnival, we must longer localised celebrations. The most begin in medieval Europe: In the 13th and 14th renowned, from Rio to London, have grown into centurIES, the catholic church attempted to rein spectacular tourist attractions that draw in the ecstatic and hedonistic forms of worship millions of revellers from across the WORLD. – possession, speaking in tongues, drinking and dancing – that early Christians had inherited from Greek mystery religions.

Until the late medieval period such wild behaviour remained common in churches, even priests and nuns were known to participate.

The influence of corporations loom large over them, as does the presence of police and the hand of the state.

With a complete ban almost impossible to impose, church leaders The compromise inadvertently invented carnival: the dozens of instead allowed the festivities to continue on the condition THAT they festivities that filled up the catholic calendar, now no longer took place on religious holidays and outside OF church grounds. confined to the church itself, became, in effect, secularised.

Much to the chagrin of church One outbreak of frenzied dancing, which began in Aachen, Germany authorities, an epidemic of in 1374, lasted four months, gradually spreading from city to city. dancING mania spread across It culminated IN 1,100 people dancing simultaneously in the city of Metz. northern Europe. attempts to exorcise the dancers provided ineffective.

But that has not always been the case: carnivals have served as the crucible for civil rights movements, independence campaigns AND revolutions – musical and political. The contagious, ecstatic dissent alarmed both the church and the state AS it posed a threat to the church’s monopoly ON the divine and incited violent revolts. THE CARNIVALESQUE INVERSION of hierarchies has long been a source of interest to scholars. In 1965, the Russian academic Mikhail Bakhtin published a book ON the 15th-century French writer François Rabelais. LOOKING at Rabelais’s WRITING ON FOLK CULTURE, Bakhtin wrote that carnival offerS “a second life outside officialdom” where people were liberated from political and religious dictates.

carnival is the world standing on its head

Carnivals also PROVIDED an occasion to send up the local, secular and church authorities.

Some critics ARGUE that carnival strengthens authority rather than contesting it, serving as a release valve in which anarchic One of the traditions of carnival is thIS mocking ritual. In Europe, the king of fools has its roots in the Feast of Fools, an event energies are safely UNLEASHED. In Europe, at least, this proved to During the celebrations, social hierarchies were temporarily created by the lower rungs of the clergy. This parody OF A mass involved be true: carnival gradually became formalised by the Renaissance. inverted with the village fool crowned king – the local clergyMEN dressing in women’s clothes, replacing the priest’s censer Only centuries later, ON a different continent, would a subjugated baron, by implication, taking THE FOOL’S place. with a sausage and CONDUCTING the usual Latin incantations IN gibberish. people finally realise the latent revolutionary potential in carnival. Recognising the subversive power of the instrument, the colonial government attempted to prohibit drumming in 1884.

From the 16th century onwards, European settlers Europeans plundered, brought the traditions enslaved and colonised of carnival with them vast swathes of the WORLD. to the colonies. But musicians soon found ways around the During the Second World War, tRINIDAD Kasio also evolved over the decades into ban, using bamboo – an abundant natural island was used as a base by the US modern calypso. Long before hip-hop, calypso resource – as a percussive instrument. Navy. Oil drums were LEFT in abundance played a similar role, with calypsonians often Bamboo groups (or tamboo bamboo) soon and musicians began experimenting with – but not exclusively – providing commentary became the sound of carnival. them. By the V.E. Day celebrations of 1945, on political events. they had become integral to carnival. In Trinidad, carnival was initially a white celebration imported by French colonists WHO would often dress as slaves for the occasion.

The majority Once Trinidadian slaves were emancipated of crime is through in 1838, they begAn TO THROW their own poverty because/The high annual event to celebrate their freedom, cost of living, lord!/Higher appropriating elements of French carnival than a mountain/People like me alongside African-derived traditions, in and you so/Have to stand up By 1934, the authorities had also banned turn mocking the elites. and watch the goods tamboo bamboo and, following increasing at Hi-Lo * calls for independence, songs “that insult *mighty members of the upper class”. sparrow

In 1943, a young calypsonian named Lord Invader debuted a new song that militated against RACISM – not just in Trinidad but in the diaspora as well. It became an instant hit and was later popularised in the US by THE SINGER Lead belly.

Negro fought in World War One and Two, So if Negro are good enough to fight, I don’t see why we can’t have equal rights

Music was central to the festivities. The participants sang kaiso, narrative song from west africa with lyrics that satirised the island’s white elites. Drums also played a crucial role. As the scholar Dawn K. Batson writes: “they gave voice to the confusion, pain and strength of a people brought against their will from Africa to the New World.” over a century after the abolition of slavery in Trinidad, the descendants In responsE, a of former slaves BEGAN TO MIGRATE to the nations that had colonised them. Trinidadian communist Caribbean immigrants brought with them a radically reinvented form of the Among them was one of Trinidad’s top CALLED Claudia Lenten celebrations that the Europeans had imported to the West Indies. calypsonians known as Lord Kitchener. Jones, who had been His arrival was caught on camera by a imprisoned in the News reporter, who asked him to sing. US for her political Kitchener didn’t miss a beat. activISM, WAS inspired by her memories of carnival to celebrate Caribbean arts and culture WITH AN EVENT.

London is the place for me

In 1948, the Empire Windrush, a former German cruise ship that was captured by the British, CARRIED the first wave of West- Indian immigrants to Britain.

His optimistic outlook would soon be tempered by But it was his 1957 song “Birth of Ghana”, the harsh realities of urban life as a person of marking the country’s independence, that colour. AS WAS CLEAR FROM SONGS like “My Landlady”. struck a chord in Ghana and back home.

First staged indoors A dirty sheet with at St Pancras Town half of a blanket Hall in January 1959, the carnival included costumed masquerade bands, WITH performances of drama, poetry and steel band music. We will be jolly, Calypso also featured And she merry and gay, the 6th of prominently. has the audacity March Independence Day

To tell me I’m living in luxury

The carnival quickly By 1958, with the rise of facist and nationalist groups outgrew its humble and growing calls for BORDER control, raciST beginnings and attacks WERE REGULAR IN BRITAIN. That summer, violence spilled out onto erupted in the streets of Notting Hill after armed the streets of teddy boys OPENLY ATTACKED West-Indian residents. Notting Hill in 1966. As communities from across the West Indies became involved, carnival came to reflect Barbadian, Dominican and Jamaican traditions as well as those of Trinidad. The Notting Hill carnival Some musical revolutions have even emerged in opposition has been the soundtrack to established carnivals. In Brazil, Rio carnival began as to Britain’s multicultural a marginalised and illegal practice but over the course evolution since the 1960s. Its of the 20th century it became increasingly commodified, sound reflects the music co-opted and institutionalised. of the “Black Atlantic”, the scholar Paul Gilroy’s term for a fluid, black identity born from slavery and forced migration, which encompasses everything from calypso to hip-hop, jazz to techno. it has also served as the catalyst and testing ground for new sounds. The black Atlantic links artists as diverse as Mamady Keïta, Sister Nancy and Drexciya’s James Stinson.

The gentrification of carnival has led to the growth of new cultures in the favelas, such jungle is a collision of hardcore, Jungle was black Britain’s answer to the Goldie, one of the most famous producers as funk carioca, Jamaican dub and the breakbeats of musics of the Afro-Carribean and African- in jungle, fittingly described the sound which offers a american hip-hop. it emerged from the Americans; it unified the diasporic musical as “ghetto blues for the nineties”. greater sense of immigrant communities of 1990s London. traditions encapsulated by carnival and participation than provided a new sense of identity grounded the event proper. in London.

Originating in the 1980s, funk carioca borrows heavily from the hip-hop sub-genre Miami bass. In 1998, DJ Luciano Oliveira made the sound his own by combining capoeira, candomblé and maculelê drums with 808 bass. The resulting loop would dominate funk carioca for years to come.

In bringing together To unite disparate communities, people as one ah carnival has forged create a song Ah hope it Hundreds of parties, called funk solidarity between live on from generation bailes, where MCs and DJs perform ethnic groups and, in to generation on huge sound systems, take place the process, brought in the favelas each weekend. Strict about musical government legislation makes transformations. In it almost impossible for events Trinidad, a new musical to be held legally and many are style, soca, arose in shutdown by the police. the early 1970s with the explicit aim of “uniting the East Indian and African peoples”, according to its creator Ras Shorty I, by fusing traditional calypso with east-Indian rhythms.

By the late 1980s soca became the dominant music of carnival. Like samba before it, which was also born Although soca today features few in the slums, it remains to be seen whether Indian sounds, it remains emblematic the genre will eventually be celebrated of a pan-West Indian identity. rather than demonised. As Rio carnival has become synonymous with the It’s possible to see traces ... the UK student ... the Tahrir Square ... and the 2011 Spanish establishment, funk carioca has supplanted it as of the carnivalesque in protests of 2010 ... protests in 2011 ... indignados movement. the chief expression of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque”. the seizures of public space that have defined Greek protests against austerity in 2010 and 2011 ...

Since the 1960s, many other cultures have gathered and celebrated in ways that fit bakhtin’s definitions of carnival. and Much like in the late Medieval ages, carnival in the 20th In 2012, as part of the protests against the century and 21st century has found new life outside of its re-election of Vladimir Putin, Pussy Riot licensed forms. performed an iconoclastic punk prayer in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on shrove Tuesday, the traditional date of the Lenten carnival. In 1967, the belgian situationist Raoul The following year, Vaneigem conceived a theory of carnival Paris was overtaken as a model for revolution. He wrote, in by a wave of student his book The Revolution of Everyday Life... protests.

revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society

While the protests themselves may be Vaneigem’s concept of “revolutionary carnival” has since short-lived and often brutally repressed, been taken up by other movements. In 1999, the activist they have nevertheless served as the group Reclaim the Streets organised a global “Carnival From Brazil to Zimbabwe, foundations for longer political projects. Against Capitalism” to coincide with the G8 summit. there were protests in 40 different countries. In London, thousands of people turned Europe’s largest financial centre upside-down, while a Carnival of the Oppressed in Nigeria brought nearly 10,000 Ogoni, Ijaw, and other tribes together to close down the country’s oil capital, Port Harcourt.

Bahkin saw carnival as a “second world” in which people are liberated, albeit briefly, from the oppressive structures that govern their lives. Today, the carnivalesque revolts occurring across the globe are a blueprint for that other world. THE END