It’s that time of the year when Barbadians become nationalistic and nostalgic, and nowhere is this more reflected than in the music on the local airwaves.
Each November, most of the radio stations play soulful and uptempo Barbadian tunes stretching back 30 or 40 years, warming many a heart with memories and exposing, year after year, the wealth of local music which we have in our storehouse, but which is hidden away until Independence.
That’s why I’m surprised that no call has been reiterated at this time for the 100 per cent Bajan radio station as suggested by Adonijah in his Pic-O-De-Crop contender this year; nor has anyone reminded the Minister of Finance or Minister of Culture of the call in the last Budget for 60 per cent local music on all radio stations.
Maybe it’s because topics like the state of the economy as well as repeated talk of a new hospital and high-flying ministers have become the issues, with which every other Barbadian feels he should bombard the airwaves, newspaper pages and websites.
It’s ironic, though, that back in the not-too-distant past when GEMS and JAWS raised many eyebrows, when a whole prison was burnt to the ground, and when cost overruns in capital projects were as clear as the water off Brandons Beach, many Barbadians still found time and space to address a range of other issues, including culture.
Today, everything is “the economy”, and most discussions involve who is incompetent and who in Barbados can miraculously solve a situation that baffles the entire world. And what about the much needed discussion on radio airplay for local music – a sector that has nearly as much of an impact on foreign exchange being wasted at this time of decline in tourism spend?
So far, a few commentators have dismissed the 60 per cent airplay suggestion by saying that the law already has it covered. If so, why isn’t it being enforced? And if it is, why is the difference in airplay so glaring every November?
One letter-writer also opined that Barbados’ volume of indigenous music would not be enough to sustain a Bajan radio station without much repetition. Really?
In November alone, we hear less than half of the spouge music that has been recorded by Barbadian artistes. And, in fact, back in 2002 when the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation posted its Top 100 Bajan hits, a large segment happened to be calypso, and not spouge.
And it’s not merely a case of having statistics, but simple arithmetic would indicate that the thousands of multi-genre songs sung, played, written and produced by Barbadians could easily sustain a 100 per cent Bajan station, and could – if only some effort was made by radio station bosses and DJs – make the 60 per cent target a reality.
The watershed of music from the 1960s and 1970s would be a mix of spouge, gospel, folk, ballads and calypso, featuring the works of Sach Moore who alone has penned hundreds of songs, The Merrymen, Jackie Opel, Joseph Niles, Sister Marshall, Wendy Alleyne and The Dynamics, Clarence Thompson, Smokey Burke, Richard Stoute, Rudy Boyce, The Troubadors, BRC, Escorts, The Opels, The Merryboys . . . .
I could fill this entire edition and still not list all the Barbadian music from those two decades.
By the time I reached the 1980s, numerous hits by Spice, Second Avenue, Splashband and Promise would instantly spring to mind.
And what about the flood of calypsos cascading out of Crop Over from around 1982 when Red Plastic Bag, alone, began to produce an album every single year until 2011?
We’re talking about a 38-year-old festival that gets an average of two songs from about 200 calypsonians yearly; and the cycle simply continues because as soon as calypsonians like Fowl Foot, Observer, Serenader and Invader moved off the scene, in came Alison, Edwin, TC, Adrian Clarke, Li’l Rick, Mr Dale and current youngsters like Hee Haw and Popsicle to join old-stagers like Gabby, Blood, Romeo and Classic.
The genres of soca, jazz, hip hop, alternative and reggae have also unearthed tremendous talent and recordings over the years, emerging from forums like the Musicians and Entertainers’ Guild of Barbados (MEGOB) Awards, Revodubolution, the Richard Stoute Teen Talent, Gospelfest, the Barbados Jazz Festival and the short-lived Choir Festival and St Lawrence Music Festival.
And individually, the albums produced by Square One and krosfyah alone can solidly fill rotation spots for a month; some radio stations do it with Gyptian and Elephant Man!
And I haven’t even touched on Barbadian international stars like Rihanna, Shontelle, Hal Linton, Cecil “Jimi” Haynes, Sean Jackson, Arturo Tappin and Nicholas Brancker, as well as the widely acclaimed St Leonard’s Boys’ Choir, whose work is about to go on CD.
The fact that we have all the above material, most of it largely unplayed on ten local radio stations, is an injustice to all Barbadian artistes.
What radio station managers must do, therefore, is sit and discuss their responsibility to Barbados, and Government should start the example by ordering its three stations to play the 60 per cent. Instead of calling on politicians and the Central Bank to do the nigh impossible amid the world’s slow and painful recovery from the worst economic recession in recorded history, radio heads need to plug the fissures through which royalties are pouring every year to foreign musicians and music conglomerates.
They must ensure a few more hundreds of thousands of dollars stay at home by playing 60 per cent local music every day, and not only in November or during the Crop Over Festival. Every cent counts.
