WE ARE NEARING THE CLIMAX OF CROP OVER, and with the Pic-O-De-Crop Finals coming on Friday night, you know tongues wagging ’bout calypso.
But I want you to do me some favours: stop talking about a calypso as though it is an essay accompanied by music; stop talking about a song as though it is just rhymed and versified prose; stop talking as though a song is just lyrics; and stop talking about a song as though mere wordplay and/or the direct expression of views that you agree with could make it a good song.
Music is essentially emotional and experiential. It can give pleasure (and, I daresay, pain), affect senses, call forth emotions, affect mood, and so on. That means that things that are consistent with that nature make for a superior fit. When words are turned into melody/music, to be truly congruent and to achieve the greatest artistic effect, they must meld with the essential nature of music.
What kinds of words fit the emotional and experiential bill? Sensory words, emotive words, relational words, personal words, images of individuals in action, words that convey felt experience, words that convey intimacy.
So there is both a rhetoric and a psychology of the song lyric that make it a different creature from rationalistic forms of composition.
Comment – social commentary – is in essence cognitive, ideational, rationalistic. Music is affective, experiential. Not cut from the same cloth.
Perhaps some calypsonians get a sense that verse and rhyme en enough to make lyric art if it is direct comment-laden, so they try to spice things up with cleverness – in the form of wordplay.
But wordplay is itself cognitive and is not potent in sensory appeal, image creation, emotional reach, connection with the listener, capturing people in action, creating a sense of immediacy, creating vicarious experience, creating personal stake – the rhetorical and psychological fundamentals of song lyrics. Yet people call it lyrical mastery.
How has direct comment calypso survived so long? For one thing, it is evidence of such a noble democratic urge that many confuse democratic action, nobility and art.
Cultural authoritarianism – an insidious dictatorship that shames divergent thinking in populist artistic matters – has played a role too, squelching critical thinking about popular art and installing a cheerleading mentality. Also, the lack of voluntary involvement with written-down literary art as a natural and nurturing life involvement has left people exposed only to newspaper essays and Internet rants and such – social commentary – so everybody nowadays is a wannabe social commentator. In addition, the window of opportunity is so small for a calypsonian who wants to view himself as serious that a search for formulas ensues and brings with it follow-pattern thinking.
And, of course, we like to think that we are intellectuals, so we have given easy accommodation to the idea that the rationalistic (social comment) is inherently superior to emotional, relational, experiential art (so we think that The Guardians by King Austin is automatically a better calypso than Ten To One Is Murder). You can put that one over on a society that has the trappings but not the stuff of real education (especially in the arts).
Now, I en saying that you should not sing social comment calypso. Sing it – it can be a good thing for a society. Understand, though, that, properly judged, your song might bite the dust in a competition that is supposed to be judging calypso as an art form.
But if you want to be artistic, do something like David Rudder’s Panama, or Big Shot Neighbour by Duke or Shanty Town People or Don’t Touch Me (both by Sparrow) or Charmer’s Big Shot Laugh.
In these, powerful story and depiction and, in Sparrow’s and Charmer’s pieces, personal stake – and not facile, diverting, impotent cleverness – meet the rhetorical and psychological requirements of song lyrics and take on social situations that evidence a broader palette than simply governance issues.
There are other faults of social commentary calypso and there is more to lyrics than the above matters. And, of course, there is more to song than lyrics. But everyone interested in calypso should remember that the evolutionary, elemental pull of emotion and experience in music is central to its art.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com
