CBC TV8’S EVENING NEWS on Saturday carried a sound bite of Red Plastic Bag (RPB) saying something along these lines: “We have to look seriously at how we analyse calypso . . . . Every calypso does not have to deal with things that are going on in a country.”
And I say, “Bag sound like me.” Is years I saying that through different media.
Look, a good song vibrantly depicts any of a wide variety of lived out experiences of human beings. Real-real people rehearse life, relive life, enter into another’s life, experience pleasure, are validated, partnered, lifted up in faith, feel empathy and more through such songs. Not often through our “serious” calypsos, though.
Ah gine shock yuh: some of the best examples of calypso lyric-writing these days – in the critical experiential and emotional aspects – are of the bumper rolling/pooching back/wukking up/waving something/ “leh we get on bad” variety. Not that I am encouraging them, ’cause they are not high-minded. But, like all good lyric art, they do treat listeners like emotional, sensate, experience-craving beings – like real-real people – and not like ideologues or wannabe activists or sociologists or spectators of life.
The high-minded calypsos in many cases would not know art if it was as broad as Hurricane Ike in 2008 and coming straight at them – all because their lyricists, including Bag, think that comment on certain governance topics, packaged with verse, rhyme and wordplay, is lyric art.
They got that by using a very prevalent Caribbean approach: learning, not by purposeful study, but by mere familiarity with what happens to be popular. So, as Jane Sherwood Ace said, “Familiarity breeds attempt” – poor attempt. And perhaps breeds, too, a banking on listeners embracing the philosophy once used to explain Kenny G’s popularity: “Eat s*** – six billion flies can’t be wrong.”
Our social commentary songs often tackle 37 things in one song. How in heaven’s name (there is a more colourful Bajan expression “How the . . .” that I don’t use and couldn’t use in the paper, anyhow) you could sustain emotional reach and participation by rationalistically touching 37 things?
Many calypsonians, Bag too, do that, and because follow pattern en kill Cadogan in this neck of the woods, with its fabricated, inauthentic “market”, there will be lots of other misled lyricists.
Not only that, this comment-on-issue approach causes the oversimplification of complex matters, things that learned people take whole books to explore.
One of the most dangerous aspects of social commentary calypso is the absence of people in action in the songs. In what are held up as our best social commentary songs nobody lives, does, breathes, experiences. Nobody! The songwriters’ focus on commenting apparently kill dem!
But there are also non-art dangers of social commentary. One is the nurturing of apathy – as people settle into an enfeebling dependence upon supposed activist singers, when in fact they are mere entertainers playing at being mouthpieces. These singers and songwriters are no Pete Seegers, Joan Baezes, Bob Dylans, Woody Guthries, Arlo Guthries – undoubtedly activists.
The ones many are pleased to delude themselves about in the Caribbean are not known to put their boots and bodies and money where their mouths are.
Also, because of the preacher pose of many of these songs, there is no poignant communication of a felt personal stake and no sense of personal responsibility. Listen to Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror for a less self-righteous, more sensitive, more psychologically intelligent approach.
RPB’s perspective is something I first expressed on radio in the late 1970s by quoting novelist Earl Lovelace: “Boy meets girl, man-woman relationships, awe, wonder, grief – these simple profound feelings have hardly been fully expressed or even attempted in calypso.”
And now Bag mout’ in the ling. No comfort to me. Because calypsonians, who are constantly pressing politicians and others to be different and who often say they en frighten or “scurd”, apparently themselves lack the (you know what) to change.
So I en in singing no overly personal closet or bathroom thank you to calypso song that nobody else but a few calypsonians can enter into. (Basic mass songwriting blunder – trust muh a little bit pun dis: ah just order muh 66th and 67th books on songwriting.)
I singing “I cry for you, calypso” instead. And if I craft (art) it right, I entice lots of real-real people to enter into the experience and personalize it. As is the case with the best of songs.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com
