But looka you doh nuh: thinking I don’t know the difference between officious and official.
Anyway, there are officials and then there are the officious.
And every year during Crop Over, the officious does jump out de bush, and even more so after the Pic-O-De-Crop judges make their determinations.
Now, I have no brief for the judges. I even tell wunna a’ready that I no longer believe in a competition that judges something that is supposed to be art. I cahn see how you can efficiently judge it, anyway.
Don’t misunderstand me. A song, a story, a sculpture and so on can probably be shown to be better or worse than another in some ways.
But why is it so important to rank them? Is it a race, a boxing match? In athletics, Usain Bolt runs against Andrew Hinds – we can objectively prove that Bolt won and it is legitimately a contest.
But why must Sparrow’s Royal Jail be ranked against Dougla’s Split Me In Two when in the end, because of the nature of song/art, nobody can say categorically (across a mob-o-ton of creative elements) which is better.
Ah mean, I could point out weaknesses or strengths in the make-up of ten different songs but why do I have to rank them, assigning points to this feature and that one? What artistically sound reasons can we give for that?
Of course, we can give reasons that have nothing at all to do with art. Those extra-art reasons might show ranking assessment to be necessary – but at the very least it will be a necessary evil and something of a travesty.
And if you have ever given deep thought to the great number of things that would be necessary to make ranking contestants in a creative contest – such as a calypso competition – work, you would know that it would be impossible for it to be done efficiently with any consistency.
So when somebody wins Pic-O-De-Crop, nobody profoundly knows why. And the means of arriving at that probably could not stand up to the scrutiny of experts in assessment (here I don’t mean assessment of songs, which is itself a very hard thing if you seriously study it – I mean assessment as a (social) science, which has to do with selection of items, separation of items, measurement, ranking, weighting, means (in more ways than one) and so on, and as a process for which you have to provide efficient frameworks).
Look, schools have syllabuses that indicate in significant detail what is required in various school subjects. And mostly trained teachers are continually preparing students to meet the specific requirements of various items, regularly assessing and allocating marks/points to their efforts.
Then these same people, who are much practised in the assessment of the particular thing, in which the candidates have been pracitising according to a prescribed syllabus come together to do the “final” assessment of all those who have been practising meeting the well publicised, specific/detailed requirements.
And even then any reputable examining body creates an efficiency framework that includes training to assess the thing (which is not the same as knowing or having produced the thing yourself or exercising yourself in a “cousin” discipline), further focused practice for assessors, standardisation, discussion of assessments, monitoring of assessors and assessments, triple and quadruple “redundant” (I am using that word technically) assessments and reassessments, allied with other quality assurance methodologies (including restandardisations or removals from the process) and fail-safe mechanisms.
That is for things that in every case have far, far fewer elements than a song. Yet at Crop Over time people set great store by a set-up that patently lacks all of the critical features mentioned above.
And the officious rush in where angels would fear to tread.
One of their biggest mistakes is the failure to recognise melody/music as a song’s chief seducer. So catchiness, memorableness, “dramatic shape”, unity and coherence of melody; rhythm/”groove”; and the appealing use of song form (verse, chorus, bridge, et cetera) are vitally important (unless you are behaving like a cultural slave).
I say this to the officious: listening to Neurosis Of The Rich by the Mighty Sparrow as a song is radically – radically! – different from approaching it as some kind of speech (maybe a sermon) or a newspaper article.
The reason I say this is that a lot of the (overbold) comments I hear about this calypso or that one show that the speakers are paying no attention to the work as a song. They are approaching it as a document, apparently wrapped up in music as a kind of afterthought.
The evidence? When they say that a particular calypsonian has a “strong” song, they talk mostly about “a good message” and its development, with references sometimes to cleverness.
These things have relevance but they have nothing at all to do with the fact that a song lyric is not an independent art from.
The quality of a song cannot be determined by its so-called message. To make that the only major judgement of a song is bad enough. But it also views a song lyric as primarily a rhetorical entity – which it is not.
That focus pays no attention to the critical matters of the lyric’s technical proficiency as a song lyric. That takes you into the areas of singability; naturalness of phrasing; the aforementioned efficacy of verse, chorus and other elements of song form; effectiveness of rhyme, the emotional, experiential, aesthetic appeal of the thing, et cetera, et cetera.
In fact, the lyrics in a song are not best seen as words combined with music, but as words that have also become music and are being accompanied by music.
Music essentially makes an emotional, experiential and aesthetic connection with the listener. And when words are also functioning as music and operating in the context of music, the greatest consonance is achieved when the words are largely aimed at those ends.
The various creative turns that songwriters, singers, and musicians bring to the task are not matters for those who are simply wearing an officious hat.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com.