Fool that I may be, I am rushing in where many an angel may fear to tread, but in my opinion, Captain Sawyer’s calypso Something For Something is a classic representation of what a calypso should be; and it has done what a calypso should do.
He deserves the highest congratulations for bringing the society face to face with the complex social realities that conduce to the sale of, or exchange of money for, sexual services.
The Sugar Daddy is a single aspect of a wider issue.
His song should cause the society to examine the brutal disadvantages which may confront some females when they are face to face with some of the most soul-destroying challenges that any human may encounter. True to the art form, Sawyer is a social commentator dealing with reality.
He told last Monday’s Nation that he “wrote the song after going through the districts and . . . . I just sing about what is happening”.
That comment is as much food for thought as was John King’s Jump And Wave. And both songs are rooted in difficult economic times. They are powerful microeconomic reactions to macroeconomic issues.
Such is the power of calypso that from different angles they touch society’s nerve endings.
From the time Adam was a lad, sex has always been a sensitive matter and in this country the expression to “pick a fare” (another tag line from a recent calypso) has been a sort of concealed opening for soft-voice discussions about men buying sex mostly from women.
Of course, nowadays, the cougars (tourists and locals alike) have begun to equalise the situation, with their “beach bums” and “toy boys” in tow!
What Captain Sawyer has done is to find a semi-humorous manner for forcing the uncomfortable question onto the front burner.
The Mighty Sparrow opened a similar debate in Jean And Dinah, but reflecting the power relations between men and women in that era, he portrayed a situation in which men were figuratively and economically on top and could mockingly and derisively say of these two women and (insultingly so) that if “yuh find them broken yuh could get it all fuh nutten”.
But it was a harsh and brutal truth then, and it is also a harsh and brutal truth now, that sometimes some women are sometimes forced, through circumstances beyond their control, to suffer the indignities of selling “survival” sex, especially where tiny mouths have to be fed; and the pangs of deprivation of their young offspring force them into what might be called the ultimate indignity.
In that context, consider the United Nations news report on Thursday last that hundreds of Haitian and Liberian women are motivated by hunger and poverty to sell sex to UN peacekeepers, and then listen again to Captain Sawyer’s song.
Perhaps it would be much better if, like Singing Sandra, such women could afford to Die With My Dignity but I think this song has put the comodification of the act of sexual intercourse under the social moral and economic microscope.
One gets the impression that the Sugar Daddy is tendering for whatever the Young Ting may be offering and that there is a certain redressing of the power imbalance in the transactional sexual relations between the two contracting parties.
More say
Unlike her counterparts Jean And Dinah, the Young Ting has more say about what is going down. And she does not have to be “round the corner posing” as Jean And Dinah had to do.
With greater skill than Sparrow did in Jean And Dinah, Sawyer places the conversation between the Sugar Daddy and the Young Ting in the context of the recession and forces us to confront how the vagaries of economic turbulence can cause dislocation in the social and moral aspirations of some people.
If I am right, then Captain Sawyer has done yeoman service because he has forced us to confront a number of situations which have coalesced to bring this matter to fruition. In many minds, we do not equate the female from whom we would pick a fare with one with whom we would engage in a something for something transaction!
And, therefore, the question which Captain Sawyer’s song brings to focus is how far current events may have conduced to a widening of groups of (female) victims who may find themselves enmeshed in a whole quagmire of circumstances beyond their control and may get caught up in transactional sex of the Sugar Daddy kind, not necessarily because they wish but more so because, confronted with the exigencies of their situation, it is the lesser of two (hopefully temporary) evils.
If Captain Sawyer’s song is not biting social commentary cleverly packaged, then John King’s Jump And Wave (also a song emerging from recessionary times) was a gospel song!
Ezra Alleyne is an attorney at law.