It keeps coming up: this talk about local music.
Some people, mostly artistes, say that Barbadians don’t like their own music and therefore they don’t like themselves.
The truth is that liking music is not a self-esteem undertaking, or a charity endeavour, or a nationalistic project.
It is like liking food or clothes or people or a car or a sweet drink.
Once people are free to choose, you are never going to be able to pigeonhole their tastes. And that’s where I have a big problem with the complainers. They don’t understand that personal taste rules, especially now.
But in today’s circumstances the listener’s personal stake does not seem to be sufficiently a concern to many of our artistes.
In their minds, music is a nationalistic enterprise. That can work in totalitarian societies. Not in the lands of the free (even if not brave).
Instead of examining their product, like other producers of market commodities, many of our artistes show little concern for what moves listeners to song.
Take calypso.
It started as a kind of in-house protest expression and “voice of the people” in slave times. But by the late 1940s things had changed radically – people were free and moving towards variegated, democratic lives; a market/business orientation had developed; calypso was now clearly becoming both entertainment and an art form.
So, between that post-war period and the late 1960s/early 1970s you had Spoiler and Melody and Kitchener and Small Island Pride and Bomber and Blakie and then Sparrow – and many others – singing songs that showed sensitivity to the new realities and to listeners.
But then along came intellectualistic (not to be confused with intellectual) calypsonians and intellectualistic judges (of competitions) and set a different tone, a tone that no longer respected the royalty of the listener, his/her interest in story, in people in the midst of experience, in the song as entertainment and as art – a tone that sought to impose a nationalistic, rationalistic agenda on free listeners.
And if it wasn’t for the burgeoning imposed carnival seasons giving them licence to bamboozle judges and captive masses, they woulda suck salt – as they deserved to for so assaulting the latter-day sovereignty of the listener.
Listen, calypso composers: the people now have a voice and you are only self-delusional if you feel they need your voice.
They have no reason to fear when a man (or woman) in a mask (or in a masquerade), singing with a focus on making money and/or becoming popular (nothing wrong with either of those), and making absolutely no use of the real-real means of getting change, sings about this or that governance issue.
Even so, life for most people is not primarily about pursuing societal change. It is more about feelings and personal dealings. It is about love (of a romantic other, of a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a child). It is about ageing. About loneliness. About good times. About longing. About friendship. About desire. About dreams. About tensions. About fears. About tragedy. About triumph. About coping. About dealing with alcoholism, with drugs, with hurts, with disease, with death. And they want to be partnered in these things.
Real people are experiencing so much every day while calypsonians bypass their living and treat them like column-reading would-be activists. With their anachronistic, out-of-step, over-long, often uncatchy, head-focused, editorial excuses for songs. Except the party ones.
And when listeners turn away, they are slapped with, “Wunna don’ like wunnaselves”.
Stop treating autonomous listeners as though they are your nationalistic project!
You really interested in changing the status quo? Build up support for causes, lobby, petition, find ways of encouraging people to act, put boots on the ground in protest – things that have the teeth of real influence and action. Stop forcing songs into a misfit. Let songs be songs and do what songs do for people personally.
If you want me to like your songs, you had better understand that you are a partner in my enterprise – not the other way around. As with other products, the customer is king (queen). I am Your Majesty.
Artistes (’cause artists – poets, novelists, short story writers, sculptors, playwrights, painters – don’t talk with a sense of entitlement), if you want me to like your works, you better try and “like” me – by respecting my real life, taste included.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.
