EDITORIAL – The sound of music or of fury?

IF YOU TOOK MR KEN KNIGHT’S RECENT TV UTTERANCES on calypso tents seriously, you just might believe these operations were doomed – at least to four. We were not overwhelmed by Mr Knight’s argument for the touted cut in tent numbers: the decrease in calypso patronage by “20 per cent”.One possible cause of the decline in tent attendances over time is the Cavalcade the National Cultural Foundation (NCF) pursues each year: an exercise in entertainment brought to your doorstep for free.There is no doubt the Cavalcade affords many party people much merriment, but it definitely brings no substantial patronage to the tents. It boosts no greater interest in the tents as Mr Knight and the NCF have claimed it would.Added to that, the NCF is not without blame for the direction calypso has taken.The inadvertent boxing of calypso into a “competition song” – whatever that may be – has contributed in large measure to “winning formulas” that have in turn been detrimental to the deeper qualities of fun, wit, irony and creative storytelling.Calypso has always been too varied to be constructed into abstract (and oft-times convoluted) social commentary, forced double entendre and planned picong as measuring sticks.That’s what has been killing calypso tents and their patronage; the past two recessionary years have only underscored this.Added yet to all this is NCF chairman Mr Knight’s heavy leaning toward the rabid party music, referred to by a predecessor as partilypso or some such nomenclature: a genre that dispels any notion of quality lyrical content or melodic structure.So, strangely enough, for Mr Knight there are too many tents, but not too many calypsonians and partilypsonians.And who would be so naive as to believe tent managers would cluster, capitulate and select from among them Mr Knight’s ideal four calypso tents?What has happened to the planned “stimulation of the cultural industry” that we have been awaiting since the last NCF administration? We cannot be sold on the idea the “cultural industry” will be any springboard from which entertainers, producers and managers – among others – will be flung high to a profitable existence (via foreign exchange), when the NCF keeps sending mixed signals.We ask the question again – yet unanswered: will the ordinary “cultural industry” folk be helped along the way as were – or are – the tourism industry players, the agricultural industry veterans, the manufacturing industry entrepreneurs, and the like?Can we see a tax deal via special fund – of the kind forged between the Government and the Barbados Chamber of Commerce & Industry last week – benefiting the Crop-Over stakeholders, including the calypso tents?Or will the calypso tent industry be at odds with the imagineering of the entertainment entrepreneurial gurus and consultants, in this mad rush to exploit the great profits there for the taking from the inferior sounds of music?