Stetson?Wiltshire is right. You don’t have to be singing about “the issues of the day” to have a “good” calypso or a “competition song”.
And in case you don’t know who Mr Wiltshire is, it’s the iconic Red Plastic Bag aka RPB. By his candid and proper declaration, the multiple calypso monarch was intimating that there was no excuse, because he himself used the “issues” formula to great advantage, for either the people or the judges to expect others to restrict themselves to this blueprint. Actually, seeking to constrain RPB himself to his original styling would itself be egregious, unjust, thoughtless.
A calypso is a song. It is meant to be performed with a melody, and a theme, and a mood. It was never intended to be a boring lecture set to music, or a dissertation on how profoundly abstract its composer could possibly be.
Calypso was never meant to be opaque either, or to be interred in the bowels of incoherence to breed gobbledegook.
We have had presented to us as “competition songs” – and making Pic-O-De-Crop Semi-finals and Finals over the years – excursions into naivety and false-rhyme nonsense riding on the highway of tautology, overplayed catchphrases, intellectual dumbness, with none of this having any prescribed destination, except to the crevices of the minds of their perpetrators.
And this simply because some calypso “guru” somewhere began propagating the sterile notion that competition lyrics ought not to be of simple imagery or of single theme, and should not be mushy (read that as having a mood), and need not have a distinguishable tune. All that was required, apart from the “issues” formula, said the obtuse sages, was the pontificating on some abstraction like “democracy”, “civilization”, “meritocracy”, “integrity”, “Westernization”; or the demerits of politics and politicians and the futuristic disasters they portend for the nation’s children.
Spouted feigned intellectualism going nowhere and portrayed as profound calypso lyric is demanded by the calypso “gurus” and their adherents as befitting places in the Pic-O-De-Crop Semi-Finals and Finals. All else are labelled a “tent song”, substandard by their assessment to a contrived and empty amalgamation of clinical and unworthy writing and a slightly better musical notation.
Sadly, too many of us share this fatuous observation or capitulate to the pressure of being with it, robbing ourselves of the true essence of calypso.
Hence, for example, the criticism of Popsicle’s ascendency last year and Gabby’s offerings this year. Gladly, with all the pleasant surprise, the judges would manage to ride Popsicle’s ass up front in 2011; unfortunately this year, Popsicle lost several of the judges’ numbers on My Phone. A pity!
It could hardly be argued that Cornwall last year fitted the usual fare in the Pic-O-De-Crop Finals and that it was not a welcome change.
Then there have been those who have been insisting that Gabby’s offerings were not “competition songs”. Balderdash! As RPB argued, a calypso could be a about a cloud.
And as I will add, it could also be about a fool, a clown, my neighbour’s foot – and, of course, pruhnography.
A song – a calypso – is as much of the senses as it is about lyrics, melody and rendition. To strip kaiso of its sensory state is to do injustice to the musical work and its composer.
Songs that are cryptic crossword puzzles or the manifestation of a frustrated university lecturer have no place in calypso. Calypso with its sensory devices should make you laugh, or cry, or ponder, or reflect; should make you want to take action, militate; or should inspire you to help your fellowman. It should excite you to take the ride with the singer – anything but go to sleep during its execution.
A worthwhile calypso does not require this newly found overabundance of melodrama and theatrics. Truth be told, pyrotechnics won’t replace rendition, nor staying in key.
We need to get back to being soothed or wowed by calypso, with its subtleties and variations, and not being tormented by all the distracting and destructive intrusion – including the ill-informed.
• Ridley Greene is a Caribbean multi-award-winning journalist.
