In 1973, 50 years ago, there was a dramatic evolution of calypso – a redefinition of the sound and business of carnival music.
Today, Carnival in the Caribbean and throughout the diaspora has one main soundtrack: soca music. How this music came to define the Caribbean carnival experience for many, in Trinidad & Tobago and elsewhere, is an exercise in parsing myths and apocryphal stories, deciphering competing agendas and egos, and defining a unique space within an industry. global music – beyond what Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott describes as the region’s encouragement of “the pleasures of mindlessness, of brilliant emptiness”.
New World music – calypso, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, reggae, hip-hop and dancehall – arises from a community of musicians, singers and interesting media that reports and encourages its development and growth. However, it is sometimes easy to attach one man’s name to the creation and development of new musical genres in America – James Brown for funk, DJ Kool Herc for hip-hop, and Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto for Brazil’s bossa nova.
For soca, a credible case can be made for calypsonian innovator Lord Shorty’s moniker to be attached to the genesis of the genre and the song that started it all: his 1973 tune “Indrani.”
Born Garfield Blackman and over six feet tall, his original sobriquet was ironically Lord Shorty – but he would later use the name Ras Shorty I, following a spiritual conversion in 1980, until his death in 2000. He eventually gave the sound and rhythm a name, though sokah — a reporter’s spelling mistake shortened it to soca.
He gave the genre’s origin story a continuous, oft-repeated narrative:
The aim of soca in the 70s was to unite East Indians and Africans. So there was a combination of the two main rhythmic structures in Trinidad to create a sound that would be thoroughly Trinidadian… It’s not soul as in American soul. [music]but the spirit of Trinidad, the spirit of calypso… It all started with “Indrani”.
The first song to start a genre is usually identified, in retrospect, by music experts describing the characteristics and instrumentation. Here, the propulsive bass over a continuous percussive groove with the high hat mirroring the kick drum and snare drum alternately syncopating in a wake up rhythm. It was a musical evolution in a socially reawakened Trinidad, as the island’s turbulence of the 1970s gave birth to cultural pride and inner inspiration for creativity.
Effectively born out of a need to bring calypso up to date—and hopefully cross over to a wider audience outside of the earnest Caribbean diaspora in North America—soca music began to sonically define the carnival experience from the 1970s and has continued through in the present.
These single creative stories are filled with hyperbole: Little Richard in rock ‘n’ roll (“I say I’m the architect”); or Jelly Roll Morton in jazz (“I, myself, happened to be creative”). Lord Shorty was no different: “I am the inventor and no one else.”
However, origin stories can be challenged. The names of various artists and musicians at the seminal KH Studios in Port of Spain, creating that new music in the early 1970s, are in the mix for future generations to bestow fame or infamy: Calypsonians Maestro, Shadow and King Wellington; and music arrangers Ed Watson, Pelham Goddard, Art De Coteau and Robin Imamshah.
Soca would become a catch-all catchphrase to define the music that sent carnival revelers into frenzied joy. The atmosphere and energy it provides are addictive and inviting. Despite initial doubts about longevity and popularity beyond a passing fad, calypso icons soon jumped on the soca train: Calypso Rose with “Give More Tempo” (1977), Lord Kitchener with “Sugar Bum Bum” (1978), Mighty Sparrow with “ Soca Disco” (1981).
Brooklyn, New York became a center for the global spread of soca in the 1980s, with Caribbean entrepreneurs – Rawlston “Charlie” Charles, Granville Straker, Michael Gould (B’s Records) – doing big business. The other islands took on the evolutionary sound of soca, which was no longer associated with Shorty’s idea of a fusion of African and Indian rhythms.
The King of Antigua’s ‘Tourist Leggo’ short (1976) forced a xenophobic response to what might be considered the ‘Road March’, the most played song on the road: ‘Not a Trini, no road march’. It reflected Art Blakey’s famous axiom, “No America, no jazz!”
The Caribbean came out anyway. Montserrat’s Arrow has perhaps the most famous soca tune, “Hot, Hot, Hot” (1982). Barbados launched a musical invasion at the Trinidad Carnival in the mid-to-late 1990s that changed the way the music scene evolved; It `s done groove.
Grenada-born William Munro in 1993 presented the Soca Monarch competition, dubbed the Superbowl of soca music, cementing superstar status in a new breed of soca artists: the iconic Superblue, the enduring Iwer George, the lyrically adept Bunji Garlin and the wife of its trend. -the setting of Fay-Ann Lyons, and the star of the next generation – The Voice.
In his 40-year career, soca’s biggest superstar, Machel Montano, made collaborations with major artists in other genres a key to his global recognition, pushing soca’s potential across the board. As music modernized in the 1980s—with synthesizers replacing musicians and DJs replacing live bands—international pop began to influence the compositions.
Soca emulated whatever was hot – hip-hop/R&B, dancehall/reggae, EDM and more recently Afrobeats – or boldly blended pop tunes from Enya, A-ha, Cyndi Lauper, The Police and U2 into soca beats in an attempt to its to break out of the cocoon of carnival festival music and become the new popular music from hot latitudes, just as reggae and dancehall, bossa nova and reggaeton have done. Even Guyanese music icon Eddy Grant tried to make the ringbang – his trademark facsimile of the soca sound – a hit in the United States, with limited success.
The remix route became a business model for success beyond the diaspora. Vincentian Kevin Lyttle made serious progress in the Billboard Hot 100, reaching number four with “Turn Me On” (2003); and Barbadian Rupee included his song “Tempted to Touch” (2002) in a hit film, moving that song to Billboard Top 40. A 1987 cover of Arrow’s “Hot, Hot Hot” by Buster Poindexter and Baha Men’s 2000 cover of Anslem Douglas’ “Doggie (Who Let the Dogs Out)” brought US chart success and a Grammy, respectively.
These singular accomplishments mask the ongoing broader struggle for soca to break into the wider public consciousness beyond Carnival, or in these cases, the music for summer in the North. On modern streaming services, soca is deliberately labeled “reggae” to get the high-level algorithmic recognition that soca is not accorded. Analysis shows that the popularity of reggae/dancehall and reggaeton, compared to soca, is 10 and 100 times greater respectively.
Calypso is the art of a lyricist and performer, and soca has become the art of a producer. The rise of the “riddim” in the 2010s (a musical bed, many songs – mimicking the production economy of early dancehall and calypso) has generated popularity but limited unique spread.
Party aesthetics govern modern carnivals. Music is about movement and getting a physical response. Lyrics that express carnal desires overshadow many soca songs about love, female empowerment or Caribbean camaraderie.
Hhow did soca encourage walcott’s “brilliant gap”? Not necessarily, as it has also become the driving force behind a growing and diverse Caribbean music industry.
Fifty years after “Indra”, soca is now Caribbean music; artists, songwriters and producers from all over the islands reign. St Lucian Dennery’s segment, Grenadian jab music, Dominican bouyon, Barbadian soca bashment and more genres of island music all exist commercially in the soca space, despite their various origins unrelated to Lord Shorty’s thesis -t for calypso stall reversal.
Lord Shorty once said, “Sokah is the power of movement.” He didn’t lie. of Solower it somelypso is made practically and aesthetically Sowhiten the traces of somernival, and soca’s continued chameleon-like development means it will be more than that in the future. And we will still be stuck in the rhythm.
