It’s Crop Over time again, and music is in the air and on the air. As usual, there have been numerous criticisms of the music that’s been released. Some have said that the songs lack musicality, that the lyrics lack wit, subtlety, intelligence, that much of what is played on the airwaves, in the calypso tents, at shows, parties and fetes is “smut” (‘smut’ seems to be the watchword this year for the critics) and utterly lacks any redeeming value.
I make no claim to any expertise in the genres of calypso and soca. I’m just a regular radio listener. And I don’t think the music is that bad. Compared to recent years, there’s actually some pretty good stuff out there (as one commentator said, it’s a matter of choosing what you want to play/hear). Because it’s easier now for people to get access to a studio to produce and release a song and get on the radio, the number of songs released and played in the two or three months of the festival has skyrocketed, and yes, the gold comes along with a lot of dross. But (to completely mix my metaphors) the cream seems slowly to be rising to the top. And I think (or hope) that the music industry in Barbados will continue to move towards a healthy and profitable combination of quality and quantity.
Here’s my issue with the music that’s being released. A lot of it is not calypso, a lot of it is not soca. I’m hearing hip hop, reggae, R&B, pop, dance, reggaeton, all sorts of things. And that’s not a problem in and of itself, because I believe that a diversity of musical product is a good thing. And I’m not a soca purist by any means — I’m not even sure what “pure” soca is. But I don’t understand why the performers and producers of this music insist on trying to tell me that’s it’s soca, and I don’t understand why they get defensive when people point out that it isn’t (although it seems to be okay to refer to it rather vaguely as a “soca fusion”).
Actually, I think I do understand. It’s been mentioned before (in general, and on this site in its previous incarnation) that one of the effects of the growth of the Crop Over festival seems to have been to reduce the window of time in which performers feel they can viably release their product. The Crop Over season is the music season; if you put out a record then, you can be pretty sure that it’s going to get some sort of radio play, because that’s the time when the popular stations really focus on local music. But Crop Over isn’t just time for any type of music, it’s time for soca music. So the song you put out should be a soca song, even if it really isn’t (but you could put a little calypso beat under the melody, just to be safe).
Me, I think that’s counter-productive. If you want to sing R&B, reggae, rap (although you don’t sing rap as such, but you know what I mean), then do it. Do it and call it what it is! Don’t release it at Crop Over time and call it soca just to get your song through the door of the radio station and, hopefully, on to the play roster, because then you’re undervaluing and perhaps marginalising the music. And I don’t mean the soca art form and genre, but your genre of choice. I believe that there’s a place for Bajan R&B and Bajan hip hop and Bajan reggae and Bajan rock and Bajan synthpop and Bajan drum n’ bass. It’s not necessarily going to be easy to carve out those niches, but I think it’s worth doing (easy for me to say, ‘cause I don’t have to do it). Because, really, if artists and producers and writers want to revolutionise the music industry in Barbados, then they should be looking at ways to break the mould, not ways to try to fit it.