Clevon Raphael

I do not wear a hat, but I took off my imag­i­nary one to salute the judges in the 2014 Ca­lyp­so Monarch com­pe­ti­tion, ow­ing to the ex­cel­lent de­ci­sions hand­ed down in this year's epic bat­tle.It has been a cou­ple years well that I could find no fault with the work of those peo­ple, who did an im­pec­ca­ble job in se­lect­ing the win­ners in what must be the pre­mier con­test in the Car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions.

First of all, the choice of Rod­er­ick "Chucky" Gor­don was a pop­u­lar one in a field that had a sound mix­ture of ex­pe­ri­ence in the per­sons of last year's win­ner Pink Pan­ther, Chalk­dust and Cro Cro.Chucky's vic­to­ry I pre­dict­ed the mo­ment he com­plet­ed his two num­bers at the semi­fi­nals last Sat­ur­day, dur­ing which he cap­ti­vat­ed the large au­di­ence, sur­pris­ing­ly, with his sec­ond of­fer­ing Wey Yuh Think.

I felt he was coura­geous to put down his tongue-in-cheek num­ber which earned him the loud ap­proval of the very dis­cern­ing Skin­ner Park crowd, who I had felt would give him the toi­let-pa­per treat­ment for de­fend­ing the al­leged pas­time of many Tri­nis, in­dulged in by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar.His not-so-veiled crit­i­cism of the PM was not as caus­tic and dis­re­spect­ful as that of Cro Cro and his ca­lyp­so/po­lit­i­cal side­kick Sug­ar Aloes, who opt­ed to re­main out of the 2014 bat­tle.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers