JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Friday, July 4, 2025

Prang for Parang

by

20151204

Prime Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert–and I nev­er thought I'd write that firetruck­ing phrase, let me tell you, I would have quick­er bet on Amer­i­can Pres­i­dent Ralph Nad­er or Pope Richard Dawkins or Teenag­er of the Year Mick Jag­ger or No­bel Peace prizewin­ner Bashar al-As­sad–main­ly be­cause I nev­er thought I'd be taller than a prime min­is­ter, even a tem­po­rary or act­ing one–but Prime Min­is­ter (Act­ing, Short) Im­bert this week dis­closed that the PNM gov­ern­ment he leads (for a ten-days, while our own primus in­ter ca­nines ma­l­os is on tour, off leash) will be dras­ti­cal­ly cut­ting state spend­ing on Christ­mas par­ties and bonus­es with the HDC, as man­aged by the UNC, spend­ing $3 mil­lion on its Christ­mas par­ty last year–they saw fit to hire a car­ol-singer named Machel Mon­tano–there was clear­ly a need and one of the first ca­su­al­ties of the cost-cut­ting has been parang.

It's an ill wind that blows no­body any good and I'm per­son­al­ly deeply grate­ful for the vast re­duc­tion of the num­ber of peo­ple drink­ing Scotch well and singing Span­ish bad­ly be­tween now and Box­ing Day. All my life, I've done my en­deav­our best to like parang but it was like Ree­va Steenkamp try­ing to see the good side of her killer. I'd rather take the ac­cu­sa­tion of be­ing un­pa­tri­ot­ic on the chin than sub­ject my ears to a sin­gle verse and cho­rus from most paran­deros (apart from my own ex­tend­ed fam­i­ly mem­ber, Chris Ras Cas' group, of course, which I treat as the ex­cep­tion that proves the rule).

Now I don't mind parang as a con­cept: in our neo-slave so­ci­eties, I'm al­most al­ways for any­thing that en­cour­ages lib­er­al­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly if it leads to drink­ing and singing, joint­ly and/or sev­er­al­ly, but I do in­sist that, if we are go­ing to be drink­ing and singing, there should be some songs in­volved every now and then. Every parang par­ty I ever went to and ar­rived at stone cold sober seemed to con­sist of one song, sung over-and-over, to the same melody. Here, to the tune of–well, you know the tune, there's just the one–is every parang song ever writ­ten (and parang "song­writ­ers" can toss parang songs off like priests do acolytes be­cause no one un­der­stands a word of what they're singing, and no one cares that they don't, be­cause the on­ly an­a­lyt­i­cal think­ing ever brought to bear on any­thing con­nect­ed to parang is how to un­screw the cap of the rum bot­tle if the thread gets crossed): "Tu ma­ma, Lucy/ Y tu pa­pa, Juicy/ Soy marinero, no soy cap­i­tan/ Los li­bros, ac­qui/ Her­manos Cas­tries/ An­gos­tu­ra y cataflam/ Fi­del Cas­tro video/ Man­ana er­go/ Chica­go so­pra­no calor/ pael­la por mi amor/Y el burg­er for me/ Panadol id­io­cy / But them bound to pay we/ Aha, now is time for/ Aieeeeeeeeeee!"

I ap­pre­hend that the for­mu­la oc­ca­sion­al­ly gives rise to great songs, par­tic­u­lar­ly in its bas­tardised forms–Crazy's "Parang So­ca", Scrunter's Ah Want a Piece of Pork, al­most any­thing by Daisy Voisin–but that could be said for any genre: va­pid Amer­i­can teeny­bop­per pop mu­sic man­aged to even­tu­al­ly bub­ble up, some­how, both Sug­ar, Sug­ar and Mm­m­mm-Bop and dance­hall pro­duced Green Bay Killings and What Po­lice Can Do, chut­ney, some­thing we like to think of as a form of mu­sic, may have pro­duced on­ly a great cho­rus so far –"If you drink rum, you go dead/ If you don't drink rum, you go dead/ Might as well drink rum/ And dead"–but, giv­en time, even that shal­low­est of grooves might gen­er­ate an in­stance of depth.

Our parang, like our Cab­i­net, pro­duces on­ly oc­ca­sion­al rip­ples of bril­liance in vast oceans of stu­pid­i­ty. How many hordes of sweat­ing fat men pos­ing in suits must we put up with to get one who rolls up his shirt­sleeves and ac­tu­al­ly gets to work?

Which leads to thoughts of the now-late Ka­malud­din Mo­hammed, a for­mer PNM Cab­i­net Min­is­ter, whom we lost this week, and about whom no one has, at my own time of writ­ing, said a bad thing. It's a foible of our species that we speak well of peo­ple the mo­ment they die who, up to their last breath, we were rip­ping to pieces.

Ex­pect, then, some very nice words to be writ­ten, soon, about two out of three of the con­tenders in to­mor­row's elec­tion of the po­lit­i­cal leader of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress.

We think of what pass­es amongst Trinida­di­ans around elec­tions as pol­i­tics, in the same way we think of parang as mu­sic, but, in both cas­es, if analysed even su­per­fi­cial­ly, very lit­tle of it ac­tu­al­ly makes any sense at all, and the most suc­cess­ful of its pro­po­nents are the ones who can pro­duce the shal­low­est of­fer­ings for the con­sump­tion, with­out any as­sess­ment–which is to say, the swal­low­ing whole–of the widest group. Lis­ten­ing to one of the con­tenders, who had enough mon­ey to buy live cov­er­age of a speech on ra­dio on Tues­day night –it was hard to tell whether the op­po­si­tion ad­dressed was from the same po­lit­i­cal par­ty: a UNC op­po­nent was no dif­fer­ent from a PNM one.

And this, it ap­pears, is what we choose, as a peo­ple.

The on­ly sat­is­fac­tion to be had is in the think­ing that, by this time Sun­day, there will be two few­er peo­ple spout­ing gib­ber­ish that every­one cheers but no one un­der­stands.

Aieeeeeeee!

BC Pires es un hi­jo de put a hand, Lord, pero what you go do? And is aware, De­nis Solomon & Judy Ray­mond, that "first amongst bad dogs" is not trans­lat­ed that way


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored