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Friday, August 29, 2025

Guilbault casts critical eye on calypso and soca

by

20160204

Kevin Baldeosingh

As with so many oth­er as­pects of Trinidad and To­ba­go's cul­ture, it has tak­en a for­eign schol­ar to pro­duce an ac­count of the coun­try's mu­sic.

Guil­bault, a mu­si­col­o­gist from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, fo­cus­es on so­ca and ca­lyp­so, her cen­tral ques­tion be­ing: "What is it that the new Car­ni­val mu­sics per­form that ca­lyp­so does not?"

In a sense, this is the least in­ter­est­ing as­pect of the book. She ex­am­ines the cul­tur­al claims new style like chut­ney so­ca make in re­la­tion to pol­i­tics, as well as the claims about au­then­tic­i­ty and per­mis­si­ble tra­di­tions made by var­i­ous prac­ti­tion­ers. But all of this is an­thro­po­log­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion and, as a gen­er­al rules, an­thro­pol­o­gists' ethno­graph­ic da­ta are far more valu­able than their the­o­ret­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tions of such da­ta, since as an aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline an­thro­pol­o­gy is of­ten clos­er to ide­ol­o­gy than sci­ence.

So Guil­bault traces the ori­gins of calp­so, con­clud­ing that "what is to­day called ca­lyp­so may have com­bined, as it of­ten still does, dif­fer­ent song forms, mu­si­cal in­stru­ments and mu­si­cal val­ues com­mon­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with sev­er­al mu­sics...some de­rived from African in­flu­ences and oth­ers not." This alone is a use­ful cor­rec­tive to Afro­cen­trists, and even racists who crit­i­cise ca­lyp­so on its sup­pos­ed­ly African foun­da­tions.

In­deed, some of the most in­ter­est­ing parts of the book deal with ear­ly his­to­ry of ca­lyp­so and Car­ni­val. "By 1939 the colo­nial ad­min­is­tra­tion and bour­geoisie in Trinidad were ded­i­cat­ed to hold­ing ca­lyp­so tent com­pe­ti­tions to elect the Ca­lyp­so King of the Sea­son–which, af­ter count­less bat­tles, fi­nal­ly took place in 1953 as the first true ca­lyp­so com­pe­ti­tion," Guil­bault notes. So State and busi­ness sup­port for the fes­ti­val is a longer tra­di­tion than many sup­pose, es­pe­cial­ly those who claim that the PNM start­ed this prac­tice.

In re­spect to the vul­gar be­hav­iour an­nu­al­ly crit­i­cised every Car­ni­val, Guil­bault al­so shows that this is noth­ing new and, in fact, vul­gar­i­ty was worse in by­gone days. Back in the ear­ly to mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the jamettes would not on­ly dance rude­ly but bare their breasts and propo­si­tion men. "The ges­tures and re­bel­lious at­ti­tudes of the jamet [sic] women spurred the strongest re­ac­tions and con­dem­na­tions among the mid­dle-class and white colo­nial elite," Guil­bault writes. So that, too, hasn't changed much.

Re­lat­ed­ly, she notes that Ca­lyp­so Rose was once called "The Queen of Smut"–an un­of­fi­cial ti­tle now air­brushed from Rose's his­to­ry since she be­came an icon. But, says Guil­bault, Rose was con­demned by "fem­i­nists, church mem­bers and male chau­vin­ists."

Crit­i­cism of so­ca al­so stems from con­ser­v­a­tive in­ter­ests and per­spec­tives. Those in­di­vid­u­als, from tra­di­tion­al ca­lyp­so­ni­ans to com­men­ta­tors who dis­miss so­ca are re­pro­duc­ing ar­gu­ments made about pop­u­lar mu­sic in gen­er­al. "By posit­ing par­ty mu­sic as a triv­ial and in­ter­change­able com­mod­i­ty, this ap­proach re­pro­duced the same kind of cri­tiques ad­dressed to glob­al pop...it not on­ly ig­nores the artis­tic in­vest­ment and po­si­tion­ing of its mak­ers but al­so ne­glects the aes­thet­ic dis­crim­i­na­tion and val­ue judge­ments of its con­sumers."

Guil­bault, how­ev­er, ar­gues that new forms like so­ca and chut­ney still ex­clude many of the groups that tra­di­tion­al ca­lyp­so did, sin­gling out ex­cludes gays, whites, artists from oth­er racial and eth­nic groups. Ex­cept for ho­mo­sex­u­als, how­ev­er, this point is some­what ten­den­tious.

In­deed, many of Guil­bault's as­ser­tions are ar­guable and her prose is not es­pe­cial­ly friend­ly. But, as an overview of Car­ni­val and its mu­sic, this is the best book avail­able. Most im­por­tant­ly, it in­cludes a CD.


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