Thank­ful­ly, the coun­try has been spared an­oth­er de­scent in­to what could on­ly have been an ex­tend­ed, un­nec­es­sary and po­ten­tial­ly de­struc­tive con­tention about Iw­er George’s in­clu­sion of the Na­tion­al An­them in his “Hap­py Peo­ple” song.

On hear­ing Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley say that he “wasn’t jump­ing up and down about the an­them be­ing used,” in his song, George, a vet­er­an per­former, who like many such artistes thrive on con­tro­ver­sy, which makes his cre­ations even more pop­u­lar, de­cid­ed he could not con­tend in this in­stance with prime min­is­te­r­i­al dis­plea­sure over the is­sue. He will, there­fore, re­lease a re­vised ver­sion of the song.

Now, it may be con­tend­ed that the so­ca bard sub­mit­ted to po­lit­i­cal de­mands. And he did so notwith­stand­ing the his­to­ry of ca­lyp­so­ni­ans and their songs tak­ing on the es­tab­lish­ment in the in­ter­est of a vig­i­lant pub­lic opin­ion.

Dur­ing the colo­nial pe­ri­od, when pub­lic opin­ion was of­ten made sub­ject to the de­sires of the then rulers, it was the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the ca­lyp­son­ian to chal­lenge the pow­er of the law­mak­ers and man­agers of so­ci­ety in the in­ter­ests of the then sub­ju­gat­ed mass­es.

The record of such ca­lyp­so­ni­ans chal­leng­ing the au­thor­i­ty of the es­tab­lish­ment is a long and dis­tin­guished one, with ca­lyp­so­ni­ans such as Growl­ing Tiger and At­ti­la the Hun, the lat­ter be­ing a leg­is­la­tor him­self, stand­ing bold­ly and fear­less­ly against the pow­ers of the pe­ri­od.

In more mod­ern times, the likes of King Spar­row, Broth­er Su­pe­ri­or, Black Stal­in, Valenti­no, Ex­plain­er and a whole gen­er­a­tion of ca­lyp­so­ni­ans have con­tin­ued that role on be­half of the “peo­ple”, those with­out a voice.

The so­ci­ety must sure­ly be ever mind­ful and grate­ful to those bards for their con­tri­bu­tions to na­tion­hood, and for tak­ing up the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and pat­terns set by the fore­fa­thers and moth­ers of the art­form.

How­ev­er, the cir­cum­stances of the in­ser­tion of the Na­tion­al An­them by George in his song is with­out any mer­it of de­fence of “the peo­ple”. In­deed, lis­ten­ing to Iw­er’s in­clu­sion of the an­them in his piece brings one to the con­clu­sion that he sim­ply went off on a lyri­cal/mu­si­cal frol­ic to some­how con­nect the peo­ple of the coun­try with “hap­pi­ness”.

“The Big Man in the Busi­ness”, as he is known to his fans, has in the past cre­at­ed a cloud of con­tention and ar­gu­ment with his com­po­si­tions and, to his ben­e­fit, this time, he has recog­nised that “oh God George, you in trou­ble”. Some­where in­side his log­ic, George, mas­ter of the stand-up and prance so­ca act on stage, recog­nised this was a fu­tile bat­tle and he would not have any mer­it to con­tin­ue his use of the an­them in his song; he sen­si­bly, there­fore, backed-off.

Apart from the im­me­di­ate in­stance, to have al­lowed the Na­tion­al An­them to be used in this way with­out ob­jec­tion and with­out with­draw­al, had the pos­si­bil­i­ty of al­low­ing for a string of un­want­ed us­age of this na­tion­al state­ment of T&T’s peo­ple be­ing dis­played as gim­mick­ry. Who knows where such a pat­tern of use in com­po­si­tions would have gone.

It is, there­fore, im­por­tant that on this oc­ca­sion, a stan­dard has been es­tab­lished and com­mon sense pre­vailed.