Sweet Sweet Dreams begins with clarity: “we gonna have a party,” put plain and simply; five words that manifest Trinidadian Shadow’s soca, party here being both a metaphor for social and cultural prosperity, and what the world means in the everyday. There is beauty to lyrical simplicity, isn’t there? Slogans...
Tag Archives: Trinidad & Tobago
Songs mean the world. It’s especially the case when a singer, Calypso Rose, is the very first woman to perform the music of a particular commercial genre: calypso. With every one of her answers to my questions, Calypso Rose sang her songs to me during our interview, as if to...
The Caribbean: scattered islands, surrounded by sea that is at times green, at times grey, and at times blue. The nations that make up the Caribbean are all products of large slave populations, sometimes 90 per cent to 10 per cent plantation owners, the genocides of native tribes such as...
Calypso Rose is a calypsonian in the true sense of the word. Actually, if that word still has a sense, part of the credit goes to her. She started composing and playing calypso when she was 15, when calypso was arguably at its popularity peak and spreading its messages all...
To compile a playlist about calypso music is also to delve into Trinidad and Tobago’s history. When the first kaisonians or storytellers/griots were deported from West Africa (in particular Nigeria) in the late 17th century, they started to spread a new music repertoire on the islands referring to their Ibibio...