Caribbean and African artists like Olatunji, Machel Montano, and Timaya are reaching across the Atlantic to create a global Carnival sound.
By Jesse Serwer
On a Friday night last February, a singer in a gold lamé suit and matching kufi stepped off a throne to pounding drums and a loud chanting of his name. As Olatunji performed his single “Ola,” dancers in feathered headdresses and face paint interpreted its rhythms with movements like the etighi, a step popularized by Nigerian artist Iyanya's 2012 hit, "Kukere." Despite the West African signifiers, the performance took place in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where Olatunji is based, during one of the most climactic moments of 2015’s International Soca Monarch competition.
The Monarch competition is a key event in the run-up to Trinidad and Tobago’s annual carnival, and one of the most prestigious music showcases in the Caribbean. Olatunji’s triumphant performance of “Ola,” already one of the most popular songs of the 2015 carnival season, earned him the title of Groovy Soca Monarch, one of two prizes awarded at the competition. Perhaps more significantly, it also confirmed the arrival of a new subgenre that's come to be termed “afrosoca”—a blend of Caribbean and African rhythms that reflects both the outward expansion of Trinidad’s signature sound and the growing influence of afrobeats on the island, and worldwide. It was Shakira Marshall, a New York-based choreographer of Guyanese descent, who coined the term afrosoca as a name for her Brooklyn-based dance class in 2012.
The emerging hybrid is the latest volley in a transatlantic conversation that began, like so many other cultural transfers, with the enslavement of millions of West Africans and their forced relocation to Caribbean colonies centuries ago. Trinidadians proved to be remarkably resilient and creative in preserving African traditions over the years, refashioning the spoken word commentary of the griot into calypso, defying colonial bans on drums by creating new percussion instruments from bamboo and turning discarded oil drums into the steelpan. Similar developments occurred across the Caribbean—notably in Jamaica, where the mento style of folk developed in parallel to calypso in the early 20th century, and where African drums later reasserted themselves in the form of Nyabinghi drumming, the rhythmic foundation of reggae.
Rawiya Kameir
The Monarch competition is a key event in the run-up to Trinidad and Tobago’s annual carnival, and one of the most prestigious music showcases in the Caribbean. Olatunji’s triumphant performance of “Ola,” already one of the most popular songs of the 2015 carnival season, earned him the title of Groovy Soca Monarch, one of two prizes awarded at the competition. Perhaps more significantly, it also confirmed the arrival of a new subgenre that's come to be termed “afrosoca”—a blend of Caribbean and African rhythms that reflects both the outward expansion of Trinidad’s signature sound and the growing influence of afrobeats on the island, and worldwide. It was Shakira Marshall, a New York-based choreographer of Guyanese descent, who coined the term afrosoca as a name for her Brooklyn-based dance class in 2012.
The emerging hybrid is the latest volley in a transatlantic conversation that began, like so many other cultural transfers, with the enslavement of millions of West Africans and their forced relocation to Caribbean colonies centuries ago. Trinidadians proved to be remarkably resilient and creative in preserving African traditions over the years, refashioning the spoken word commentary of the griot into calypso, defying colonial bans on drums by creating new percussion instruments from bamboo and turning discarded oil drums into the steelpan. Similar developments occurred across the Caribbean—notably in Jamaica, where the mento style of folk developed in parallel to calypso in the early 20th century, and where African drums later reasserted themselves in the form of Nyabinghi drumming, the rhythmic foundation of reggae.
By blending with afrobeats, a rhythmically similar but more nebulous category with less restrictions and more visibility, soca is broadening in a way that’s true to its origins and identity.
Today, Jamaican reggae and dancehall are among the most popular music forms in many parts of Africa. Along with hip-hop, house, and African sounds like highlife and kwaito, reggae and dancehall represent a major thread in the expansive category of African dance rhythms that has come to be known as afrobeats, from the patois-inflected bashment pop of Nigeria’s Burna Boy and Timaya, to the quasi-dancehall azonto beats used by Ghanaian artists like Sarkodie.
That kind of organic culture-mashing is how soca itself was born. The genre first developed in the mid-’70s through the music of calypsonian Lord Shorty (later known as Ras Shorty I), who sought to blend calypso with the chutney sounds of the polyglot island’s substantial East Indian population, creating a Trinidadian sound he called “the soul of calypso.” Abbreviated to soca, the genre crystallized in the ’80s, with synthesizers and drum machines approximating the sounds of brass bands and rhythm sections. Spreading across the Caribbean, it took on different shapes on different islands, from the rugged bashment soca of Barbadian artists like Lil Rick, to the jab jab style associated with Grenada. About a dozen Caribbean nations and island territories, including Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines—just about every English-speaking country in the region, save Jamaica—count soca as their primary musical product.
But what drives and propels soca is precisely what limits it: it is music made expressly for the Caribbean’s annual carnival celebrations. Carnival traditions have their own African roots, having originated as a means of resistance among Trinidadian slaves. Each year, a few dozen songs, mostly from Trinidad and Barbados, take hold region-wide and advance through the diaspora, where they soundtrack floats at celebrations from London to Brooklyn to Baltimore. A handful of songs—Kevin Lyttle’s “Turn Me On” and Rupee’s “Tempted to Touch”—have made it to Top 40 radio, though often in a form remixed to fit global tastes. Yet the genre remains inexorably tied to the parades, or road marches, that are the climax of every Caribbean Carnival.
That kind of organic culture-mashing is how soca itself was born. The genre first developed in the mid-’70s through the music of calypsonian Lord Shorty (later known as Ras Shorty I), who sought to blend calypso with the chutney sounds of the polyglot island’s substantial East Indian population, creating a Trinidadian sound he called “the soul of calypso.” Abbreviated to soca, the genre crystallized in the ’80s, with synthesizers and drum machines approximating the sounds of brass bands and rhythm sections. Spreading across the Caribbean, it took on different shapes on different islands, from the rugged bashment soca of Barbadian artists like Lil Rick, to the jab jab style associated with Grenada. About a dozen Caribbean nations and island territories, including Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines—just about every English-speaking country in the region, save Jamaica—count soca as their primary musical product.
But what drives and propels soca is precisely what limits it: it is music made expressly for the Caribbean’s annual carnival celebrations. Carnival traditions have their own African roots, having originated as a means of resistance among Trinidadian slaves. Each year, a few dozen songs, mostly from Trinidad and Barbados, take hold region-wide and advance through the diaspora, where they soundtrack floats at celebrations from London to Brooklyn to Baltimore. A handful of songs—Kevin Lyttle’s “Turn Me On” and Rupee’s “Tempted to Touch”—have made it to Top 40 radio, though often in a form remixed to fit global tastes. Yet the genre remains inexorably tied to the parades, or road marches, that are the climax of every Caribbean Carnival.
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