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Carnival 2000 in Trinidad (Background for Afropop Program)
Debbie Jacob is a Trinidad based journalist who writes for the Trinidad Express Newspapers.
She is a frequent contributor to Afropop Worldwide and her reportage on musical highlights from Carnival 2000 and interviews with Shadow, David Rudder and other leading artists will be featured later this month on Afropop Worldwide.
In the tiny island of Trinidad, seven miles off the coast of Venezuela, people are fond of saying, "Laughing and crying live in the same house." That certainly was true for the first Carnival of the millennium.
Sadly, The Lord Kitchener, who helped define steelband music died at the age of 77. Even the heavens, which provided an unusually rainy Carnival, appeared to be weeping for the man who had written numerous steelband tunes and the most Road Marches (11 in total) in calypso history.
Road Marches propel masqueraders in feathers and sequins through the streets of the country on Carnival Monday and Tuesday and are vitally important to the spirit of Carnival. Kitch, a combination of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, had his pulse on the beat the people wanted and the stories that would grip them from the time he sang "Mama Look a Band Passing" in 1954.
For the next 20 years, calypso was dominated by Kitch and Sparrow. It took a young upstart singing about a "Bassman" playing in his head to break the domination. "I was planning to forget calypso and go and plant peas in Tobago," Winston Bailey, The Mighty Shadow sung and revolutionised calypso into a more danceable music filled with blistering basslines which were already popular in reggae music.
Kitch continued to be popular, but Shadow, opened the door for a whole new generation of singers. Shadow's "Bassman" became a Road March in 1974, but the calypso judges gave Sparrow the crown that everyone thought belonged to Shadow. Then, 26 laters, in Carnival 2000, Shadow finally took the crown with two humourous calypsoes: "What's Wrong With Me?" a satire on calypso judging and "Scratch My Back" , an hilarious song about growing old. The last time a funny song won a calypso title was in 1967 when the Mighty Cypher got his calypso crown.
Humour made a dramatic comeback for Carnival 2000. In the old days, calypsonians performed under real tents. Today's venues don't use real tents, but they're still called calypso tents. This year an entire calypso tent was devoted to humourous calypsoes. Puppet Master won the humourous calypso competition with a double entendre called "Dirty Container."
And just to show that calypso is a tapestry with calypsonians linked together like yarn, SuperBlue, the calypsonian who began his career in Shadow's calypso tent called the Master's Den, overtook a young calypsonian from his oil-rich hometown of Point Fortin to gain his eighth Road March. SuperBlue, who was crowned the King of Soca, calypso's sexy, dance music, is riding on the heels of Kitchener's phenomenal record.
This Carnival, like all others, had its critics. As usual, some believed the judges didn't choose the correct winners. But Trinidadians have another saying which applies to the festive season: You Can't Have Carnival Without Bacchanal. The late Lord Kitchener sang a song about that too.
Contributed by: Debbie Jacob
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