Public Service Announcement: Check on your Trininadian friends. Check on all of your Caribbean friends. They’re not OK. Because for perhaps the first time in Caribbean history, that time of year has rolled around and the unthinkable has become real: Trinidad Carnival. Is. Cancelled. To understand the appalling gravitas of this situation, try to imagine the cancellation of, say, Christmas. Or, broadly speaking, the event — holy public ritual, really — that motivates tens of thousands of people around the world to keep on keeping on amid the daily drudgeries and mundane indignities of this nine-to-five life, because they know that come February, there shall be an ecstatic release: They will be covered in oil or paint, drink in hand, shimmering costume on deck, dancing through the streets of Port of Spain and giving thanks for a life that is a grand gift—wholly drugged by music, dance, joy and love.
But all is not lost. Yes, if ever the world needed a grand life-affirming ritual, it’s this very moment. The oil that keeps the engine of Trinidad Carnival running is soca music, and it continues to flow from Trinidad and beyond. Carnival or no Carnival, pandemic be damned, artists from across the Caribbean region are still releasing tunes capable of transforming your living room into a proper Carnival fete. With lyrics to fit the times — sometimes comedically so — these tunes also have the potential to upend the soca music industry (which tends to revolve around Carnival) by proving that soca stands on its own: music with these many vibes is worth releasing year-round.
Soca veteran Machel Montano has been tirelessly recording, releasing music, and performing through this energetic cycle for over 25 years. “Before you finish with Miami Carnival in October, you start to want to hit the studio around then trying to make an entire album for the next year,” he explains. “You’re releasing singles to make sure that you have songs popping for late December. As soon as Christmas is over, people want to hire you based on if you have new songs, new hits. It becomes a crazy whirlwind.”
As vaccinations begin to roll out across the globe, there’s hope that 2022 will see the return of massive events like Carnival. As artists will certainly welcome the return of live performances, the pandemic has empowered them to bring their strengthened digital fluency, and a push for more infrastructural amendments like proper genre labeling from streaming services, along with them. “I would hope that we don’t go back to the program as usual,” Montano adds. “I hope that what everybody has gotten from this time is that we’ll have to push things forward. We always want better.”
By Baz Dreisinger 02/18/2021
