It didn’t come to me like a bulb lighting up; it took a long time for the realisation to dawn but when it did come it landed with so much force that I remember it left me thinking, “Halle-lujah; I never thought of it before, but that’s true” and what I’m referring to is the fact that the most gifted calypsonians were those who had the advantage of having lived a very focused life, of having taken part in or seen or heard of unusual things, and – this is the key part – then being able to find a novel way of expressing the idea or the behaviour in a humourous or sardonic manner in a song. An accomplished kaisonian could look at a fairly regular part of the life and see the humorous angle in some aspect of human behaviour, and if the humorous angle wasn’t already there, the calypsonian would tell us the story in a way that brought out the humour. That is the essence of kaiso
Lately, as I come to these SO IT GO columns, I find that I have to pause and stress some particular aspect that is important to the story. In this case, before I go any further with this topic, I step back here to emphasise that calypso – the music I’m dealing with – is no longer the music of the day and, as we all realise, the redolent humour of our past popular music is not on the stage these days so reader be warned: I am proceeding here to show you the calypsonian mind operating on our music as it used to be when those artistes time and again were laying out strategies for living, or approaches to life, and notice that often they were cloaking the message in humour – that was the essence of the genre; it took serious stuff and showed us our comic side.
Now we don’t do that much anymore, for a number of reasons that would take a book, and since it’s not happening on the radio, or on the CDs we buy, let me put you beside an imaginary committed calypsonian, taking a walk through a day as we live it today, and hear the approach he would have taken in earlier times.
To start off with, Kaiso Man, would drive along the Seawall Road, with those impressive Atlantic views, but he would be more taken with the motorist who has parked his car on the roadside and, back to the road, is taking a solitary pee. If you were to take a photo of that with your cellphone and show it to Kaiso Man, he would immediately recognise that as the subject of a kaiso. In fact, I can you tell immediately, the title of the tune, will be something like “Ketching Breeze” – the actual word depicting the action, will not appear, but the message will be obvious; we’ve all seen it, it’s real, it’s calypso; it stirs a smile. Furthermore, KAISO MAN, having introduced the subject, will now go a step further and combine it with something else: in this case he will take another Seawall behaviour – that of the Lovers Lane – and write a song that goes like this:
A man by the seawall taking a pee, in the afternoon, recently
A lady on the other side of the wall, padna, nothing ain’t passing she
She lean over the wall and tell the fella, “Good afternoon, Sir, lemme say
“I see what you’re doing, when you finish, darling… bring dat ting over here.”
And kaiso can take this even further. We are all familiar with the great care and attention that is lovingly bestowed on a cricket ground, such as Everest along the seawall, and subsequently another song will say:
Whoever maintaining the grass at Everest, fellas ah talking flat
You spending money on fertilizer, don’t waste your money on that
Just go by the seawall and tell them fellas who peeing there “Excuse me
“We just down the road, we have plenty grass, drop in and pee on we.”
That’s an example of what I mean by a Strategy for Living. Here are is another:
Some minibus drivers they playing their music so loud it give you cuddups
When you complain they cut their eye and only leggo two steuups.
To fix that, go by the driver house where he living… Mahaica or in Buxton
With two big speaker box on a big goady truck, blasting Buju Banton.”
And also:
A chap dumping garbage in the road. Now that we cannot forgive:
Don’t say a word to the fella, just go where you know he live.
Clear a spot on he parapet and put a sign… four feet square
“Keep your neighbourhood clean, Guyana, dump all your garbage here.”
We can keep going with this on and on – Guyana politics, for instance, is full of hilarity and some truly comical scenes. This is just a sample to demonstrate my essential point: that the calypsonian, apart from making us dance, does something probably more important – he/she shows us how to laugh at ourselves; giving us unsolicited strategies for living, particularly in these times.
