By Corey Gilkes
January 11, 2015
Doh believe what foreigners do/ is better than you/cause that eh true
Is a mental block/that hard to unlock/it hard like a rock/with it yuh doh wuk (that true)
Yuh go live an illusion……..trying to be another man
Doh believe what foreigners do/is better than you/because that eh true
Profound words by one of our rap(so) pioneers (Yeah, I did that on purpose, hope it got you thinking) echoed over the years by different singers and thinkers. Last year the forever-robbed Heather Macintosh reminded us of our deeply embedded self-hate and self-doubt when she told us how we don’t see anything good in Trinbago till some foreigner say so. But didn’t Harry Belafonte and the recently departed Pete Seeger, huge cultural icons in the US, marvel at our kaiso and pan respectively years ago? In 1968 Belafonte went so far as to use selections going back as far as the 1920s to articulate the rioting and turmoil sweeping across the US and Europe in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the heavy-handed actions of the police and FBI within the US itself. And yet, to this day, we treat our artists and artistes, our panmen and poets with scant courtesy. Kaiso seems to be forever a quaint folk song, sung around Carnival time to amuse the tourists and pan is still “a noisy instrument.” Not even when we do oddah people ting and sing reggae and pop/rock we hardly give that any more respect. So I eh sure about Jointpop and Orange Sky go fare any better than Wildfire and Kalyan before them. What is certain is that in the “logic” of our self-contemptuous thinking, none of these disciplines have any relevance when the question of transforming our society comes up.
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