Our Colonized Minds....

What happens if you threw the greatest show on earth and nobody wanted to see it? The clash of multiples of diverse global cultures, their histories and how they/we all came to be on this tiny island expressed through the eyes and hands of the craftsman and artisan has been replaced by someone else's version of what the two days before the start of lent are for, and the immense and colorful spectacle that was Trinidad Carnival has been cast aside and no one seems to know why.

Titles like band of the year are now meaningless as there is little if anything left to judge. This is no longer an expression of culture but an exercise in excess set to music. The fact that the majority of mas bands are themselves owned by people who specialize in promoting parties and sponsored by alcohol companies is apt, because what remains of our carnival has been stripped down to its bare elements, one big party on the move. You don't so much as pay for a costume per se but a 'cover charge' to get into the dance. Now the running joke seems to be how to take the exact same costume used this year and rename it something else and sell it with a straight face next year.

Our music has become what music becomes when you allow a few to control what the masses gets to hear. We have no artists anymore, just clever businessmen, collusion and a stable of performers willing to gyrate for their share. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with profit, but profit for profit's sake  destroys creativity and individual expression and delivers instead the bland, tasteless, styrofoam packed 'mac-meal' that soca has become. I have nothing against the individuals in this list, but tell me, out of a population of one point three million, how do we get the same tired, rehashed, reheated performances of Destra, Bunji Garlin, Iwer George and Machel year in and year out? If this is pure coincidence and these few are always the best of the crop every year then I think that is the most telling sign of all that the art form is dead. It could also be the result of the rumored 'control' of soca, where unless you 'belong' to one of the 'outfits' that control the airwaves and the party stages there is no sense in writing much less incurring the expense of recording your song. The fact that ninety per cent of the major parties are promoted by the same two or three groups and the soca stations owned by an even smaller number contributes to this stranglehold and if the government is serious about 'culture' something has to be done here.

Instead of a two million dollar grand prize why not make the National Soca Competition a year long event, with ten competitions spread out over the course of the year open to anybody with a soca song vying for a hundred thousand dollars first prize and a chance on the Soca Monarch stage? If twenty people take part in each of those monthly prelims we just gave two hundred hopefuls a chance at a life changing opportunity, instead of funneling state funds into already full hands.

To the investors in carnival the name of the game is sponsorship, profit and prize money and ideas like those above are reprehensible, but society requires governing for much the same reason children require parenting. We need to set boundaries that works for the greatest good of us all, to help us develop a healthy sense of self even as we attempt to indulge our desires. Imagine what television would be like without rules for a moment, even the weather report would have a car chase, a shoot out or some other 'kill scene' ending in gruesome death and gratuitous nudity and sex. Carnival is no longer something to be proud of but two days of decadence that undermines our society a little more each time. Our inability to like ourselves is a sad condition that needs to be addressed if we are ever going to find and keep our identity in the 'global market place.' To me the fact that we took sugar and made shit is not even the problem here, the fact that we as a people are not even aware of it is.