29 July 1999, 807 words
Ella Andall is a singer whose technical proficiency and African-oriented compositions are greatly admired by people who ought to know. But she lacks popular appeal. Sonny Mann is a middle-aged chutney singer who was unknown outside his particular sphere until Lotay La became a runaway hit for Carnival. That phenomenon surprised everyone - except, of course, the feting masses.
The two things are not, I think, unconnected. Andall's music, despite its sophistication, remains disconnected from the audience precisely because it is so African. Lotay La, on the other hand, became popular because it was indigenous. And the audience recognized it as indigenous, despite the Hindi lyrics and Indian melody.
It may seem that my assertion assumes an improbable musical sophistication on the part of fete-loving Trinis. But anyone who thinks so does not understand music. In How the Mind Works, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes, "Anyone who lived through the craze for Indian raga music after George Harrison made it hip in the 1960s appreciates that music varies from culture to culture and that people most enjoy the idiom they grew up with." That is why non-Hindus generally do not like Indian music and why most Trinidadians readily appreciate both popular American music and David Rudder.
But, as Lotay La and even Hulsie X demonstrated, crossing the rubicon towards a musical fusion is entirely possible. "The emotional connotations of musical intervals are not exactly universal, because people need to be familiar with an idiom to experience them, but they are not arbitrary either," writes Pinker. "Infants as young as four months old prefer music with consonant intervals such as a major third to music with dissonant intervals such as a minor second...A person merely has to listen to melodies in a particular idiom over time...and the emotional connotations develop automatically."
What Lotay La did, therefore, was tap in to the upbeat soca rhythm through an Indian-based musical style. And if that can happen in something as fundamental as music, then it is easily possible to do the same in other areas. In fact, it has long been a hypothesis of mine that the Trinidadian has an innate advantage over people in homogenous or larger societies because, with the several diverse cultures pressed into this island space, we can more readily discover what the essence of humanity is.
Now, about 20 years after this idea first occurred to me, the science to support it has begun to emerge. Comparative ethnography shows that, far from human cultures diverging without limit, there are clear constraints on how all societies order themselves.
Take, for example, Trinis' reputed moral looseness. The ethnographic record shows that in all societies both sexes commit adultery. Hence, in Trinidad, our constant wrong belief that women outnumber men and the many calypsos about loose women. Even that purely Trinidadian icon, the calypso, falls within the rubric of human universals compiled by anthropologist Donald E. Brown, whose long list includes the following: great interest in the topic of sex, verbal humour, humorous insults, gossip, narrative and story-telling. What makes calypso (and now chutney) uniquely Trinidadian is that we have taken all these universal elements and combined them into one artform.
Or take another supposedly Trinidadian characteristic as defined by V.S. Naipaul in The Middle Passage: "We lived in a society which denied itself heroes...It was a place where a recurring word of abuse was 'conceited', an expression of the resentment felt of anyone who possessed unusual skills." But computer scientist Marvin Minsky, author of The Society of Mind, points out a more probable root of such resentment: "...what we call genius is rare because our evolution works without respect for individuals. Could any tribe or culture endure in which each individual discovered novel ways to think?"
And even Naipaul is forced to admit that scholarship winners and cricketers get acclaim here. He puts the most negative spin on this contradiction, of course, but my own observation is that cultures do acknowledge genius, especially when the work has practical or psychological benefits, but that geniuses are usually browbeaten by the elites. (Consider the popularity of Rudder and the particular kinds of people who used to badtalk Minshall before the metropole told them he was a real artist.)
At any rate, J.A. Froude's infamous assertion - "There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own" - was and is meaningless. People are always people: you can dismiss a culture as invalid only if you have some ridiculous ideal which no culture lives up to. The essence of a true Trini is that we contain the universality which is common to all people, but ours is buried less deeply below the weight of history and geography. Trouble is, we don't realize it.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh