Early Bird: Machel’s Monarchy triumph; mafia or merit? Mission for the media?

“What shit you talking, bro?” Bobby asked, his jaw literally dropping. “We talking bout the same song?”

Even before Calypso Fiesta, I had shared Soul of Calypso with my pardna on WhatsApp. We both agreed then that it was not the “hit calypso” Machel would have us believe it is.

There was, Bobby suggested, an initial ‘s’ missing. I concurred. Unhesitatingly.

“He ent going nowhere with dat,” I wrote. “I cyar see dat making the top 40.”

Wrong! It did. And then earn its creator the crown at Dimanche Gras.

“So, the mafia make Machel monarch?” Bobby greeted me as we began our walk on Carnival Monday morning.

“Mafia?” I responded, genuinely surprised. “You don’t think he won fair and square?”

If cut-eye could kill, I would have dropped dead then and there.

“What!” Bobby exploded. “You joking, right? You really think that shit song deserved to win the crown?”

“Sure!” I responded. “The singer, not the song. The Big Truck singer who was once too young to soca was easily the best man on show.”

Immediately, I died a second death, felled again by his wordless cut-eye.

“The judges aren’t judging the song, you know,” I explained. “They’re judging the performance of the song on the night.”

Silence. He looked straight ahead, no more responsive than the Cipriani Statue on Independence Square.

“Have you seen the criteria?” I inquired. I thought I heard Cipriani grunt.

“Lyrics 30, Melody 30, Rendition 20,” I told him, “Presentation 10 and Originality 10. Where would Machel have been weak except perhaps in lyrics?”

His face became a jack spaniard nest after you shake the branch it is on; one wrong move…

“I mean, Soul of Calypso doesn’t have lyrics to make a politician cringe,” I offered. “And it cyar turn the most easily pleasured woman’s body into jelly. But…”

That was when, completely scandalized by the comparison, he could not help himself. His jaw dropped.

The truth is that, when I first heard the calypso, I gave the effort very short shrift. Not having watched most of the Calypso Fiesta performances, I had been surprised to learn that Machel topped the placings.

However, seeing it performed on the Savannah stage on Sunday night, I had no doubt about the power and quality of that spectacle.

Still, I had only worked things out in my head in the quiet of that fo’daymorning on my way to Bobby’s house. In 1974, Stalin repainted Sniper’s 1965 Portrait of Trinidad, adding the details of the last decade. In 1988, David Rudder did the same to Sparrow’s 1963 Outcast with his Engine Room, reporting on two decades of evolution.

With Soul of Calypso, Machel in turn was updating Rudder’s 1987 classic Calypso Music—to include three decades of what he saw as growth.

But I had already lost Bobby. He literally would give me no opportunity to offend him further, crossing the street and keeping his distance until we reached the EHS.

By the end of the morning, though, I shared with him what I thought was an important insight. Somewhere, I had read a letter written by someone claiming to be a music professor in the States. It set me thinking.

It was “absurd”, the professor opined, for Phase Two to have been placed last in the Panorama competition. Using any set of reasonably relevant criteria, he argued, no one knowledgeable about music could fail to see Boogsie’s arrangement and the band’s performance as “winning”.

I reminded Bobby that, during the Wayne Berkeley five-in-a-row Band of the Year wins in the early 1990s, Peter Minshall was not just an also-ran; he was sometimes placed dead last.

By walk time Wednesday of this week, two relevant columns had appeared in the daily newspapers. And Wired868’s Mr Live Wire had heaped scorn on the judges’ decision.

The judges, he wrote, bowled over by his sheer aura, capitulated faster than your average West Indies opening batsmen.

And he quoted runner-up Karene Asche as telling the Guardian that “Machel get in because of his name”.

Most commenters on that piece seemed to believe the mafia claim. One comment by Fayola went against the popular view. Interestingly, it also lamented the “padampadamfication of calypso”, for which it blames “Chalkdust’s wins”.

In the Express, Raffique Shah skirted the issue of whether Machel’s performance earned him the title:

I still need to address the quality and quantity of excellent songs from the other performers—Karene [Asche] especially for her gripping performance and incisive lyrics.

But he acknowledged Soul of Calypso as “a hit”.

What Machel did on Dimanche Gras was go back into the toolboxes of some of the earliest bards ever, matching their lyrics, rhyme and melodies, producing a hit.

In Newsday, Debbie Jacob went further, calling the calypso “an intergenerational hit that crosses musical divides and bridges the gap between soca and calypso”.

In the Dimanche Gras performance, she saw more than echoes of the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For her, it is as if what began as mere evocation of calypsoes of yesteryear magically becomes an invocation.

Past, present and future, she says, were there on the Dimanche Gras stage, alive and dancing before our very eyes.

After 40 years of Trinidad carnival, I finally realized that a calypso can be so well crafted that it feels like a piece of magical realism. The magic is rooted in reality, and the song feels timeless.

So, magic or mafia? Bobby, like most of Wired868’s and so many social media’s commenters, has no doubt. But the jury remains out.

And will so remain unless and until TUCO releases the marks. The media—and Machel!—must insist that the marks be released. What justification can there be for not so doing? Where is there a precedent?

Should TUCO decline to comply, I plan to ask the Wired868 Editor, whom we all trust, to constitute a high-profile panel of competent judges whom we all trust. Christophe Grant, David Rudder, Kees Dieffenthaller, Leston Paul, Nadia Batson and Sparrow are names that come readily to mind.

Give them the video and the criteria and, once the exercise is complete, make their scorecards public.

“You’d better hope,” Bobby laughed, “he doesn’t let Gypsy answer for him!”

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