The return of the Kings and Queens to Sunday’s Dimanche Gras made for a good show. Calypso won as, although there were too many props, there was no excess of lame melodies, thank God, and no overdose of prosaic lyrics. It was refreshing to hear music back in our calypso; …
Read More »Time to scrap Dimanche Gras! Best suggests Culture Minister take page from Machel and Kees
An Open Letter to Culture Minister Nyan Gadsby-Dolly Dear Madam, It’s over, madam. Dimanche Gras is dead. Like the numerous, onerous pretty costumes the Pegasus Fancy Sailor and Tan Tan and Saga Boy relegated into irrelevance, the show is arguably now exposed as a creaking, antediluvian anachronism, not merely moribund …
Read More »Can Sandra silence Voice in the Big Yard? St Bernard previews Sunday’s sizzling Calypso finals
The 2018 Calypso Monarch Finals promise to be the best in about 20 years. This is so although the judges only got about 70% of the selections correct. The mix will be excellent, not simply in terms of musical variety and lyrical content and style and pace but also in …
Read More »Are reports of Carnival’s demise exaggerated? Stakeholders await govt post-mortem
Forty days and 40 nights. And counting… NCC has had its say. Communications is largely silent. Tourism has been silenced. Community Development, Culture and the Arts has had nothing to say. But the volume of kangkatang in this year’s Carnival, it seems to me, makes a proper post-mortem imperative. And …
Read More »Juba Doo Bye Bye? Best calls on Chalkdust to hang up his guns once and for all
The Mighty Chalkdust has no more than one month to make a public announcement that that’s it, he’s calling it a day at last. In February, in his 50th year in the business, the former schoolteacher who celebrated his 76th birthday in early March sang “Learn from Arithmetic” to beat out 16 others …
Read More »Is Greatest Show on Earth not far from finished? Best’s 2017 Carnival post-mortem
A litany of whoa! But we jamming still! Bacchanal, synonym of and the default rhyme for Carnival, has been part and parcel of the national festival for donkey’s years and controversy and comess have been its consistent companions. But this year was ‘diss’ year; everywhere you looked in 2017, it was disaffection, …
Read More »Algebra, not arithmetic; Best returns to Chalkdust’s ninth win to get his sums right
My friend AJ is not a trained calypso judge, the only ones able, according to now nine-time Calypso Monarch Chalkdust, to judge the annual calypso competition fairly. So I really don’t know if AJ’s view that “Chalkdust should be somewhere in the middle of the field”—shared with us on our …
Read More »Dimanche not so gras! Best casts critical eye; says why he preferred Karene to Chalkie
Not to take anything away from the 2017 winner, Dr Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool, the now record nine-time champion, the results of last night’s Calypso Monarch competition simply do not add up. And as the dissatisfaction with the organisers and complaints about the quality of the show multiply—as they are almost …
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