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🇬🇩 Grenada Radio

Grenada — the Spice Isle — celebrates its culture each August at Spicemas, where soca, calypso and the raucous jab jab tradition take over the streets. Grenadian radio keeps that energy on the air year-round, spinning soca and reggae alongside Caribbean classics, gospel and local talk. Tune into Grenada's stations live on J.A.W Online for the sound of the island, wherever you happen to be.

The Spice Isle

Grenada is the world's second-largest producer of nutmeg, and the spice is on the national flag. The country is really three islands — Grenada itself, Carriacou and Petite Martinique — and the smaller two hold onto older traditions that the mainland has partly let go.

The island was devastated by Hurricane Ivan in the mid-2000s, which destroyed most of the housing stock and much of the nutmeg crop. The recovery reshaped the country, and it is a reference point in Grenadian conversation in the way that a war is elsewhere.

Jab jab and the sound of Spicemas

Grenada's Carnival, Spicemas, runs in August, and its defining image is the jab jab — masqueraders covered head to foot in used motor oil, wearing horns and dragging chains, descending on the streets before dawn for J'ouvert. It is one of the most striking and least sanitised carnival traditions anywhere in the region, and it has its own music: a heavy, chanting, drum-driven jab soca quite distinct from the Trinidadian style.

Alongside it sit calypso and mainstream soca, and on Carriacou something older survives — the Big Drum or Nation Dance, a ceremonial music and dance tradition tracing descent from specific African nations, performed at significant occasions rather than for spectacle. Carriacou also keeps a strong string-band and quadrille tradition, celebrated at its own festival in the spring.

The radio landscape

Grenada's dial is small and mostly commercial, with stations covering soca and Carnival, reggae and dancehall, gospel, and news and talk. The Carnival season dominates from midsummer onward, when the jab soca releases start arriving and the stations turn over to the road.

Several Grenadian stations stream reliably, which matters more here than in larger markets — the diaspora is proportionally very large, and the island's own audience is small enough that online listening is a meaningful share of it.

Nutmeg, hurricanes and a small island economy

Nutmeg and mace built the Grenadian economy, and the island supplied a large share of the world's supply before Hurricane Ivan destroyed most of the trees in the mid-2000s. Nutmeg takes years to come back into full production, so the storm's economic shadow lasted far longer than the rebuilding of houses.

Tourism and offshore education have taken up much of the slack, and the resulting debates — about cruise berths, medical students, land and agriculture — are staples of Grenadian talk radio.

Carriacou and Petite Martinique

The two smaller islands keep a different pace and a stronger hold on older traditions. Carriacou's Big Drum ceremonies are performed at boat launchings, tombstone feasts and other significant occasions, with songs identified by African nation names carried down through families.

Carriacou also holds its own Maroon and String Band Music Festival in the spring, and its Regatta in the summer draws hand-built sloops from across the Grenadines. Petite Martinique, smaller again, has a boatbuilding and seafaring reputation of its own. Grenadian stations carry both islands, and for the diaspora that coverage is often the only reach back to them.

Listening from the diaspora

Grenadian communities abroad are concentrated in New York — Brooklyn especially — and in Toronto and London. Grenadians are a visible presence in Brooklyn's Labor Day carnival, and the jab tradition travels with them.

For those listeners, Grenadian radio in August is the closest thing to being on the road at J'ouvert, and for the rest of the year it is where the island's news and arguments actually happen.

Live stations from Grenada (10)

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