J.A.W ONLINE 🎧

Calypso: the Caribbean's commentary music

Calypso carried news, scandal and political criticism through song long before the region had broadcast media of its own.

From kaiso to calypso

Calypso's roots reach back to the chantwells who led call-and-response singing among Trinidad's carnival bands in the nineteenth century, and further back to West African praise-and-insult traditions carried across in slavery.

The word kaiso, still used interchangeably with calypso and shouted as an expression of approval, is generally traced to a West African term of praise. The music took recognisable form in the early twentieth century, and Trinidadian recordings were selling internationally by the 1920s and 1930s.

Its defining characteristic was never the rhythm but the lyric. Calypso is a music of commentary, and calypsonians took stage names — Lord Kitchener, Mighty Sparrow, Attila the Hun — that announced the persona doing the commenting.

The tent

The calypso tent is an institution with no real equivalent elsewhere. In the weeks before Carnival, calypsonians perform new material nightly in a fixed venue to a paying, attentive, highly critical audience.

This is workshop and competition at once. Songs are refined in front of listeners, weak material is abandoned, and the tent decides what reaches the finals. The audience expects wordplay, double meaning and a strong final verse, and it is entirely willing to say so when it does not get them.

The Calypso Monarch competition that grows out of the tents remains the genre's most serious prize.

Commentary and censorship

Calypso was the Caribbean's press before the Caribbean had a free press. Colonial administrations understood this perfectly well and censored it, requiring lyrics to be submitted for approval and banning songs outright — which the calypsonians answered with allegory, innuendo and metaphor so practised that the surface meaning and the real meaning could travel separately.

That habit never went away. Contemporary calypso still takes on corruption, crime and government, and politicians still respond. In several Caribbean countries a Carnival-season calypso remains one of the more effective forms of political criticism available.

The tradition has close relatives across the region: benna in Antigua, quelbe in the Virgin Islands, and rundown in Cayman all do the same work in different forms.

Calypso and soca

Soca grew out of calypso in the 1970s and has since overtaken it in volume and commercial reach, which sometimes leads people to assume calypso has been replaced. It has not.

The two coexist within the same season, judged separately. Soca competitions reward energy and crowd response; calypso competitions reward lyric, structure and delivery. Many artists work in both, and the calypso finals still draw serious attention.

What has changed is the audience profile. Calypso skews older and is followed closely by people who care about the words, which is precisely the audience that radio call-in programmes serve.

The great calypsonians

Calypso is a genre organised around personalities. The Mighty Sparrow, Trinidadian by way of Grenada, dominated for decades and holds an unmatched record of Calypso Monarch and Road March titles. Lord Kitchener was his great rival and the more prolific composer, and his tunes still form the backbone of Panorama arrangements.

Earlier figures — Attila the Hun, Roaring Lion, Growling Tiger — established calypso as commentary and took it to New York studios in the 1930s. Later, Black Stalin, Chalkdust and David Rudder each pushed the form in different directions, Rudder in particular bridging calypso and the emerging soca audience.

Calypso Rose, from Tobago, broke the genre's gender barrier decisively, becoming the first woman to win the major titles and continuing to record into her eighties.

Calypso beyond Trinidad

Every Anglophone Caribbean island has a calypso tradition and a monarch competition, and the local variants have their own character. Barbadian calypso is closely tied to Crop Over and the Pic-O-De-Crop contest. Antigua's grew directly out of benna. Saint Lucia, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominica, the Virgin Islands and Belize all run their own seasons.

The competitions are taken seriously as a national forum. A calypsonian who lands a telling verse about a sitting government will be quoted for months, and in several countries a Carnival-season calypso remains one of the more effective forms of political criticism available.

How to listen

Calypso concentrates in the weeks before each island's Carnival, when stations carry tent performances, competition heats and commentary. Outside the season it appears in vintage programmes and on national holidays.

Because the lyrics are the point, calypso rewards listening rather than background play — and a great deal of the reference is local, which is part of what makes it worth hearing from outside. The stations below carry it live.

Stations playing calypso and soca (20)

📖 Read this in the app ← Browse all Caribbean stations