The emotions that I feel on the eve of my departure are a mixture of excitement, nervousness, curiosity and a rising sense of amused bewilderment. This project contains many challenges, but perhaps none will be greater than conducting an effective overview of the Caribbean’s musical evolution, while avoiding generalized statements that gloss over each island’s unique experience. The intricacies of the region’s ethnomusicology do not lend themselves well to oversimplification, but my preliminary research has taught me a few broad truisms which are relevant to the study at hand: first, due to the brutality and greed of their European conquerors, most of the islands’ original inhabitants were eradicated within eighty years of Columbus’s arrival in the new world. As a result, the local Taino, Arawak and Carib Indian populations left almost no cultural legacy behind to impact future generations. Second, because these Native Americans died so quickly, the new world’s colonial masters began importing African slaves en masse to work their plantations and mines. The frequency and urgency with which this human cargo arrived reflected how much revenue the overseers hoped to squeeze from their territories, but it also had a direct impact on each island’s relative level of “Africanization.”
Consequently, Trinidad, which became a British settlement in 1797, imported far fewer slaves than Spanish plantation colonies like Cuba and Puerto Rico, and its national music style reflects this more moderate experience. Calypso contains percussive schemes that are unmistakably African, but lack the thumping beats and rhythmic claves that are central to other examples of Afro-Spanish fusion. Part of this divergence is explained by Trinidad’s early abolishment of slavery, which both stemmed the flow of Africans to its shores and brought about a mass influx of indentured servants from South Asia. Their presence filled plantation owners’ demand for cheap labor, but it also complicated the island’s status quo by introducing yet another marginalized, downtrodden ethnic group into the lower rungs of colonial society. It was around this time that the Trinidadian nationalist and anti- imperialist movements began to take shape, and Calypso would soon become an important symbol for their stated goals. As a direct descendent of the call-and-response “Kaisos” which helped Trinidadian slaves discreetly communicate while in captivity, the genre’s bawdy innuendo and biting socio-political commentaries became a creative way to criticize British policies without violating the crown’s strict anti-sedition laws.
Much like Dominican Bachata music and Hip-Hop in the United States, Calypso originated as a “lower-class” form of entertainment, and was derided by polite society as vulgar and crude. However, Calypso’s anti-establishment appeal soon made it into a fashionable diversion for the wealthy, and, inevitably, a lucrative source of revenue for opportunistic producers and promoters. Now, like these other genres, it seems to exist in a state of contrast between its original, “uncorrupted” form and a commercialized brand that dominates public airwaves. Such contrasts are just another reason why Caribbean music remains so fascinating, and why I feel the story of its evolution is one that has to be told.
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