Ringbang Fools

03, Jan 2000
We have no sense of the building process. We love spectacle! It is our substitution for the painstaking, slow, grind of building concretely from the bottom up. The spectacle is the show, the exhibition, that exhilarates for a fleeting moment but leaves nothing fundamental after all is said and done.

One hundred million was spent on the Miss Universe Beauty contest that we hosted, $8 million was spent on the World Beat Show that went bust" and now $40 million has to be coughed up to cover the costs of the Millennium "Ringbang" World Broadcast. That is a grand total of $148 million, spent within a 12-month period, and at the end of the day we have nothing to show.

Little Carib theatre will remain as is, so too Queen's Hall, there shall be no proper home for the arts, no "Sambadrome", like in Brazil where we can present the "mas" properly and so on. Yet we talk incessantly about being the world's most creative people, about the fantastic "culture-product" that we have to project internationally but the infrastructural requirements have not been designed and implemented to provide sustenance to the very culture-product, to nurture it and package it for global marketing.

No matter how creative one may be, if he/she does not possess the required vision, strength of character, patience and discipline to "dig deep" within self in order to develop the product, then all that one will do is merely flitter around glibly for a while. And of course keep awaiting the next idiot to suggest yet another spectacle.

So Eddy Grant presented us with the latest one. We have nothing against Grant who over the years has thrilled us with some fine musical compositions. In fact, what was always remarkable about his work, even back then in England with his band "The Equals", had been the consistency therein of his use of calypso rhythms and phrasing. When you heard "Funky Like A Train", "Electric Avenue", "Hello Africa", "Irie Harry", "Neighbour, Neighbour", you knew you were hearing the work and soul expressions of a Caribbean person.

"Neighbour, Neighbour" was so popular in T&T, precisely because of its "calypso-ness", that the first shipment of records sold out quickly and when Grant came to T&T and discovered this, he promptly went into a local recording studio and single-handedly recorded "Neighbour, Neighbour" playing every required instrument himself. There was no difference between the two versions.

His buying up of the rights to the calypso music of most of the great T&T exponents of the art form is also quite commendable and shows his business acumen. We expect him to do remakes and new "cover" versions of the truly great compositions, and hopefully not only the party songs but also the social and political commentary. For this Grant stands to make huge profits down the road. All that is fine.

But when you come to tell us that you have re-named our culture-product, that you have re-defined our thing for purely selfish purposes, and that we must spend $40 million to assist you in bastardising our own product, we must draw the line. Is Grant to remake all those great calypso compositions he now owns and call them "Ringbang"? We must "fear" the Greeks particularly when they "bring gifts".

When asked by Ray Blood to define "Ringbang", Grant replied: "Ringbang is the power of the drum and the rhythm of Caribbean peoples everywhere. Ringbang is our culture. It is what we speak without language. It is what we understand without education...." Gigantic claims, these certainly are. But if Ringbang is all this, how come one person can lay claim to have created it, and created it only yesterday, Viking Tundah's "Ringa Ringa" being the very first song popularly identified with what Grant calls "Ringbang".

True to say, it is all one big "CON". Grant's words used to define "Ringbang" are typical of the kind of sales-pitch that come from the lips of marketeers hell bent on selling something, worse yet something that has been fraudulently fudged while laying claim to authenticity.

When Mudada told the world in song that "T&T- the land of calypso and pan/is no fast-food slogan", he meant exactly that. We paid tremendously in life's terms for this product. Calypso is as old as Caribbean society itself.

Two hundred years ago, Gros Jean, a slave calypsonian, was composing his verses in French Patois. And there were many like him before and after.

People fought to develop this "jamette culture" as it was described by the then proper, colonial "citizens of substance". All the folk songs of the Caribbean, from Jamaica to Guyana, are in fact calypso or in the calypso mould. Every single one. This thing is our soul, our blood and guts. We must guard it jealously. Let no one fiddle around and tinker with our heritage and on that basis advance all kinds of ridiculous claims.

If we continue to project "Ringbang" in the new millennium we will not be projecting the Caribbean but Grant personally with all his fraudulent musical definitions. Instead of laughing this man out of town, we opt to spend $40 million unconditionally. Why? Because of our penchant for spectacle.