Soca Has Been the Sound of Trinidad for 40 Years, but Can It Go Global?

There aren’t many countries that can claim to have a contemporary popular music which perfectly encapsulates their spirit, history and culture. Jamaica has reggae and dancehall, Congo has rumba and soukous, Puerto Rico has reggaeton, but most countries - like Britain for example where our dissolving domestic music culture is a grey shade of pastoral folk - have nothing that could be described as a lasting and unifying indigenous sound.

Soca, the national music of Trinidad and Tobago, ticks that box and then unashamedly grinds on it, because there is probably no closer tie of a music genre to its homeland in the world. The energising sound of soca has undergone a load of stylistic transitions since its humble beginnings in the mid 1970s, and by taking a look back through its kaleidoscopic history, it’s easy to see how it’s maintained such a phenomenal social importance and cultural prominence in its country of origin.

These days, the current soca genre is so damn broad, you could say it incorporates pop, techno, R&B and afrobeat, but no matter how coalescent it becomes, it’s always underpinned by that unmistakable rum-soaked, decadence of the party-loving waist-wining Caribbean island.

To cater for how diverse it’s become, it’s been divided into two categories. You’ve got groovy soca and power soca – two sub genres that have little in common musically. The rules of the International Soca Monarch (ISM), a sort of FA Cup of soca music held each year in Trinidad, state that anything less than 125 bpm is groovy soca (example below), and anything higher than 150bpm is power soca.

Power became popular in the 1990s thanks to an artist called Superblue whose energy-frazzled tunes and live performances were so hyper they heralded a new dawn. Fans were vociferously urged to jump, get crazy, wave rags in the air and scream like frantic rave banshees.

Power soca was the first time Trinidadian music transitioned into a more aggressive, intense, pumping, urgent style after almost a century of lilting, hypnotic, sweet, swaying calypso music. It signalled a major departure from the early soulful, groovy days of soca in 1974 when its inventor, Ras Shorty I, a black musician from the largely Indian south of Trinidad, had first envisioned the mix of sounds. His main aim was to create social unity, peace and love through music. He combined the ethnic music of the African and Indian cultures of the island, taking African rhythms, drums and (via America) brass, and mixing them with Indian Bollywood-style strings, percussion and synths, and the result was what now call soca.

It is now perhaps the only contemporary music in the world that operates seasonally: tied stringently to Carnival season – the frantic period between Christmas and Lent in which the island parties for two months straight – and songs are written, recorded and released in such a way so that an artist’s best songs of the year can be honed in the live arena ready to compete for the Soca Monarch crown (and £200,000 prize money) at the ISM Final in front of tens of thousands of people in the national stadium and around 1.3m more watching at home. It’s basically like X Factor, but not at all shit.

Trinidad has no record industry to speak of, or even any proper record labels (a bizarre fact given that Jamaican labels like Island and Trojan achieved great success and particularly since Trinidad has far more rich businessmen who could pour money into the music business). So soca artists make all their main cash by performing at these live concerts - known as fetes - during carnival season.

One of the most frenzied live performances ever witnessed at ISM, came in the 1996 final. The crowd at the outdoor concert held in a huge park in Port-of-Spain had been waiting for Superblue’s performance for hours and it was late. When the announcer finally introduced him and his live band began to play, the crowd immediately swarmed the stage, overwhelming it with their waving flags and rags (watch below).

The melee kicks off to such an extent that the cameraman can’t find Superblue at all. He’s in there though, and starts bellowing into the microphone like a shaman until eventually the spotlight finds him, wearing a long blue cape, which he strips off to reveal an outfit in the red, white and black of the Trinidad & Tobago flag. He sings a song called “Bounce”, urging fans to “show your national colours and bounce,” before building up to a huge chorus where he declares himself, “READY TO PARTY!” with a sincerity that only seems to work in soca. It’s spellbinding, theatrical, and it tells you everything about Trinidad’s love for exuberance in eight anarchic minutes.

The story of Superblue was becoming the modern soca story, but soon after that career-defining performance, he just totally disappeared. In a display of self-destruction that Gazza would have been proud of, he went missing from the soca scene for over a decade, chasing addictions to crack and booze. A living legend amongst fans, he was reduced to virtual vagrancy. Then, in 2009, in a quite incredible story, he returned to the stage in the most dramatic way.

His daughter, Fay-Ann Lyons, by then a prominent and electrifying soca star in her own right, was performing in the ISM finals, nine months pregnant, with a song called “Meet Super Blue”. In the two months leading up to the performance she had teased the crowd that her father was waiting in the wings but he never materialised. Then, at the finals, he suddenly burst on stage – the crowd couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. She won the title and in 2013 Superblue completed his remarkable recovery by winning the power soca title himself.

Fast forward to now, and Fay-Ann and her husband Bunji Garlin (pictured below) are two of the biggest soca artists, not only in Trinidad but all over. Garlin’s huge Carnival 2012 road march “Differentology” was remixed by Major Lazer a year after its release. Later in 2013 Diplo and Kubayashi produced his massive track “It’s A Carnival” – soca’s biggest airing yet on the international stage. In 2014, Garlin performed at SXSW festival and was earmarked as a “must-see act” by Rolling Stone.

Where most stars sing about drinking rum, gyrating waists, girls jamming their butts into crotches, and, most importantly, carnival; Garlin has become one of the few to write about social issues, like the old calypso legends of Trinidad - Lord Kitchener, Mighty Sparrow, Shadow - once did. “Bomb Song” features a mock-explosion at the beginning with Garlin and crew falling to the ground dead, penned in response to a string of bomb attacks in Port-of-Spain.

If Garlin is bossing soca’s world stage, back home Machel Montano is a national god who enjoys unparalleled acclaim. Year after year he drops hits (using a hit factory of the best songwriters) and performs them with a rarified swagger.

In recent years he’s released "The Fog", "Happiest Man Alive", and "Haunted" – all tunes that have dominated carnival, their synth-heavy pounding rhythms resonating through the air from fetes to bars to cars. This year he’s released a string of equally mesmerising tunes like "Remedy" (with more YouTube views than any soca song ever) and "Like Ah Boss" (below) whose gorgeous cascading brass arrangement and crescendoing structure builds to an outrageously infectious chorus.

Soca is not entirely dominated by men, women are often the subjects of the songs and videos – dancing half naked and soaked. If your feminist red flags have started waving, they shouldn’t be – these aren’t spectacles for the benefit of men, nor are they particularly disempowering. A lot of Trini women see soca and carnival as a platform for hyper-sexualised public displays, just as male performers do. The two biggest female stars, Destra Garcia and Fay-Ann Lyons sing about sexy girls wining just as much as the next man. Objectification is not a negative in Trinidad, it’s one of the most exhibitionist societies in the world.

Destra is an enduring presence and her musical output is consistently brilliant, her stage shows are fantastic and her voice is sublime. Her groovy songs like 2014’s "Just A Little Bit" and "Road Call" (below) could break the top 40 if they were released in the UK or US. Her power songs like "Mash Up" are basically rousing knees-ups with wicked melodies. More recently arrived artists like Patrice Roberts and Jo Jo are audaciously confident, their live acts get better each year and they look sure to rise to the top in the hugely competitive world of soca.

As for the future of soca as an art form, things seem to point towards the international mainstream breakthrough it’s been threatening and pushing towards for some years. Trinidadian music has never managed to travel well. Lord Kitchener might have rolled straight off the Windrush in 1948 to sing an acapella version of his seminal calypso “London Is The Place For Me”, but countless entertainers who could storm the charts worldwide have barely made it out of the islands.

Everything could change in 2015 though, and soca’s new stars are thumping on the door of relevance. Off the back of last year’s stomping tracks “Truck On D Road” and “Red Light District” Bunji Garlin signed a record deal with RCA records which could see him succeed where other heavyweight Trinidadian artists like David Rudder and Kitchener have failed. And with the help of hip collaborations, mostly with Major Lazer who have co-written with Machel Montano, remixed soca star Flipo, mashed up Montano with Ariana Grande and put on huge concerts in Trinidad, it feels like the message is finally hitting home.

At a time when pop music likes to appropriate any rising cultural flavours before they get a chance to stand on their own two feet, here’s hoping that soca can leap the gap and finally get the limelight it’s been flirting with since 74’.

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