![]() ![]() Calypso’s lyrics, too, became a forum for thrashing out the issues of the day, reporting on anything from industrial disputes to sexual peccadilloes.Ĭolonial-era education and studies of the English poets remain foundational for Sparrow. Hammering industrial metal into tempered scales, steel pans were made out of oil drums from the island’s chief export this was music made by any means necessary, to defy those who benefited most from the island’s resources. Starting in 1740, the legal banning of the African-style drum (made of wood and animal skin) under slavery and colonialism encouraged the invention of the steel pan. The lyrical sting of calypso and the instrument associated with it, the steel pan, may be pop’s most embedded form of resistance. ![]() ‘We always wanted to belong to the English side of things, that’s all we knew’ … Mighty Sparrow. “Certain people are telling the audience: ‘Don’t believe what you see, don’t believe what you hear or what you read.’ But I do believe.” There’s no question about it.” The concept of fake news is anathema to him. “If you have time to look at the news,” Sparrow observes, “you see where most of those songs’ inspiration comes from. More recently, he has hymned a pre-presidential Barack Obama, and railed against Russian oligarchs on Neurosis of the Rich. Watching Sparrow watch the news, eyes narrowed in concentration, is a reminder of the decades of conflict he has processed into poetry – from the impact of US naval withdrawal on Trinidad sex workers, on the infectious 1956 song Jean and Dinah, to the space age and cold war on 1963’s Kennedy and Khrushchev. While the photographer sets up in my living room in Queens, New York City, the 83-year-old calypso originator scrutinises the screen, where the US midterm elections offer gold to this instinctive satirist. ‘Can you put on the TV news?” asks Slinger Francisco, AKA Mighty Sparrow. ![]()
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