WC2007 Song: Neither Fish Nor Fowl
Out of ethnic diversity Trinidad has developed a complex culture. It has had more experience than its Caribbean neighbours in absorbing the vast array of practices and beliefs brought to its shores by its cosmopolitan citizenry.This assimilation has not been and still is not a simple process. The most apparent tensions are usually fuelled by politicians who cavalierly and shamelessly shunt aside harmonious development in favour of divide and rule strategies, creating and fostering enclaves to serve their political ends.
Be that as it infuriatingly may, several efforts have come, even from political platforms, to preach policies of inclusion. It is a strategy to widen appeal by offering a little something to either titillate or appease different palates.
It's called being politically correct. It has created many lumbering creatures without philosophical centres, struggling to pander to multitudinous tastes and succeeding mostly in irritating all.
When I say Trinidadians have the most experience, it is because we have lived with each other's others for far too long not to recognise when something is real and when it is just a pappyshow. People can discern contrived harmonies. They just don't resonate at the gut level.
How many times, for example, have we felt a wash of cynical impatience at public gatherings -- especially at State-sponsored ones -- where the entertainment segment feels interminable because someone has decided that every single dance form and musical genre must get up on the stage or some group will feel slighted?
It's like the selection of West Indies cricket teams. How many decisions are made out of concern that some territory will take offence otherwise? Nobody is brave enough to let merit alone enter the gates. So we end up with a wide range of mediocrity. And there's plenty of that to go around.
Listening to the recently launched official CWC World Cup song, "The Game of Love and Unity," made me reflect on these things. I looked at the lyrics, thoughtfully posted online by CaribbeanCricket.com and tried unsuccessfully to listen to the song again on the cricketworldcup.com. The lyrics were of greeting card style; the music was striking for its indistinctness. Described by Rupee, one performer -- Shaggy and Faye Ann being the other two -- as something that takes a little bit of something from various musical genres in the Caribbean; it seemed to me that the effect was to capture nothing. Trying too hard to include everything, it became neither fish nor fowl.
I was disappointed but not surprised. The ICC's Australian firm which had designed the mascot, Mello, conveyed a Caribbean image that is constructed from outside not inside the region's sense of self. I got that same feeling from the song, that it did not naturally rise up from a Caribbean belly. Even if it has been described as mainly written by Rupee, it feels like a tourism jingle and not a real song. Maybe I am using the wrong ears to hear it, maybe I should just say, well it is a jingle, and leave it at that. I just feel irked by these reinforcements of a stereotype.
I suppose when I think of the spectacular fusion music from regional artistes that have the purity and artistry that comes when the fusion is organic, it makes this too contrived an attempt, devoid of the scripting that comes from the natural call and response between artiste and artiste.
As the World Cup draws nearer, my heart sinks at the looming re-casting of the Caribbean as simply a tourist playground all decked out and subservient to other people's images of who we should be.
I would dearly like this to be a success, but more than anything, I'd like to see it as an occasion of opportunity for Caribbean people to show the world who we really are and what we can do ourselves.