Corie Sheppard Podcast
Corie Sheppard Podcast
Episode 236 | Lou Lyons
In this episode, Lou Lyons shares the journey from growing up in a strict Tobago household with no TV to co-founding Freetown Collective and becoming a voice for cultural introspection. We talk about his early love for vinyl, the creation of Full Disclosure, and how the pandemic pushed him deeper into music and self-discovery. Lou reflects on the spiritual responsibility of artistry, learning guitar while studying law, and how he and Muhammad Muwakil built Freetown from spoken word roots to international stages.
We also discuss:
- The impact of calypso on all Trinbagonian music
- Collaborating with Machel Montano on “Represent”
- Why he left Lord Shorty off his soca Mount Rushmore
- The importance of documenting music legacies and teaching pan over recorders
- The spirit behind “Feel the Love,” “Light Man,” and his upcoming album
A deeply thoughtful conversation about culture, conviction, and creative purpose.
🎧 Click the link in my bio for the full episode
#coriesheppardpodcast #loulyons #freetowncollective #calypso #soca #kaiso #trinidadandtobago
well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, we will find out today. We will find out today. So, how you're going, bro? I good you're, it's good to have you here, bro. I want to tell you this has been long in the making. When I first started talking to people, you was one of the first people I said I had to talk to that man boy. Why, bud, full disclosure radio boy? Yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, I used to do the podcast before just talking about what happened in the. Wherever the current affairs was, I kind of started to talk about that, but my goal was always to tie it back to Calypso. Calypso is my love. That's where I feel most comfortable and I find that a lot of the issues that we see now, we see these things many, many times before in the past.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it cycles.
Speaker 1:It cycles, but the thing is it's our brand new people born every day and it's easy for us to take for granted. Them know what we know and their experience is ours. So I was glad when I see somebody else in this space talking about the, the current affairs and that kind of thing. What was the genesis of it for you?
Speaker 2:um and this is um full disclosure around the pandemic right right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you were talking more of the, the issues around the pandemic, the political side. It seemed as though there was no topic that he wasn't willing to talk about. Yeah, um.
Speaker 2:So full disclosure. As the name alludes to, it was my attempt to show a community that I was growing in real time. It was never to come off as a leader in thought or guru of any sort. The pandemic allowed me to slow down, and in slowing down because remember, feel the Love had just take Freetown Collective to a new place in the culture we had about 17 bookings outside of the country already lined up From Feel the Love, from Feel the Love, and for the pandemic to hit and for the entire company to pivot and say, well, how are we going to survive this?
Speaker 2:I had a lot more time to sit and think and slow down and a lot of personal things in my life needed addressing. And as I began to address them in my own self, other things started coming out. About the creative community. Right, a lot of whistleblowing started happening and I picked up a book called woman who run with the wolves.
Speaker 2:Well, it was suggested to me by a friend, right, she even bought the book for me and in reading that book I realized just how much I was ignoring about my own existence. I said, okay, I'm feeling like I stumbled on a gold mine in my own self and I would like to try to have a community around self-discovery. So, on full disclosure, that name suggested that no topic was off the table for addressing and I would attempt to be my most brutally honest so that whoever looks at this could hold me to those words. I needed the accountability. I got you, so I wanted people to hear me say those things. Yeah, see me make those discoveries and force me to be a better person by holding me to those things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you put it on record I appreciate that it was a conversation. I think, if I remember right, I used to see it on a sunday like yeah, yeah, it used to be in a sunday nice little community, you know, because it was. I like the idea that you were doing it live as opposed to I recording and putting it out every tuesday.
Speaker 2:But I might record friday, yeah, but the live gives you a different opportunity you can't hide no, no, no, no, you can't hide it the comments coming at you fast and furious. Yeah, and you?
Speaker 1:seem to enjoy it too. You like the banter with the, with the audience, because I'm a perpetual.
Speaker 2:I don't ever see any kind of engagement or discourse as a challenge. I am here to learn From the most learned to the most naive. I'm here to learn. There isn't any area, any topic that I think that I'm an expert on. That precludes me from learning from somebody. So if you want to see me at my most excited, yeah, teach me something.
Speaker 1:It seems to be real excited when you're doing the teaching.
Speaker 2:So you know, teaching is a learning in itself yeah, and I'm excited because it's a two-way street, because by attempting to impart information, I am also, in the moment, realizing that I didn't realize some things, so there's some contemporaneous learning for me when I teach.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, gotcha. So that would have been advanced to today in our series.
Speaker 2:I'm enjoying a lot for the record.
Speaker 1:Yes indeed.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I can see it. I was telling you before you, before we start this great work that you're doing, because I, almost since you started, every time I prep in to interview somebody, something you said on that episode. Make me add a question, change a question. It's been real, real useful. Thanks. I can remember you're reading something about how kenny phillips here last week and you read something and you say Kenny Phillips, and I was like I say my first thought was Lou, make a mistake here, because the age of the song you're talking about and my age for Kenny Phillips I say something here, right?
Speaker 2:And I said the Kenny Phillips Just so that everybody was clear. Yeah that, kenny Phillips, you only looking young. I know, kenny, you only looking young. The cat is out the bag now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, people stop dying here. No, you're clean shape man, you're born.
Speaker 1:oh sorry, scratch jack that was you keeping him looking young too. You know every great tricks, yeah, but that part about just connecting the music and it's something you used to do a lot in full disclosure radio. Maybe that's why I latch on to it, because you would be talking about that topic like what happened in the pandemic and youths, something you used to do a lot in full disclosure radio. Maybe that's why I latch on to it, because you would be talking about a topic like what happened in the pandemic and youths and so on. And then you just randomly talk about a melody calypso and I think.
Speaker 1:But this man okay so yeah, yeah, so you're diving to it fully now.
Speaker 2:Yeah um, uh, I was just talking to david where's photographer and he was responsible for, like freeetongue's first professional um photo session for an article done by laura douridge and in that photo, uh, muhammad and I are sitting on crates of records and he was holding up a shadow record and I can't remember which record I was holding up, but those are the same records that I that I have today. So I've always had these um records in my possession and I've always had calypso songs and soca songs that really, really important to me. But the dive into it would have come after Feel your Love. So Feel your Love is a part of an album, an EP called Yago, and in executive producing Yago I had to go into Calypso and I want to give credit where credit is due. Jaron Remy, dj Rockers, was the first person to really start telling me examine all the music we make in trinidad and tobago. All of it is calypso, like all, all of it. And I start examining all, even the reggae that we make carrie kill mad cow disease, but how he singing that. So just take away all that, that whole reggae revival, take away all the reggae um instrumentation and imagine um calypso behind it.
Speaker 2:Calypso, I spoke to beaver. I said beaver, ganja, farmer, talk to me about that, why? Why is that a hit? Beaver said flat, is that calypso? It's my little show. That sent me back into the crates. If all of these songs that are hits I mean I sasha, don't you know your love like, that's the most genre-less song this country has ever. This is a ballad but there's pan in it, but the lingua sounds like reggae, but can I help, the melodic structure of it being that of Calypso. So that sent me back into the crates to really study just how much influence Calypso has on the soil in Trinidad and Tobago that we can't escape it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I heard you say somewhere that the culture is not just a festival or religion or whatever it is. The culture is really how you and me interact with each other. That's right. So I always felt that anytime, anytime somebody from trinbego do something, it's done already. Exactly we talk in the barbershop like exactly because you, you line up in any street corner, which we do. It could go from politics to woman, to whole man, this thing, the pandemic we could talk about. That way a man grew up.
Speaker 1:So, sometimes you know a man everything about somebody without asking him a question about himself just through Kaiso and Kalipso.
Speaker 1:Yes, you know, that's why I like what Ben Jai say, you know, when he say the love of his walk and how he just talk and how he just cook. Now he's a look to me. All of it is so I feel encouraged when I hear you talking about that. The last episode I listened to you were talking about that. You were starting to get into some depth in voice, calypso. But I want to talk about your records, because your origin in music started from vinyls to with your father.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, um, I grew up in pembrokeke, tobago, and my parents I have one older sibling, I have an older brother and my parents decided that for both of us, they wanted us to read, so they discarded the television that they had. So no, TV. Yeah, as in not give it away, they throw it away. They don't want no TV in this house, so we literally grew up with just books, the song that they see, and vinyls.
Speaker 1:Music, so you had to go to the vinyls.
Speaker 2:I mean how much book we could read.
Speaker 1:Corey how much book we could read. It flips up to your parents. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But also, I also grew up very strict Seventh-day Adventist and to me the music was always a pathway to a wider world of imagination that wasn't just religion, school work or family home. There was a way that listening to these records ignited my imagination to see a world that I didn't have a television to see, that I didn't have access to any videos, music videos no, those things started in my brain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, don't tell them YouTube was not wrong when you were small. Nah, youtube was not wrong. Yeah, it had none of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah flat screen TVs was never wrong. Corey, yeah, it used to take two men to live up at 20 inches.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if I had to get a friend when he wanted to move all the TVs, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so music started to play a very important role in my life because of the access to the vinyls and the cassettes that my father had and also my brother and I had a Saturday ritual. We used to come from church right, there's morning church and evening church, church, right, there's morning church and evening church.
Speaker 2:So in between, that period where we're taking lunch and resting a little bit. We used to. We used to be vexed to go back to evening church because evening church starting back at 4 pm but at around 3 pm rick deez and the weekly top 40 used to start, and if nobody knows what that is.
Speaker 2:Rick de's and the Weekly Top 40 used to start, you could hear some music and if nobody knows what that is, rick D's and the Weekly Top 40 is the longest running music show on radio where it recaps the top 40 songs in the world Right and that used to be like our soap opera. We listening to see who get bumped down from song number 10. One new song coming in. One new song coming in. So yeah, it was just a portal for our imagination.
Speaker 1:I understand, and that would be not genre specific, the records you're listening to, or any talk for All.
Speaker 2:You just hear it, yeah all, all, from gospel to soul. Maybe not a lot of calypso then, yet yeah, but all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would assume that the early days of you know, as you say, before you get into soccer, it is very hard to see. I hear you call um born into darkness, a pop album but it's so hard to put a genre to it. It's like every song you hear is from something else. You know. It went from rock and roll to that pop, that love song, feeling R&B, and again you understand that I'm listening through the ears of all them songs. Kaizo, to me, is all Calypso.
Speaker 2:All of them is Calypso, corey All, but we didn't know at the point in time.
Speaker 1:Gotcha.
Speaker 2:And the reason why that? And do you know why that album was called Born in Darkness? No, Because we had no reference. When is there reference? We had no OGs.
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 2:We had nobody to tell us. So Mohammed, myself and Sheriff locked ourselves in a room and basically taught ourselves a lot. Yeah, I suppose I'm not saying that the space didn't have ogs, we just felt like we didn't have access to them. And so, the same way, um, usher would have been justin bieber's oj, you know, and peter dean a lot of hot water, but before that he was he was a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was a lot of people's mentor, of course, so we felt like we had these stories that we needed to tell. Yeah, but we didn't have the presence of an older record exec producer, an artist, say here's how you develop an album, from song one to the end. Yeah, I know beaver at that time to tell you and beaver was around, but beaver still active in his own personal life and he's still doing production. He's still a active musician and intellectual. So I mean, how are we going? Convenience beaver?
Speaker 2:like that our industry is not set up like that.
Speaker 1:No, yeah so introduce the mentors. There's no system of matriculation, is a little tricky.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So looking back, no, we can appreciate that. Born in darkness, songs like what Carl and Carl Jacobs is doing, sounds like what Robin Imamsha was doing, like sounds like what Ajala was doing, they were always these. Sounds like what Mavis John was doing. They were always these trin begonian musicians who didn't make festive music, carnival music, and it sounded like it absorbed whatever the world influence would have been at the time. When you strip, when you strip that away, the songwriting is calypso, the reference is calypso. The way we express the emotion in the words is calypso. The way we bend of course the melody is calypso.
Speaker 2:The way we bend the melody is calypso.
Speaker 1:You can't escape it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know I was talking to Turner here about that, the way Turner says words, there's so much kaiso in everything he does.
Speaker 2:Turner is a throwback, you know. He's from another life for sure Turner is, and he has always been that way. That life for sure Turner is, and he has always been that way well, it was funny to hear him say that.
Speaker 1:He said that the Calypso Nian has a God to him. When you ask him about it, he said but the Calypso Nian is the man, because even when he said something, he said oh lad, oh lad, that's not from now yeah, you understand that you talked about his life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, talked about his upbringing and you know.
Speaker 2:Right. So, growing up in the home, but also in East Port of Spain, that is the hotbed of the cult, of course, of course. So for a youth like that, who could have been influenced by anything negative, for Calypso to be the spirit that he identified with, that shows that, to me, calypso is the most potent yeah, yeah, primordial of course, energy.
Speaker 1:Well, it's kalinda well, kalinda true that's kalinda, but manifested as calypso yeah, and that's why it would affect and impact so much other genres all over the world. Yeah you know, when I hear molly come here to do to do show and she had a link up with gladys, you know it shows you something about what we're doing is special and there's a man who with Gladys, you know it shows you something about what we're doing.
Speaker 1:It's special and, as a man who's diving into the culture to plenty of our genre, music come out of orphanage plenty of it come out of homes, you know when you think of it. So you diving into records, listening to radio, trying to find yourself. What is it like when you, when you start to find yourself in music Because you're starting to play?
Speaker 2:music started from the churches, yeah, so my father always liked to tell the story. There was a time he traveled to the States and he asked me and my brother what we wanted, and I think it was. My father also had a large collection of Reader's Digest Kids. You wouldn't know what that was, but that was like Instagram in book form. Yeah, yeah, with the magazine days right.
Speaker 2:And I had come across this real, life-size fire truck with all the bells and whistles and things, and in my mind I was saying, if I get this, I'm going to be the man on my glove, because nobody's going to have a toy like this. I said, daddy, I want a fire truck like in the Reader's Digest. And my brother wanted a keyboard. My father said he went into a store and he saw the keyboard and he said I ain't buying no fire truck. Them boys could share this keyboard and, as my father would tell it, my brother probably felt like he owned that keyboard for five minutes by the time that keyboard came. That was my real start to music, like touching a real instrument. That opened up an interest to start singing in church. Then that opened up for my parents to really observe that. You know, music is something special to me.
Speaker 2:My father is a skilled joiner and at one point in time he was doing a lot of work on on yachts, doing the woodworking on the inside of yachts, and he and his business partner had done some work for a really famous musician who had a yacht dry dock in trinidad and apparently he didn't have a lot of the cash available to pay them. And my father saw a bass guitar there and he say I have a son into music. And the man said, well, this is my touring instrument, you know. But well, you do such a good job. And my father brought that bass guitar for me. Let me say we, he brought that bass guitar the monday, the saturday, I was playing in church yeah, never touched a bass guitar before, but I had a few days to realize notes. I said, yeah, man, I can play. And bass guitar became my first real instrument that I played in church.
Speaker 1:Serious. So you're playing with a keyboard. You're playing a little bass guitar too, Now that playing music in church is different to telling your parents you want to become a professional musician.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm so stupid, I never tell them that.
Speaker 1:Up to today.
Speaker 2:I never tell them that. They know that.
Speaker 1:I guess they would be seeing it.
Speaker 2:I never tell them that.
Speaker 1:So how religious parents you know? Trinidad is a place where most of us, you talk to a lot of musicians and you find that people find themselves in the music, within the religion. I always wonder what it's like for parents when you start to play music, that you know secular music, as they would say. What daddy and them saying at that point? Um?
Speaker 2:my musical journey opened up for my father to be open about his upbringing. So then that let me know that he was a part of youth groups around the time of black consciousness and he used to be singing and performing with his partners and them in in community centers, performing as a front but really distributing black power paraphernalia. I, he, was a radical using music, so now I know that, yeah, I'm not really a novelty in the in the family in that way. The most, um, I would say, reservations would have come from my mother. Yeah, she's a very conservative woman, very spiritual, very religious, and she prays a lot. So her reservation right was always tight on idea that musicians just take drugs.
Speaker 1:Oh nice, I like that. I like that. It's so sweet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So who gripes now with the music? You know it's when the music is a gateway to cocaine.
Speaker 1:It's amazing how they see it, eh, boy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and listen. At that point I found it to be illogical, like illogical to the point of hilarious. This is me as a boy, right, but you don't test the wisdom on your parents. Yeah, yeah, yeah, now I understand. You see this, not that I've taken drugs, but you've seen it. You have a front row seat. I didn't say that for you. I go say it for you. You see this, I'm not saying I've taken drugs.
Speaker 1:But you're seeing it, you have a front row seat. I didn't say that for you. I go say it for you. You have a front row seat.
Speaker 2:All I'm saying is I understand the wisdom of my mother now.
Speaker 1:You know it's funny. My grandmother told me the same thing. We had a business, we had an opportunity to move to Jamaica and I was back forth so often. I tell my father one day I say, boy, I had to go, I had to stay, you know. And when I moved, my grandmother nearly in tears. She said, boy, don't go and follow them drug people in Jamaica where it's coming from. But I like you guy from proceed to yeah but I, like you, I'm into partying, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean, who knows?
Speaker 1:who knows?
Speaker 2:you know you never to know he swiped, he didn't touch you.
Speaker 1:Your prayers worked. Yeah, plenty prayers. That's the thing with West Indian children and their parents. You back up plenty plenty prayers.
Speaker 2:Now my mother could relax because she realized, you know, free Tongue is a positive group and all of that. But in the early days my mother just used to call me randomly. I'm praying for you. How's the band going? How's the next one? Muhammad is his name. How's he going?
Speaker 1:I'm praying for you, all right but it's funny because you're all both, uh, from deeply religious backgrounds and that might have affected your choices in terms of what you do with music, where you choose not to with music of course of and um the reason why, even at the point of meeting Muhammad, I already knew what my path using my gift had to be Um, because in my mind was already the notion um that if if a gift is not used right, it will destroy you first Before you wreak havoc on others with this gift.
Speaker 2:By the time someone starts destroying community with the gift, it's because they are already internally destroyed. So I always approach musicianship and just the notion kori of being an artist is something that's very reverent for me and sobering. Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 1:It's not something I take for granted or I treat recklessly at all I'm starting to understand your posts around this vibes cartel issue because I saw people talking about well, everybody have an opinion about vibes cartel not coming to trinidad. You know, man say again 90 percent of the money and never sure. But I saw you as artists come out and say one of the few artists I will say that I said something publicly about it to this point. Uh, come out and say for you, the spiritual connection with your fans almost is what is at the forefront for you and you might have moved different. You didn't say what you had to do, but you say you might have taken that into consideration if you come.
Speaker 2:That's where it comes from too in terms of yeah, of course, Because I understand that somebody could say well, examine Vibes Cartoon Music. He's not a person who stands on principles and morals in his music, he's really a high entertainer. You know, he offers entertainment as his service. If you go deeper than that, whether you are saying that the music is a vehicle for just enjoyment or your music is a vehicle for upliftment, you can't escape that music is. Music is spiritual.
Speaker 2:The act of performing, writing, creating out of nothingness an idea that can access people's emotions, that is a spiritual transaction. And when you look at the ripple effect of that because of songs that you might have written in your bedroom, under a mango tree, in a car, after a breakup in the river, wherever you were at at that point of origin of that idea that can motivate somebody to buy a new outfit, take a loan from the bank, to come and see you. So, without trying to be too judgmental because I'm very judgmental about ice, right, and if you want your platform to handle that kind of stress, I could go there too. But the takeaway message was for me as artists, we have to be mindful of the full gamut that putting art out in the universe can do, and that transcends financial transactions. That's a spiritual transaction the ability to get people to do things that they might not have done but for your art, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm with you. I wonder how much artists would take that into consideration, especially at the top levels. You know the people who could command $1.3 million for a show. You know, because in my mind again as a layman, if you give me 90% of my thing, the contract, the contract breached, so I'm waiting my rights to not come right, but one of our core values as a company to his relationship over rights. You see what me and you bill and what me I always feel. If me and you refer into a contract, we we done break down already.
Speaker 2:Of course you know I mean of course, if you're married and you had to be talking about your marriage it's not gonna work, bro, by the time we're talking legally is it is because we have exhausted diplomacy, we have exhausted an ability to individually resolve conflict and we're now looking for external legal systems to help us.
Speaker 2:But I'm glad, I'm glad you, you talked about that core value that your company abide by, because that's where I'm coming from right, where I'm coming from korea, is trinidad and tobago right, and jamaica has an ongoing caribbean sibling rivalry that we refuse to talk about. Right, and on both sides we're right and on both sides we're wrong. But what this has opened up is a conversation for us to have about how trinidad's energy economy has allowed the creative economy of the caribbean to allow artists of the caribbean, including jamaican artists, to have their first proper shows and get proper pay for international appearances. Ie, let me look at which camera I could look at. You could look at all. Ie. Trinidad and Tobago has bust so many and when I say bust, introduced in a major way so many Jamaican artists that that is valuable cultural context for this if you understand that the music consumer market of Trinidad has supported your industry for more than four decades.
Speaker 2:Yes, one instance of bad business is enough.
Speaker 1:It speaks volumes. Right, okay, I would say it speaks volumes. They say the highest pay men ever get. I hear Jamaican artists say that the highest money they ever get in any other market outside of Jamaica is here.
Speaker 2:Coco T will tell you that Sizzler will tell you, that Vibe Scar tell himself, will tell you that Beanie man will tell you that Bounty Killer will tell you that Shabba will tell you that man like Yami Bolo who was living in South will tell you that yeah yeah, yeah, been here, right.
Speaker 1:Well, the since, let me make a big difference he's going by this time he'd have put on a show and he'd have treated slightly differently. Because you know, it's like both Mr Shark and Kurt Allen are here, heavy hitters in the Calypso arena, and both of them said in their own way hey, you see, between me and my fan, no judges can come between that, no promoter can come between that. The message first and the relationship with the audience is first. So I appreciate you saying that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you saying that.
Speaker 1:It's important to be said.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just for the record, there are times when Freetown has been asked to perform charitably and we've had to say no, and it's not because we don't believe in using our music for community. Sometimes there are hard conflicts between charities. There are hard conflicts between other altruistic goals, of course, of course. So it's never well, we ain't getting paid. That's why we ain't showing up. No, we have other commitments, right, yeah, right, that are not financially related. That would make this too onerous and too burdensome for us to keep the ship afloat.
Speaker 1:I'm with you. Right, I was telling Muhammad.
Speaker 2:I saw you all was on a charity show too, so you get it done right, yeah, we do we do get it done when we can, and there are times when we have been asked to examine well, okay, do we? And this is between me and Muhammad, yeah, we, manager, want to pay the bills, but we know that this person can't pay. What are we doing? And there are many times that we defer to. And it's not just pleasing the fans, it's understanding that music is a spirit and the moment we define our relationship with music as exploitative, as the beginning of the end yeah, and I guess you also conscious of it, destroying you before everything else too, exactly exactly so.
Speaker 2:So balance, and when I let's look at it from a, from a, um, as an objective standpoint, as possible right receiving 90 of your money, it's balanced yeah, yeah, let's put a hell of a balance even if you show up and you perform for 10 minutes and you tell your the patrons I'm sorry to to give all your wet beak. Yeah, but I still show up, even though me and guy have bad business. But I wanted you all to see that I was still willing to show up. Yeah, for your fans.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it has happened before. I remember sometime bounty killer might have cussed on stage and they, they started to stop the show and elephant man them came back I believe it was rory mirage and he come and he said you're gonna do a free show. And they came back and they do a free show and things just go wrong. Well, you know that world is difficult but um so many, so many things can be done differently.
Speaker 1:That is you still unfolding as you speak, waiting for word from the promoter and so on. It it would. It would never die off. But the choices you make in music influenced heavily by that connection with that audience. And I want to go back to you. The first starting to perform and it was spoken word. Where did that come from? Where did the poetry part? Is it in school or where you get the influence?
Speaker 2:no, what kind of music you think I just listened to mostly mostly you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would have said reggae if I had to guess. Wow, stereotype much. You need to judge him from luciano. Get up and sing, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:But kaisa and soka nah, let me, let me you know who make it happen is. Let me give a infamous make it happen rap line. I is the only rap man my dog and them does listen to conscious. I see, is that real rap man? Yeah, yeah man, yeah, legit, legit. So I wanted to rap. But when I, when I look around, I say okay, as he shines the hood's greatest, do anything. As he make it happen, do anything. I see spot rushers doing the thing, um, even um, highway records is doing the thing. Uh, I say I don't think I could do that.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I don't have any production.
Speaker 2:then I don't have no beats, no nothing. And again, this is before YouTube. I say, okay, well, all these verses I have, I will just poetrify them. I got you, I can just spoken wordify them, but it's really rap verses. I was doing as I'm spoken word.
Speaker 1:I understand, I understand, and that circuit is where you first met Muhammad. You also met there. Yeah, yeah, yeah that mutual respect developed from there. Yes, Now I hear you say when he was booked to go England Muhammad spoke about it before, but he didn't tell me all the time. He had one tune and it was time to go with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but we, I would say two tunes Right, right, a song called mama africa and perform that in a while, though it might perform that tonight mama africa and, um, yeah, we performed mama africa and love transition. Those were the only two songs we had, right, so it was two songs and, well about you know, six poems between all of us who went what were you doing so special that you feel people reaching out to you it's a book here and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:At that point in time, what were all people finding you without youtube and without social media?
Speaker 2:well, um, the, the. The ground zero stage would have been ue speak right um, which was a, an open mic started by muhammad in u and you could hear about an event. But showing up to the event is a different thing. The first time I showed up to UE speak, I swear it was a fete, the way the excitement and the students will react into. And, of course, they had some poems that were like audience favorites, so that people knew the words of, people knew the words to poems. Corey, yeah, I would not think. I would not think, yeah, people knew lines and would shouting it back like if it's put your hand in the air, come to see that yeah, it was.
Speaker 2:It was the. The live performance, um atmosphere was very different at that point, right right. The idealism on campus was was very different. The political motivations for students to make a better world was was very different.
Speaker 2:This is before we start seeing plenty nakedness on instagram I think you're distracted now, but we were still closer to the idealism of our parents and a kind of society that they dreamt of and felt like we could finish the good work to do, and so that in itself generated a buzz off campus. So, yeah, being able to generate that kind of energy on campus affected off campus right, oh, it's here.
Speaker 1:So it's so that the exposure name starting to get her up, yeah, and by that all started from on campus gotcha plenty movements, huh yeah, look at what the university should mean.
Speaker 2:All of them, yeah, black power started yeah on campus too I wonder.
Speaker 1:I'll try not to know, though. Do you think the campus could be a space like that again?
Speaker 2:every now and again, you see it rise up to be that yes, but it can't be a fiction of the past, it can't be romanticized based on a time before technology I guess we have to be able to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have to be able to use technology as a tool for community, because that's that's all university really is. It's community, because it's such radical thought. It's easy for me to show up if other people show up. I don't want to be single. The police are they spray down people with water? I don't want it to be me alone. Yes, israeli community. How do we find an established community?
Speaker 1:um, in a time that is dominated by technology, yeah, and you're right, it could be so different, because I remember going in ue and it might, you know. You think that your ideas are now coming out of the most rebellious phase in your life right definition in your teenage years, and you think that these things you have is so novel and yeah and when you meet other people, you're not alone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you find a tribe. Yeah, so you're finding that tribe. By that time, you and muhammad are already free town collective at our point. No, no, not yet so when you're traveling the first time, you're not no and you will, but by the time you're not no in UWE, you will, but by the time you're getting booked not yet.
Speaker 2:No, in UWE we weren't Right. So Freetown Collective the name Freetown was born in London, I see. So London created Freetown and that's why, to this day, we raise a lot of capital to go on tour in London. You know, we've been blessed to break even and sometimes make some profit, because London, when we went to do that show at the Tabernacle, right, we didn't know the effect of that show, but immediately after that, some residents of London came up to us and said that they would like to invite us for lunch, right, which would have been the following day. We found the place, we showed up and, korea, it was an entire room of caribbean professionals, like high level professionals, like senior council lawyers, accountants, bankers, who are present at that show. Remember, we're now finishing university, we're trying our thing, right, and we are in a living room, lunch prepared, and we are around Caribbean people, guyana, barbados, because I mean, once you're outside of the region, it's become brothers and sisters, right? Yeah, all of a sudden you understand what unity.
Speaker 2:Is it's true? Yeah, so they were really instrumental in the forming of Freetown, because they, in a very sobering way, put us to sit down Right and we performed. We performed a few well, the two songs and some of the and some of the poems Right. And they said you all don't know what this means for us. They said all we hear from back home is soccer music. And then when we go back home in person, the reality that we encounter does not mirror what we get from the music.
Speaker 2:The music will let us, will make us feel as though everything is all right. Yeah, we're drinking rum as normal and and and you know, the caribbean is just this real happy place. But when they go back to the caribbean, they realizing some different people have it hard and they were able to get that kind of narrative from the poems and the music that we did and they urged us whatever plans you will have for your lives, just don't stop this. I understand because, while what you are doing might be important for trinidad and tobago, the caribbean diaspora needed even more so that would have given you kind of the emphasis to see who's your that was yes, that was it.
Speaker 2:That was it, you know. And so you have muhammad trying to finish up his civil engineering, me trying to finish up law and Keegan trying to finish up something else. And it was a bleak day. I remember this. All three of us just standing up in silence looking at the Thames, coal figuring out life, an existential moment. Coal figuring out life, a existential moment. And one of us would have broken the silence and say we had to try this when we go home, like wherever the plans are here, we could finish up school, but we have to try this. Yeah and um. Then muhammad had a song called call the city free town. And, yeah, keegan was the one who says I think Muhammad suggested, well, I think we should go with the Freetown thing, and Keegan said, yeah, but we had to call it Freetown Collective.
Speaker 2:Why didn't you come up with the collective Collective? You know because Keegan, keegan Maharaj, a really powerful spoken word poet. He's a man who really Kegan Maharaj, a really powerful spoken word poet. He's a man who really believes in community and there's a way that East Indians have a way of living community. That isn't always the average experience for the African, Trinidadian and Trinbagonian. So there is a description and a feeling of community that he had that he kind of impressed upon us. That had to be part of the model moving forward. Like have to be about people. So the collective is everybody. We would be the core of Freetown but once you believe in Freetown you're part of the collective.
Speaker 1:It explains some of the performances and the tight spaces and some of the performances and the tight spaces and some of the parts of the mission that collective got it.
Speaker 2:That is the DNA of our business model. I'm with you it is a community model.
Speaker 1:I'm with you. I heard you say at that point in time you decided Muhammad's going to work on his voice for the next six months. You're going to work on guitar.
Speaker 2:So at that, when you go on there.
Speaker 1:you're not playing the way you play now. You're not playing Hell no Serious no, Bro no. Just stand up and sing. You're just playing. No, no, no, no, because so far you tell me keyboard, then you say bass. Yeah, so how it become? Now you're going to spend time to perfect the guitar. You just needed it in the band then.
Speaker 2:When we started making these songs and spoken with, Muhammad was a better guitarist than I was. I couldn't play guitar. I did not have a guitar At that point when still going to school, right, and my wife watching me.
Speaker 1:She know the career path that I'm on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when this music thing fitting in my friend. You know what's happening. Yeah, once I married a lawyer and I had a child on the way. Mm-hmm, yeah, so serious matters.
Speaker 2:Despite that right, and I want to say that the women who are in artists' lives are so critical and so important to their success, and there are some women who desire for their contributions to be private, because there is some emotional safety around people knowing what you just do. Tools of that, or what I would say is the first proper guitar that I had was purchased by my wife. I see she didn't know that Samo was taking place, but she said that thing you're playing there, it's not sounding good, it's not sounding good. I don't know where we're going to find the money, but you'll get something better than that. I think she would have said that after she came to a UE speak, I think probably a week after that, I see her, I get her in her box. I say okay, but there was a desire to get better.
Speaker 2:After London, there was a desire to commit it and do this in a way that required better. After London, there was a desire to commit it and do this in a way that required it to be done. So I used to study, right, no lie, before London, my average study day was 17 hours. This is when you were doing law. Yeah, doing law. I used to study was 17 hours Correct.
Speaker 2:This is when you were doing law yeah, doing law. I used to study for 17 hours.
Speaker 1:So I mean all your waking hours.
Speaker 2:All my waking hours, and some sleeping hours too. All the house used to have papers on the walls of cases. I used to live and breathe that. And now I have to divide my attention with that.
Speaker 2:And so 17 hours studying law and then now while starting to play the guitar. Now I would alternate. So monday I'll study, on tuesday I'll do some light revision and play guitar whole day. I'm not a formally trained musician. All that you hear from me is hard work. Nobody said if you want to play guitar you should start on nylon strings yeah, let's say it started steel, bro.
Speaker 1:That explains a lot too.
Speaker 2:He started on steel strings on a fretboard that looked like a harp, the, you know, gypsy have a. Have an album called the action too high I mean your fingers on both hands going through it going through it, there was blood coagulating under under the nails of my left hand, the hand that holding the cord, because I had to learn, I had to learn, yeah, and I, I, I just tried, tried, and at some point YouTube became more and more in stream and, yeah, be sent out on tutorials.
Speaker 1:Ah, with you. So you didn't decide to drop out of law at the time.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, we have to do both. Where would I live?
Speaker 1:After she buy the guitar, she's supposed to know that is it for law school. No, no, no, no, no. I had to finish, so you finish your law degree? Yeah, yeah, why law?
Speaker 2:um, so in tobago I started off in journalism. Really, yeah, that's why the podcast and thing has struck it. It see, I started off as a junior reporter and editor for Tobago News. So I actually worked for Tobago News and my editor at the point in time, earl man Mohan, a man who changed my life too, he said you should go and pursue this Like you could go to Custard and study this. He said I will put you keith smith, editor at large. Um, he, he had some weekend classes and thing. I'll put in a good word for you you could, you could pursue this like you're good, you could write, of course, and so that's what I did.
Speaker 2:I came down to trinidad from tobago with my very radical idea of changing the word by being an investigative reporter. What's that? Yeah, Even worse. And I had. I had um Kirwin Pyle Williams I call him out your name. He was one of my lecturers in uh in costat and he was responsible for my ethics course and in ethics, ethics and law. And he, he, he said you know, you should, you should look into um. No, because you have a. You have a brain for ethics and legal reasoning, so so you should, you should pursue it. I didn't take that too seriously, but there was another teacher who was responsible for teaching us critical thinking I won't call your name Based on assignments that I used to submit. He always used to say little boy, they gonna kill you. I don't think. I don't think journalism is for you. Yeah, too radical. No, this is unsafe, Like this angle that you want to take news from. That's not the purpose of news. You have to manage information. You just want to disrupt society.
Speaker 2:No, that's not manage information. You just want to disrupt society. Now, that's not. Yeah, so and he, and, and he used to say joke jokingly at first, but then he, he really told me now you will not get work if you don't understand what the, what the fourth estate of media is supposed to do as a political entity. Right, forget the corporate side. Like you, trying to adopt this as a as a way of being a journalist is is not going to work I see but that is what my idealism was tied to.
Speaker 2:So then I say if I can't do that, then yeah, so costa was media was? It was journalism and public relations.
Speaker 1:I see Stories tend to come together a little bit. You know I'm starting to see some of it because just watching the way it would break down issues on full disclosure back in the day. Very, very structured. I don't know if people might know how much research would go into what you had to do.
Speaker 2:It just seems like showing up and talking.
Speaker 1:All of that is a result of um being in media and then going to school to study it, right, right, and a certain level of determination too, because anybody who ever tried to play a guitar and then hear you play a guitar, you feel like you can't get. Yeah, listen, the first time I hear you play was in a show in anchorage. It was a habitat for humanity. Um, uh, this is the hunger banquet, or something like that, and I hear all the men play, we playing, we playing after me and my father, our band is old time Kaiso, so we playing after all the fellas. But in them days I was telling Muhammad, you heard Freetown Collective, but you don't know what it is. I don't know what is a collective and you know it's just a song. I don't know what that is. And then y'all came and play a few songs and thing, and it was. You had the crowd in a grip.
Speaker 1:People, people know some of these songs, but even the ones that they know, they can't be ignored. But I remember hearing you play them time. I didn't realize you're singing. I hear you play dread and I trying to figure out what you doing. So I said I'm going to go closer, boy, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. My father now has one of the greatest in guitar too. But you're doing something and I say I see what you're doing. Boy, you guys play quattro. I try to imitate what men do on the guitar, on the quattro.
Speaker 1:So I can sing like I see that I try to imitate what the fellas look at, what we call. But I come a little closer and I say if I could see a hand, if I could just see that right hand, I could figure out what it is you're doing on. No hope, no chance whatsoever. Just I don't enjoy it and take it.
Speaker 2:You know, I, I used to be very and to this day a little bit, I'll admit to be very insecure about my guitar playing. Yeah, because again the open mic spaces were populated with actual musicians, like just the other day, I tell Kyle, right, I say Kyle, I used to hide when I see all your guitar parts, I literally used to pull back. You know that meme with Homer Simpson disappearing in the bush Bro. I used to hold my guitar because I said them is real musicians Now what I doing. And that used to further propel me to practice for like 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, and I just developed my technique. The breakthrough came when there was a fire festival in Cuba some some years ago I can't remember what year that was exactly this is not a fire festival or flop.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2:Cuba actually has something called the fire festival and trinidad and tobago sent a contingent. Okay, and it wasn't even the band with the woman, yet it was just still me and muhammad. And we went on that trip. On that trip, lord superior was still alive. Lord superior was the calypsonian who went right. I see whole trip, even from in the airport. And thing I seen this man dressed to the nines, right in a pristine leather guitar case or anything, and this man they watching me on. Mom, real contempt, real contempt. Like who are these youngins? I don't know them, from nowhere. And his, his, his attitude was was just real, standoffish, serious, like real right, but the night that we performed at the gala. So there's the gala event and we will perform, we will. It's a wild story.
Speaker 2:We were slated to perform three songs. This is a non-English speaking audience. We went to a smaller event, it was a poetry reading and we were going to close it with some music. Lord superior, wasn't there? A human guy who could barely talk english, called fernando, comes up to us and says that he is an uh something, physicist. That's his day job, right, but he really want to be a musician. Thanks, fernando says that he will be our friend in cuba while we did nice. So he asked if we perform in any way. Again, you say we said yeah, we're performing at the gala event. He asked if he could come and perform with us on stage. I said how? He said nah, just play guitar too. Something in me, corey. Just say you know what, come through, fernando, we show up to the gig. Fernando right Shows up. It is hair slick back Ray-Ban aviators. Fernando right Shows up. It is hair slicked back, ray-ban aviators and a black leather jacket with a Fender.
Speaker 1:Stratocaster A Strat, a black and white Strat, beautiful.
Speaker 2:And we go and say I have not heard Fernando play in my life and he ain't hear all y'all playing.
Speaker 1:No, no, no. He heard Fernando play in my life and he ain't here while you're playing. No, no, no.
Speaker 2:He heard at the open mic Right. So we on stage and they gave us a corner of the stage. They said this is the old spot, do not move from here. Like we are stage right in a nice little cubicle and don't move from here. It's a good thing. Man like Muhammad don't know how to follow rules. So I, I strike up sony, which is a scotch drum right, and I strum in. I see muhammad like he can't move.
Speaker 2:Muhammad then takes the mic off of this, off off of the stand, and goes center stage and tells people to get up. An entire audience of about a thousand cubans who can't talk english gets up and is clapping fernando then goes center stage and starts shredding rock star style while I am trying. I trying to keep this car going, fernando. What are you doing? Fernando, go on, but it was epic, yeah. After that performance, lord Superior then comes up to Muhammad and I and speaks to us for the first time on the trip and he said you all are phenomenal. Yeah. He said both of your voices blend perfectly, phenomenal. He said both of you all voices blend perfectly. And he said whatever you doing on that guitar, he said that is madness. Whatever you doing there, that's, that's you and I telling you it working like he don't even know what notes I playing but, he said it working and from there I I got comfortable with well people might.
Speaker 1:For people who don't know that, coming from lord superiors, there's a. There's a big endorsement.
Speaker 1:Soupy was many calypso, near cm, as the guitar is soupy and relator yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, them fellas, yeah, when they play, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, that so so. So. So now when I I get a chance to come to tight spaces, I tell my mom I, but I reach late, I vex Because I want to blend into the back of the place. I had to come and sit down right opposite you and Ruckus now, and I hear the way you all blend Because you play acoustic down there, ruckus, you play electric bass and the way you all blend. That is something else. When I'm watching you, I know I want to. They didn't figure out nothing Really. They had nothing figured out. There's a tightness on his strumming, though it really. It really is. I feel good about that, yeah tight, tight, tight, Well if Superior tell you that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I actually I actually revere people like Lord Superior, um Relator, but also Kenny Phillips. Like Quiet has kept, he has some colours that he has contributed to some of your best songs Of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was telling him that. I wonder, you know, we talk about education and them kind of thing. You all both you and Mohamed would it be a parent's dream, one studying engineering, the next one studying law? That's what dream. One study in engineering, the next one study in law. That's where you want to know when you're getting older. You're trying on them and both of them come out and went into music. And if you're saying that, born into darkness, coming out from lack of a reference point, lack of mentors and so on, I feel like we have an opportunity with places like uct to document what kenny phillips did yes, show what he played.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, because that's a calypso hand it's important, or kylo yourself because, um, I was learning. I went to edna manly in jamaica just doing guitar for a little while in the school and talk to this teacher. What men didn't know? Talk the things. Okay, this man, this is his style. Yeah, he was strumming, this is what peter tosh was doing and you gotta, you gotta learn to do that talk the things.
Speaker 2:And and not only that with edna manly, you have your practicum. You had to learn to do that. That's part of the class Talk the things. And not only that with Edna Manley, you have your practicum. You had to go in the hotel and gig.
Speaker 1:Listen, it is. You know who was in class with me in the, not the practical, in the theory class, rashaan, who's Cartel producer, wow, and he was there doing music theory like everybody else, and that already, but sitting through the classes and them kind of thing, you know. So I wonder when we will get there, you know, I wonder when. Soon, man, soon.
Speaker 2:Well, you're doing somebody and and to tie it all back right. That is why I'm doing for the record.
Speaker 1:This is what I mean. That's what I mean, because documenting it and making sure that we know. Okay, so you say a skastrum, and anybody who know music know what you mean. But we, when we say play a kaisaiso, play a kalipso, play a soka, somebody who knows learning guitar, they don't even teach our songs as part of how we learn music. It's still. Mary had a little lamb, we and them kind of things. You know, ori, can I ask you a serious?
Speaker 2:question Trinidad and Tobago is the birthplace of kalipso music. True or false? True Birthplace of Soca music. True or false? Yeah, the most authentic carnival in the world. Yeah, why are we playing recorders in Form 1? Boy, let me tell you something. Yeah, no, no, no. Let me add one more. Tell me we created this steel pan. No, somewhat. Why are we playing recorders in Form 1?
Speaker 1:You're going to get people upset in Olu. Let me tell you something. I had Duvon Stewart here, who is Renegade's arranger. He said exactly what you just said. I talked to him up to yesterday. He wants to come back to talk about some of them things. Why are we playing?
Speaker 2:recorders. In Form 1? They have answers. And in Form 1, right, we don't know about Rudolf Charles. And in Form 1, okay, I don't want to go too much in the who created Soka, we go get him. But we don't have a reference point formally in education for who lord shorty is, for why 1974, 1975, is a pivotal year, sure, sure, why, why? Why?
Speaker 1:I don't know. We had to change it. Let me start by saying that, right, we this us as a group here, we had to start to change that because we care, we care, dead and gone and somebody else coming here asking people the same questions. So we must change it. Because I'll tell you that when he said that, I got numerous calls from people in pan who at the time duvon was here I might have had four or five guests before so they might be seeing the bigger picture I said people, listen, is our body a work? It's not one interview, it's not one conversation. So they disagreed with his take on putting the pan in schools based on how much it would cost parents or the more, the, the um, the pan too big. And I'm like listen, a recorder is a, it's really designed for teaching. I've never gone to a gig and see somebody playing a recorder in a use in a eurocentric classical music.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so our context is less applicable. So, any.
Speaker 2:Okay, let me find the best way I could phrase this. My parents tried to send me to a piano lesson. Right, I went to Miss Phillips once. I had my hand trying to do that posture that she was trying to do and she whacked my hand with a go of a whip, nice, and I never went back. That was it. I wanted to punch that old woman in the face and I couldn't do that as a child. Yeah, so better you don't go back. I'm not going back. And while that, maybe my story.
Speaker 2:There are kids who can't appreciate music as a Trinbigonian child from a recorder in form one. Yeah, it's difficult, there's a disconnect. Now there are kids who come from singing musical families. Parents are musicians, they can adapt easier. But to say that the kids who can't find themselves in music and orient themselves in a love for it because they didn't survive the recorder is to ignore what is what is indigenous to us. Yeah, at least a jimby. Yeah, because we could. We could teach calypso hand drum rhythm. Right, we could teach adoption, of course. Right, we could teach calypso hand drumming. Yeah, a little rhythm. Right, we could teach doption, of course. We could use that to now introduce kalinda. Yeah, yeah, and how? Kalinda live, way, call and response the bedrock for calypso. There's a way that we can craft our music modules to mirror who we are as a society that honors and pays tribute to our history.
Speaker 1:That's right, but we had to do it. They will not dare. They will not dare because I see boys my son going, fatima, for instance, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my school too. I don't put that out there too much in marriage. Men has come here and you know. But. But I watch boys go to school who play hockey, drag a huge bag with 10 hockey sticks in it, men who play cricket. They come out in the morning, they drag out their thing and I can't understand why they pan too big. It's not prestigious.
Speaker 2:You feel that's where it comes from. It's still part of Okay. Do you think that as a society society we've done enough psychological work of admitting that pan men used to be classified as criminals?
Speaker 1:you feel it could start from there, boar men stick fighter.
Speaker 2:We used to classify them psychologically in our mind. I understand. So now the best we could do is carve out some space in our brain and classify it as culture, as entertainment, but it's still not part of our identity, because if something is part of your identity, you'll carry it.
Speaker 1:Of course, of course, of course, yeah. So teaching my little child the thing that the criminal was doing might be a problem in the education system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, but first we have to admit, and in admitting we might have to issue some public political apologies to communities, because this now is an instrument that is part of our identity. But people get locked up and beat for this thing. Of course, families disown men for this thing. Right, there was a period where pan men used to be considered workless men, of course, of course. Men of no ambition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, listen to David Rudd, that verse in Ingenium powerful. You say. Same woman who used to lock up open the church door to pray on my head, now she boasting that my granddaughter beat her steel band but never really. You're right, society never really accepted that. I like where you say just cast the society as culture and culture is one of them. Things where it's just like sports in schools. You know you're doing bad in your school. They take you out of this or they take you out of that no more. They want to play pando, but with pan. If you care, do maths and english on them as if pan is not maths and english how?
Speaker 1:yeah, we had to change it. We had to do the work you're doing and, to some extent, me opening some of the conversations up. I'm hoping that you're right, but I can tell you that the resistance is real.
Speaker 2:I've had no more pushback on any episode than when it is one come and say that people was upset and you know that was one of my favorite episodes because I a fascination with steel pan. Yeah, I also have a fascination with um, with steel pan players, right, every time I see a pan man or a pan woman, I just there's, there's regret. No, there's regret, yeah, yeah, I so. So, sheriff, myself and and John Gill went to a pan yard at a function there and I see a man. He just looked like a pan man, but he also had a big silver chain with a big pan pan.
Speaker 1:Button.
Speaker 2:So I asked him. I said how long are you a pan man? Calculate, calculate, calculate. He said I'm a pan man for 52 years now. He's a pan man, longer than I alive.
Speaker 2:I say let me ask you a hard question. I say you walking through town on a quiet, breezy, easy night, you hear a pan in the distance. You could tell who practicing. And you say yeah. You say yeah. You say it has some small sides that will surprise you, but for the most part I know who have a sound there is.
Speaker 2:I say why, how you could do that and this is just a man, he not looking like no intellectual or nothing. He said you have to remember a band is an orchestra. He said it's mathematical. He said just imagine with me the extent of your orchestra is 40 pieces, all right. You, as the owner of this band, could say that 20 of your orchestral pieces is cellos. So you want that bassy song? Nobody will tell you that you can't do that. And if you want 15 violas after that, and then you you want one timpani, I said okay, okay.
Speaker 2:He said that is a sound, of course. So if you follow that, understand that every steel orchestra, depending on the sound that they want will assign how many pieces per section. My brain blew right there. That might be part of the problem. So the fact that I am a musician in Trinidad and Tob tobago and my way of learning is I have to go in search of it, right, and people have a way of saying, well, if you have a person in this culture and you don't know this, you shouldn't be playing music. And to a point, yeah, but your point would be stronger if that information was part of our cultural way of learning about ourselves, and I choose not to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. You do have the option. You have to go and seek it out. That's why I tell you I enjoy, I enjoy for the record, because it's only when you read the back of some records I say that makes sense. But this man is do this as well, I hear you talk about artists and trend that being multidimensional, with some of the things that rather do it graphics.
Speaker 1:Who would know that? You can't know where you know, but you answer your own question because the fact that that man wearing that silver chain with that pan and the way he look, they don't want him come to school to teach nobody nothing.
Speaker 1:The music teacher must have a look and a way of speaking you understand and the yeah, and you know, even in the way you learn guitar they try to teach you formally. That didn't work out. It's the same thing as me and again I get that getting close to a man who's playing and watching hand, because that's how I learn to play music. I watch my uncle and them play quattro. I watch their hand and listen and I try that and I hear something like it, only only to find out years later when I created the same song he played. He's trying to figure out what you do.
Speaker 2:I said yeah, yeah, same same, yeah, but and men learn, like that too there are a couple musicians in this culture that I am openly envious of.
Speaker 2:I'm jealous of their ability, yeah, and at the top of my list is mikhail sals. Yeah, his ability to execute perfect pitch does vex me. I wish he was a shorter man so I could fight him. The fact that he could intonate the exact note that he is playing with his eyes closed does vex me, and the fact that this is something that still we nonchalant about that it's just. It's just yeah, we nonchalant about the ability to do that.
Speaker 1:We're nonchalant about that well, I'll tell you two other stories before I move on from this. When I went, fatima ray holman was a teacher and I never knew nothing between holman and pan. I just did not know he was teaching spanish right. Mikhail said it was with me in a levels. I went and I never know nothing between hallman and pan. I just did not know he was teaching spanish right. Mikhail said it was with me in a levels. I went tranquil. I never behaved in fatima so they put me out. I went tranquil to do it and he was in my class and I never knew he was into music, arts or anything like that. Because, yeah, you're gonna do mob pob and whatever the things are. There's no space. There's no structured space for the creativity. Or even if you get into music, most of the people who is musicians is not also music classes, really, yeah, but Duvon got glad to hear it's all body recorded. That is one of them pet peeves.
Speaker 1:Duvon, I will fight them with you yeah, we will start a movement, we will start a movement but for the record, it's one of the movements that, uh, that advance in it a lot in terms of your ability to, I hope so, yeah, yeah, I hope so, and to me, um, going viral is not the point.
Speaker 2:The the indication of success of it so far is many young people is this refreshing reaching?
Speaker 2:out and saying I have this question, like a young dj reached out last week and he said um, would you consider um djs who remix and do road mixes? Would you consider them to be arrangers of the? Now, I say not really because you can't, you should have some arrangement sensibilities to do that. But the depth of the role of an arranger was to imagine the landscape of the song, either before production or during production, and score the parts for each voicing of each instrument. And in understanding that, if that is the role of the arranger, why pelham goddard is not a fixture that everybody knows? Yeah, like why beaver, who's still alive? Right, who who arranged um shadow? Somebody go home. Yeah, you know that. Yeah, you have a whole hero.
Speaker 1:He's responsible for a hero. Same thing you say about Kenny. I'm telling Kenny that I say, kenny, let's shape what music song like? These guys are still alive and we just nonchalant about it.
Speaker 1:I like how you put it we just nonchalant about it them is my Mozart but I wait here on the numbers part, I don't again, as somebody who's doing this too, I really don't care about the numbers. I care about the person who I sit down with. I understand the impact of the people I sit with and I think, if if you're you're a fan of lou, if you might listen to kenny and in the connection I try to curate who comes next.
Speaker 1:I I spend a lot of time trying to figure out. Okay, alright, once people's schedules are low I could release it, because I also need for people who understand who Kenny is to listen to Lou or to listen to Kute, because we have this disconnect in society where people feel young people and blah and younger people, all people, and nobody talking to one another let me say this about Kenny.
Speaker 2:Muhammad knew Kenny before I knew him Right, and he always used to joke every time he see us that Muhammad is a wayward outside child. Yeah, but there was a point, there was a time where I could only play the guitar hard, right, and I guess it was all the anger and frustration in me. Ask anybody who is an OG resident of Freetown. I used to bust a string every other game. I used to have a pack of strings on standby, but so was the quality I get us to. I was not always a tailor man God bless me but even then every time we played somewhere that Kennyny was, he would come up to us afterwards and tell us, continue, continue. And when I look back and I see how crappy we was and these men who the legacy was already like solidified right was able to see the potential of free town, I have nothing but. And I didn't even know the depth of his catalog, I didn't even know who he was or what he was was muhammad.
Speaker 1:Who tell me hey, nah, kenny is a big deal, yeah but you're right, how you know, he will always have my respect. Yes, good, and you have his, you have his, you have his. You go hear the episode and it come out at the time we're recording. This. Ain't any episode yet, so but nice space. And going back to because you have a deep sense of appreciation for kaizo, calypso and so on now, and I I appreciate I feel I know plenty kaizo and calypso, but when I listening to you, it's like what is this man saying? I didn't see that. I didn't hear that. One never hear this song.
Speaker 2:You digging deep in the crates, yeah, you know looking at popular music only so so hear this right there's a, there's a way where our music is enjoyed. Okay, how to say this? Our music is very contextual. The average trend big one has emotional our music when we lime in Because that's how we've been conditioned to pair ourselves with our music. I had to deliberately, as a musician, create time to listen to Kaiso and Calypso, the way I would listen to rap. The way I would sit with a whole Nas album. The way I would listen to Bl, the way I would sit with a whole nas album. The way I would listen to to blueprint volume one. The way I would listen to to chronic 2001, and not just listen to it, as is my culture, but listen to why that snare fall in in what is the pocket of them drums and the more I do that corey is the more
Speaker 2:listen is the more I realize in our musicians we're wilding, bro. It's crazy. It's crazy they were wilding. And I now understand why calypso is the mother genre of all new music. Before calypso. Right, let me just say this for the record Before Calypso music, what was accepted as music in our popular space was derivatives of Eurocentric classical music. The mother of Calypso music is Kalinda, is Loveways. Then Calypso is the first world music genre to successfully trans, to successfully cross over from being folk music to number one chart-topping music.
Speaker 1:You understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Every indigenous culture have their folk music. Calypso was the first folk music to be on charts to make millions to send people on tour to send men Buckingham Palace.
Speaker 2:And that's why, once you know Calypso and you listen to blues, you realize, oh okay, there is a legend. There was a legendary blues singer from Louisiana called Lead Belly Right. He used to play a 12-string guitar Lead. When you study how lead, you listen to Lead Belly, lead Belly songs like American Calypso Right, but it's really I don't know how to say it Cajun or Cajun music, oh, okay okay, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:And the mother of Cajun music is calendar. So, as the first child of kalinda to make it to the shiny lights, to sell platinum, to become popular music of the world, every other popular genre would have borrowed from the composition structure of calypso, including blues, including ragtime, including jazz, including swing. Yeah, so the idea that calypso was able to be flexible enough to borrow from all of these genres is also ignoring that we were the mother of all of them too with you.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's even when they talk about the original reggae strum that, yeah, of course, of course, just basically, and again. So when we do local versions of that's where I feel it is all Calypso, it's all Kaisa. But in the initial stages, when you form the band, you'll make a choice not to do Soko or Calypso, or it was just the expression here, that it's a, we had no resonance with it, we had no connection to it, right?
Speaker 2:And a lot of it was religiously rooted A misdevil thing, of course you end. It was religiously rooted a misdevil thing, of course you're not taking coke.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you forget, I'll wait, okay, so let's stay away from it. So what? Was the choice now, when you, when you would have gone with, with, so what was it when we went with Soca? Yeah, when you decided it was a deliberate choice.
Speaker 2:Yes, it was a deliberate choice. We had finished most, I would say 95% of Born in Darkness album and Muhammad said, now that we have this music out of us, what we think about trying a Soca song, and that's where when I Am came from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you went into that trying to make a Soca, and that's where, where I am came from. Yeah, so you're, you're, you're went into that trying to make a soca, because when I listen to it I always say what? Yeah, this, all of it is kaizo to me, but this one in particular, song. So it was deliberate. Yes, it was, it was deliberate that.
Speaker 1:So that's our official first yeah, and that is soca song. That is not. Not like. When I first met Muhammad, he told me we only did this thing for 4 or 5 years and I was like what it?
Speaker 2:feels like a long, long time. This is the first, first, first, first, first, first indication. I guess we were frightened by it. We had a song called strictly business right the strum for that is blues. Right, we had a song called Strictly Business, right the strum for that is blues.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right, so we will. We had no band room and thing back in the day. Right, you didn't practice at home Home, no, my personal practice space was home. You know where we band room was Woodford Square. We used to go in the square and practice and the promenade personal practice.
Speaker 1:Space was home, right. You know where we band room was woodford square.
Speaker 2:We used to go in the square and practice and and the promenade, like it was known that we just day holy building our vibes. And one day we were there. It was close to christmas time and the vendors were being run from um charlotte street. The police was locking up people, kicking over tables, apples and thing, and muhammad started writing strictly business right there, because it it unfolding in life. I I know saying that and I don't blow my own mind. If that is the way this song was written, we should have done with scallop.
Speaker 1:So well, it's true, looking at this society.
Speaker 2:Wow, look at that. So we watching this thing play out and muhammad singing it and I struggling to keep up with where he is melodically because my guitar skills now learning too so when you hear, are you trying to find it no, but all I, all I, but I have a wider blues vocabulary, so singing that that's blues, the way it is played, right. But that was the first song that we entered in Jack Young Kings with Right Back in the day and every night Muhammad performed that. He had about four encores Encore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, encore, people would be refreshing in this space. You know the sound was different. You all managed to find a way to make, even though you're doing soca now, some of the best soca for the years, coming from all you know. Yeah, thanks, man, and only find a way not to. It is still very unique in terms of the sound of it. So I was talking to my mother like feeling love and what it was doing on the road. As I'm asking, only, fellas, grow up in the church and the mosque and take on this new road. Like me, I just get a long time on these streets so when I see what that song do the morning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was like I was telling him like kind of all the before the trucks move off, almost every truck in in Yuma that morning starts with that. You know, you're still, you're still naked in a sense, when you no reach there in the morning until everybody reach and you take a drink.
Speaker 1:It's still shame, it's still shame it's still shame your grandmother tell you what she boy listen. But that song just groove people into the day and then and then was one of them that hold you in the middle of the day when you're tired and eating. That mask come again now. This is real, real special. But I had to ask you. I saved this so to ask you about you know, because somewhere along your musical journey the pinnacle called you and he said he wants to do a collaboration. I hear you talking about that and had some questions around it because that song was represent, right, yes, so what was the call like? At that point in time you're getting a call from marshall to say we're gonna do a collab.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we will. Um, we were part of a intervention program, an art intervention program with some hand-picked kids from success, love, until, and the name of the. The program was called art connect and there were several artists working with a bunch of kids, um, just to explore whether through art, they could find themselves. Brian mcshine was a visual artist working with them, freetown collective was working along with them and marshall was working along with them. And, um, it was through that program marshall reached out and he said he's working on the Going for Gold album and he has a song that he thinks we could add a nice vibe to. I'm sure that he didn't really know what we just do, because his legit words was yeah, I see, all you could do, a kind of tribe called quest, kind of I see what are you saying? My guy Is he, look, tribe called quest? Yeah, but that's what he wanted.
Speaker 2:Right, when he sent the original version of Represent, I wouldn't say we were intimidated. But all of those inhibitions about that space, right, and why? Religiously, we felt as though we were designing our path for ourselves and for our music. That didn't represent what we thought he stood for, cause we don't know him, all we know is his public persona and the myriad of stories, very colorful stories, that we hear about him. So when that call came, musically, we were up to the challenge. We're just not sure if making this decision is what we want to do spiritually, and making this decision with him. So, in all fairness, we asked our audience, we said, hey, before we, we, we do anything creatively, we would like to talk to a man to man, right, and we say he's fine with that.
Speaker 1:When we, when he showed up, when he showed up, we lambay senpai because, remember, we still very spoken word. Oh hell, I guess you know no revolution revolutionaries.
Speaker 2:And we have been at that point and I wouldn't say openly because I mean it had no instagram and facebook was now now taken off. But people who knew us knew that we were critics of him and what we felt he stood for. So it's only good manners to say what you were saying behind somebody back to their face. So when we had this conversation with him, he sat silently, didn't say a word, and when we were done, he said what if I said all them things you say about me? It's true. What is the next move?
Speaker 1:so no resistance no, say what.
Speaker 2:If all of those things you're accusing me of are true you on this side, I on this side where's he move? Because I here to be better. And if that was a play, that is the greatest play in life, because now he turn that morality back on us. If you're saying you stand for so many principles, you stand for so much morality, when the opportunity to actually do the work come before you, what?
Speaker 1:will you do, but what was the core issue with? The principle stands against him and his stories.
Speaker 2:That, for the height of his career and the giant that he is, he seemed to be purely a mascot of enjoyment, and we think our people needed more I see, I see and I know, I know this might rile people up, right, but I see it differently and the reason why I felt justified in feeling that way right, because I really look up to him in terms of what he is Right. I had some questions about who he is at that time, but what he was was never in any question.
Speaker 2:As in the same way people talk about. As. In the same way people talk about Michael Jackson, and the same way people talk about Prince, and the same way people talk about Bob Marley. On this rock that is called planet Earth, floating through space, there isn't a bigger soaker star than Marshall Montano on planet Earth. A bigger soaker star than Marshall.
Speaker 2:Montano on planet Earth. So if he is at the pinnacle of this thing that we've created and I think that you're just here to have a good time then me, who's still in my very revolutionary thought I'm still in secondary school fight the power, Karl Marx. Capitalism is bad. I have some things to reconcile in myself, gotcha, you know, especially if we are saying that our music is a vehicle to make the situation better oh, it's you, so at some point you decide you're gonna do it.
Speaker 1:What was the conversation like? We decided.
Speaker 2:Both muhammad and I decided that we will take three days to pray on fast okay, and we did so you take it as deeply spiritual?
Speaker 1:yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah deeply, deeply, deeply spiritual.
Speaker 2:And after we took our time to to to pray on fast, I came back and I said, muhammad, I think this is an opportunity to say what we need to say in song. And muhammad said I was thinking the same thing. Here's what I have, okay. So in muhammad's praying and fasting, something came to him, and that was the first part. I have love for the whole wide world, with you at the center. You are the master, keith. Love is by my side, and who could deny me? I keep climbing higher, higher and higher. That song was in response to marshall throwing the conversation back at us, as in if we sing, we stand for love, and a man is saying I'm here to challenge that notion or you love everybody or you love everything. Look at me, a sinner I want to do good could use some love. You could use some love too. I could use some love too, and this is for the people. Them don't need some love too. You going to turn this down?
Speaker 1:Gotcha, so this is how you're going with it. We're going with it, but you in particular. Your verse was a statement as well.
Speaker 2:yes, yeah, my verses were so. The first verse was me saying it on wax. Was me talking directly to Marshall, my people, do you listen? Tell me, do you hear, marshall, what is your position for the people? Do you care? I ask him questions. When you tell me that you represent, I don't know. I really want to see some evidence, because with me and my brethren in Freetown this is evident. So here's your opportunity. Bring it from your soul. And then all of a sudden we hug up and say, oh, hot fries, they tell me I had to clean some hot fries.
Speaker 2:I see hot fries. And then the second verse is me reconciling to the people who would now be looking at us as sellouts.
Speaker 2:Of course we coming on a mission, so you expected that, of course, marshall is the most polarizing character that we have in Trinidad and Tobago after Jack One and Wade Mark. So the second verse is we come in on a mission, miami brejan, and we don't really care, you'll have problems with it. One love in distribution and we have some more to share. And we live like this here every day. We do it in love and we don't delay Love. Like this, we must relay like we had a shirt and we, heart and soul, hug up again. Oh, hot fries, I'm not busy, I ain't there.
Speaker 1:So he know you're singing about him. He care you, just you doing what you're doing, I doing what I doing. It end up being a staple. Yeah, going only have plenty forever. Music, which I think a lot of artists or bands might use of more envy musicians. People might envy what you'll do in the soccer space, in a, in what is a relatively short space of time, doing it for a long time, but that only on a phenomenal run where it comes to music and and again going back to me hearing the albums and and constantly thinking, once in a training, I feel it's Kaizo. So I want to go over one of my favorite verses in Kaizo when it's saying oh, you paid, boy. You say You're still stunting with your friends in your imaginary pens.
Speaker 1:And no Rolex or no Bre brightlings. Well, he relax any brightlings and he bends. It's coming. I just want to put out there so they they present when you're singing that it might not be present there, yeah. Or watching the instagram and what you know, it's coming, it's coming, yeah so that way.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I wonder if I had everything, could I lose it all and still feel like a king? Because it's so easy to want what you don't have as soon as you can't have it. I wanted to really use the f word. But when you don't have, you say damn. This life is hard, but I'm still stunting with my friends and my imaginary bands. No rolex and no bright lens could make me feel like a prince. I'm okay, I'm okay. Yeah, still waiting on my payday. I'm okay, I'm okay.
Speaker 1:That stuff don't make me anyway and you know, I guess it coming from a space, then a light man, just the whole production of it. Like you see, a lot of artists or groups do some acoustic version, always a lot of voices making up the music and and so on, deliberate in terms of how y'all approach that song that was real failure.
Speaker 2:What do you mean? That song, that song beat, we, beat, we, beat, we, beat we. And what we had, uh, the production, what just wasn't working. But what we would do is we would have a skeleton production and at least lay down the guide vocals, at least get the vocal idea down. And so we had the vocal idea and the only thing that was feeling authentic was the bridge. See, you don't know what I've been going through and I remember studying it, studying it, studying it because um mu, because Muhammad had chosen lead writing, sheriff, lead production, and my role was A&R of the album. So I will sit with the demos and figure out the musical direction, right, and that one beat me, beat me, beat me, beat me. And I came and I said, all right, let's start with the bridge and then let's do barbershop. Let's do barbershop acapella.
Speaker 1:Yes, because that's where I come from seven the adventists singing in church.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, that's where I come from the nano instruments. When I started singing, it was just me, and, and and five of my cousins yeah, my girl clap or snap. And he said yeah no, they're snap finger right. So that's why I start off with the bass and that's church.
Speaker 1:That must be why it resonates so much. We'll try to avoid church so much that they come back to haunt me in the end. One of my favorite songs from all year.
Speaker 2:One song, one sitting here.
Speaker 1:One sitting here yeah, care breaks right, but uh, the response to that. But you'll still perform it, because when I'm in tight spaces, of course people respond to it.
Speaker 2:Of course, anytime we're in a room of artists or people who the the context of people being in that room is they're going to make some ballsy decisions, that song does resonate yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I started playing for my wife every now and again when she said when this thing starts to make money all day, you're talking to people. I'm thinking when this thing I say listen to this song.
Speaker 2:It relaxes and it bends.
Speaker 1:it's coming Of course I'll be okay, so I had to now. Yeah, one of the more controversial things you do, or the things that I see plenty people talking about, is that mount rushmore. Yes, I had an interesting discussion with kenny about it, because he spoke about mount rushmore not from the standpoint of artists, but he said the sound of soaker had a good on to people like leston, paul or pelham or you know the people who were producers behind it, which I heard you making a lot of great points on. When you first do your mod rushmore. I say what I say some, let me hear who's your mod rushmore again, nello yeah, I forget, but yeah, I don't remember them all, but I know nello was there, yeah, rose was there.
Speaker 1:Marshall would have been there, yeah, and allison hines, and allison hines, yeah. So when I listen to it I say something ain't right here. I need to hear where's the breakdown. The the first one I started with was Nelson, and I like to Let me start with Alison Hines. You started with Alison.
Speaker 2:No, let me start by discussing Alison Hines.
Speaker 1:Tell me why?
Speaker 2:Because somebody wasted on my whole list because of Alison Hines, right One, alison Hines is there because we can't be selfish about the storytelling about how Soka has developed and evolved to where it is now. Fair, fair, all right. So in looking back at where we are now, we have to give credit to the Bajan invasion. Right, right, the Bajan invasion introduced a kind of sound and lightness to the enjoyment of Soka because, left up to Chinese we go gladiator sport, the thing you know well, especially when only the fittest will survive if it left up to Chinese chinese to decide what soka is, of course, so that laid back sway, groovy life is all right to me.
Speaker 2:when we were coming up, was, was, was really really, um, not started by, but characterized by what the Bajan invasion was doing consistently. Yeah, it was definitely a shift Right. And if you understand how male-dominated music on a whole is at soca on a whole, is Alison Hines, being the queen of that moment, need recognition I with you, but again, your reasoning it's hard to argue with.
Speaker 1:I suppose anybody you come up with with four will have a different four. I have a completely different four too, and when I heard your reasoning on that I first went back to like carl and carol jacobs because they in a way that that what we know today as groovy soka them was taking a chance back then. So so, so I don't even know if, if you're strict about what you call a genre and all them kind of thing, some of the early music that they had, so I wouldn't put them there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so much them is free town. That's why I have so much more respect for uncle carl now, because, digging into carl and carol jacobs, in fact our whole charlie's roots, yeah, and chandelier movement, bro, yeah, we're not the first, no, so I I now take this opportunity anytime people talk about freetown music, we come under a family tree, right. Charlie's's Roots, chandelier Fireflight yeah, that's what we're talking about, but straight soaker. You could not go to a fet in the 90s.
Speaker 2:People might remember that early 2000s and not hear Faloma ding, ding, ding. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're mumbling the rest of the words because we don't know, but ding, ding, yeah, yeah, yeah, we mumbling the rest of the words because we don't know, but we didn't care. Yeah, and I like the idea that the face on the mud Rushmore represents several people, because Edwin Yewood was right at 2-2-2 with her. Yes, he has some classics.
Speaker 2:No, no, I really wanted to put he, you know, but I had to divers. They think all right, cool is that the I kind of thing all right, all right, I can live with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man who you're going to next nello let me go, let me go nello oh, you want to go nello last nello by the most controversial level, because nello is who you say replaced. Let me go to marshall.
Speaker 2:So, all right, the reason why I have marshall there is again is it fair to talk about hip-hop in its entirety without talking about Jay-Z? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, for some people, depending on where they are, without talking about Eminem. Even if it's a controversial point, they had to be mentioned just because of the vast contribution that they've made to it and how their presence has not left the thing the same. Of course, if you take marshall montano out, right, and all of the things that are connected to him, all of his tentacles, yeah, you remove you're going to have a black hole.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just from um, uh, uh, uh, a size perspective. He's occupying so much space in terms of influence, in terms of innovation, in terms of hits, in terms of how he would, even, how he would have sharpened the competition all the competitions, all the. I wasn't actually talking about the event, but the people.
Speaker 1:Competitiveness, his peers steel sharpens steel, even the actually talking about the event. Oh the competitiveness, his peers Steel sharpens steel, even the intro.
Speaker 2:Would we be talking about the amount of work that Shellshock would have done?
Speaker 1:if it wasn't for Marshall.
Speaker 2:Yes, it would. Marshall didn't put Shellshock on, but we know Shellshock because he was allowed to be more prolific in that chapter of his life. So just for the amount of people that jay-z signed and the amount of collaborations that jay-z has done, the amount of albums I have collaborations on that albums, we can't talk about hip-hop without jay-z, even though I personally could do without his music. Yeah I can't not talk about him.
Speaker 1:Same thing with marshall okay, fair, fair, I might have to leave him off. Too Hard to do. Hard to do if I'm on Drushmore. If I had to leave Marshall off on Mount Drushmore, I would put him as Statue of Liberty. He just you know or something he needs his own monument in a sense I didn't remember who that was. Are you sure you didn't have?
Speaker 2:Rose. No, I didn't have Rose.
Speaker 1:Or something else you were talking about, rose with regard to yeah, but let me go to Shorty, because your argument of where Shorty was concerned is about the starting of a genre, pan. People have the same thing with who invented Pan, and I think what you're trying to say at its essence is reducing it to one person or one face. Is unfortunate to say that he created it. Yes yes.
Speaker 2:So my reason for leaving him off is because for most people's lists that would be a foregone conclusion and that does not advance the conversation. So, purely for the sake of advancing the question, for other narratives to come to the front, for questions to be allowed to be asked here is a perspective that has been put out there but not been shown any light. So, on record, lord Nelson has expressed that he feels left out of that conversation. Oh, he has. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that he feels left out of that conversation because of what he has brought to this, to, to, to the table right, and the way his, his contribution is summarized is outside of what was happening here with the arrangers.
Speaker 2:Right, we will talk about pelham, we'll talk about lesson. We'll talk about about less than we'll talk about ed watson. We'll talk about clive bradley, but outside of them guys. He always knew calypso, he was always steeped in calypso, but he served in the us army and when he was out there trying to be an entertainer in the army as well, he was realizing what disco was doing. And it's the same thing. Um is the same thing, um, uh, beaver would say that the introduction, the reason for the need to evolve was seeing that calypso was hard to dance to.
Speaker 2:White people couldn't dance to it because it was in cut time right and unless your foot real agile and you're accustomed to fox, strut and waltz and thing, yeah, right so that bubbly movement now that we now introduce it for on the floor and thing is because we see what danceable music doing and he was able to see how disco could have been a valuable addition to Calypso to give it that bounce. He ain't get no influence from nobody else to come up with that in his head, right, and to know that he is the arranger for the bass line on my lover yeah so them stories.
Speaker 2:Right, so them stories. So the reason why I have him there is to introduce a new sample into the experiment so that you could now pull up endless vibrations by shorty. Look the time span, the time difference in between that and we Like it. Endless Vibrations album and we Like it. You could say, alright, this one came before, but the kind of innovation on we Like it as an album from top to bottom in terms of danceability, why would you leave that all?
Speaker 1:Well, I think he said, like you know, the song Foreigner, which to me is a powerful song.
Speaker 1:I don't know why he vent he vent a lot in that song, right, of course, listen, I always listen to that song and I say, but like hey, any real pain in this recording For him to talk about that really coming out of the fact that he was attempting to enter the Monarch, enter the competition, and they tell him he's a foreigner, which is crazy to me in hindsight, you know, when you look back at some of these things. But I like that you're making the point and the distinction that these things will happen independent of one another, which is the truth about innovation, no matter what field it's in. When you come up with an idea or something brand new, so much energy is had to be out there for you to even come up with that, that brand new. So much energy is how to be out there for you to even come up with that, that somebody else feeling that same energy somewhere else in the world too. So I liked.
Speaker 1:I like that you included nelson and I don't argue nothing against nelson ever, because to me he's one of the easily one of the greatest one. But the same thing with marshall marshall's five decades doing this thing now, yeah, at a high level since he starts. You know people, people saying that when they see marshall in 1986 singing too young to circle, they know he's a star. Like you say with michael jackson and nelson is how much decades you know this man's?
Speaker 2:still zipping down jumping up to today yeah, so so it's hard but the attempt was never to bring any erasure I understood to what mr garfield blackman brought of course, I think what you were doing is adding.
Speaker 1:I was was adding.
Speaker 2:So you choose that name, this is the name I would pick. Yeah, it's like when we do in fantasy football you have your player. That's right. Right, and I say as a Tobagonian Nelo is my player.
Speaker 1:Yeah, why not? Why not? And that's why I like the discussion, because even in the discussion, and just to bring it full circle, it's a part of the educator, because you're bringing something to the table that maybe most people would not, even my youth. I was 20 years old. We're just here. Well, shorty, create Kaiso, calypso, ahsoka. So he had to be there and you say he can't name too much, which is unfortunate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and so it. So that was to reveal that, in order for us to be better trend big onions, we have to be able to stand by what we know, if you're saying shorty is yours all right?
Speaker 1:no, why? I would say a hundred percent. But blue, super blue, was one on your list as well.
Speaker 2:Why Having?
Speaker 1:super blue on the list allows the connection between Soka, Zest and Steam to be drawn.
Speaker 2:So there is the narrative that super blue is the forefather of power. Soka, right, all right, that call and response. That live way. Put your hand in Power. Soaker, right, all right, that call and response. That live way. Put your hand in the air. Are you ready to go? No, when you listen to Super Blue's performances right, and there are quite a few from that time when he's doing the crowd interactions on the band break I promise you, there's nothing different between that and what, um, what young brother came up doing? All right, that's banter. That that space for banter over the break. Yeah, that's blue boy. So if now suka has innovated and sophisticated itself so that it could now spit out a lady lapper, spit out a young brother? Yeah, spit out papi, he's the father. That is the same as you. So I'm seeing, I'm seeing what's coming next and drawing the linkage back to suka. I see you and who would have been responsible for that innovation?
Speaker 1:Of course, of course we're probably not time, but one of the things I want to get into it with, as you say, that is the distinction of it. But maybe we talk about it a little bit, because the distinction I hear you say is unfortunate. Based on a melody record you were referencing that we said Calypso, then Soka, then Power Soka, then groovy soca, and we kept doing that over the years. I would love to see. Just personally, I just find we need to get back to calling all of it kaiso or calypso, even when y'all were in a movement that was called new calypso at the time and when I hear it I was like why? Why is it new calypso? It felt like, if you're making something else, old calypso when I thinking that, what? When I listen to some of your songs and some of what brigo was doing, it's so similar in terms of the, the energy and the vibe of the music. Nello too, because a lot of these songs yeah, a strict genre man would have seen nelson wasn't singing, yeah you know plenty.
Speaker 2:It was funk, plenty of disco, that's right reggae but to me is all okay, kai.
Speaker 1:So Superblue I think I would probably have on our list for some of the same reasons. He really changed it. But the one that I do hear people saying a lot and I look at Amon Drashmo as if we were already 2,000 years old as a genre. Right, I want to look back at Amon Drashmo and I do think he could leave Bungie off because of what he does with the music. He's changing and we see, we're going to see it live. You know, we could look back at Shorty and them and say and Nelson, and say how they revolutionized it. Or even Rose, who sing a lot about women and making sure that she's stamp it for women coming after her. That is some big risks he's taking with music. He's sticking to what he believes in in terms of where he feel music should be, both in terms of the tempo, the message, all them different types of.
Speaker 1:Because bungee has a I mean you all say those things about ram, though you know what bungee has some very, very principled ways of putting music out that's right you might hear him talk about certain things or say certain things, or and I feel like if I I keep looking for people to say, okay, bungie, should be part of that mouth rush, what do you feel about him being up there?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. One of the things that makes Bungie distinct in his presence is that he don't need none of this. Could give he a bottle and a spoon and he'll get a full song. He'll get a full song. You'll give him a two stick and a bucket and you'll get a full show. His artistry is close to that raw primordial energy that is Calypso that in the most dire circumstances you'll get an entire acapella from bungee for 10 minutes and not feel any less entertained.
Speaker 1:yeah, and heavily rooted in calypso. Because to me, you know, yeah, yeah and again, just that parallel for me is important because when I hear you know you hear so many times over the years some of our greatest icons talk a lot about breaking out into the international market or going global with the music. It's not something I've ever heard Bungie discuss. I've never heard y'all discuss that as a band either, but when you say y'all start off in England, you know, I believe that if we stay true to who we are, both in terms of the culture and the music and our own beliefs whether they come from the church, they come from the mosque, they come from wherever you grew up in the community or whatever I feel if we stick to our own beliefs and just tell our own stories the world, they don't have a choice.
Speaker 2:They will come to us. We don't have to go to them.
Speaker 1:And that's what I would have seen in Jamaica a lot Men just telling their own story. Men talk mobile at Manic Block.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:As you all would have done in Tonga.
Speaker 2:And that is who Bungee has always been. For me, he has been that window to the ground. Yeah, that don't care about how many all-inclusive tickets sell. I would tell your buddy, go on Superman outside.
Speaker 1:Of course that's his story. That's his story. So again, just drawing that parallel to you all and to you in terms of what you're doing in the music space Critical. Critical because you're pushing it, you're staying principled in what you're doing and just just as with the tight spaces or any other event, you do the audience continuing to find you no matter where you are. It starts off, so audience fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, here I hear your story about good swimming guy noises. Yeah, I was like what? Yeah, like none. None of our big um successes came from strategic moves. Yeah, it has always been um real spontaneous creation that felt good in the belly gotcha.
Speaker 1:Gotcha well, conrad, ready to pull you out. But last question are you continuing doing? You're continuing in the vein. You're going in to make music for the, for the festival for now, yes, for now, yes, yes.
Speaker 2:And and and and wider music as well. We have an album that's on the way um. Our release date is emancipation day, august 1st, and the sound of it again is going to be reminiscent of born in darkness. Not genre wise, but the adventure of it.
Speaker 1:I understand, I understand. So we up now is album or song. I see you promoting that.
Speaker 2:A song that is from the album. It's one of the singles from the album featuring College Boy Jesse and Pretty, and I was just saying to them, guys on the video shoot, that the community, this feel, the community with them, the fellowship to them, this feels so, so good and to imagine that this is how some of the calypsonians might have been back in the day I think that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1:You know, I like I have a tendency to like to reminisce a lot, all of us. You, as a historian, you do any same thing, yeah, but you know, sometimes you don't realize that we create. You know people go talk about yeah in some years to come.
Speaker 2:You're definitely doing it and the one thing I like about this era that the previous era was the previous era, but so much of what was recorded, archived and remembered was at the height of war.
Speaker 2:We remember what happened in the tent in the competition where men were not permitted to be friends, but, as what the gazette reported on, that is what the competition reported us who was the winner, who didn't place? And we didn't have instagram back then or any lifetime articles or editorials to really let us know who was friends and who was liming together. You had to rely on personal stories like kenny rl stories right but now we uh can show that, outside of of carnival and who vying for airplay like these, these fellas, is really friends that is, that is lying together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's beautiful to see this come together, even when they're not making music, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:The documentary. That's what affordable imports help them with. You see, the documenting is having it and I tell you yeah, the greatest set in the whole thing, anybody who I see a big of some storytellers KG, tamika Costello. I'm so happy that they're doing what they're doing. Yes yes but nobody looking as good. Serious boy, what all them instruments behind you playing that saxophone and all them things man all right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good time to the whole next conversation, yeah yeah, yeah, I, I, I, I love to come again um to talk about some more things music first person who come here. That kyle know really and okay, okay, let me, let me, let me use this, let me use this as a, as a plug. Right, big up, kyle, kyle from tobago, and one of the things that I really want to pursue is, um, to put some music into this space that tells a story about tobago. Well, we have a segue into the next episode.
Speaker 1:The reality of tobago needs some unpacking all right, good, let me do that now yeah because one of my questions, I'm gonna say, is to ask you about cessation. I want to hear your thoughts on that, but we're going to leave it there until it comes back.
Speaker 2:There's a whole episode. There's a whole episode.
Speaker 1:I really want to hear how you feel about it and what's your thoughts, as are we boy.
Speaker 2:Don't worry, thanks a million brother.
Speaker 1:This was great, this was really. This was wonderful. Thanks a million. Yeah, man Outro Music.