Rapso, Romanticism and the Realpolitik

I went to the first ever Rapso conference at the National Museum last Friday (May 11, 2007) out of a multifarious curiosity: what could they have to say about Rapso, which is among the most esoteric niches of popular culture? UWI was involved, and so was the Ministry of Culture: had Rapso’s time come to be formally conscripted/drafted into the culture / elections wars?

I was interested in hearing from Bro Resistance, and seeing who had emerged as authorities, and been placed on the panels. Apparently, no local academics have gotten on board the Rapso train as yet, but you can be sure they’re not far off. Earl Lovelace was listed to give a feature address, and Prof Carol Boyce Davies was listed to close the show. I avoided both these august personages but managed to catch both the advertised practitioners’ panels.



They were small and uncomplicated: in the first, Bro Resistance and Bro Book spoke for the ‘elder generation’. They identified the progenitor in one Lancelot Layne, a culture man from the old school, who opened the gates with a few iconic tracks like ‘Blow Way’ and ‘Get Off the Radio’, in the early 70s. The epic starting point was in Africa, the mythic tradition that of the griot, they say, but Rapso’s moment was located in the late 1960s in Trinidad, its opposition the colonial and neo-colonial post-independence status quo.

This was the Trinidad where trade unions and citizenry were being bought or beaten (or emigrating), power was being concentrated in fewer hands, the wealth was staying right where it had always stayed, and commissions and committees were beginning to become interested in subversive activities of those who objected to this. Subversive activities, according to Bro Resistance, included owning a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or being interested in unionizing.

From all this Rapso emerged as an activist movement, in direct opposition to black middle class ideas of respectability: Behind the Bridge vs Beyond a Boundary, you might say. Rapso was shaped by village activism and collective memory, its primary purpose to preserve and augment the griot’s narrative of African survival in the New World from the old. In this way, it was/is connected to Carnival. Resistance dubbed it ‘the poetry of calypso, the soul of Soca, the consciousness of Soca’. He also maintains that Layne’s tracks were the source of American Rap music, which pre-dated the Sugar Hill Gang by 10 years.

From this, the Network Riddum Band emerged, and the popular genre of Rapso made the cross over from obscure village and Afro-centered activist rap into pop culture commodity. (I should say that ‘Afro-centred’ here is only a descriptive adjective. Listening to Resistance, Book, Karega Mandela, and the old school, one gets a sense a concern with fraternity rather than the fascist idiocy which connotes contemporary Afrocentrism.)

Much of Rapso’s appeal and survival issues directly from Resistance. Born in Chinapoo Village, Morvant, Resistance (Lutalo Masimba) was the first boy from his village to win a scholarship to QRC. From there, he went to UWI, and graduated with a degree in Economics and History. There aren’t many other Rapsonians left from this ‘era’—they included the late Cheryl Byron and a few others, including, as she tells it, Eintou Springer.

These days Mandela and a few others sing in tents, but the best known Rapsonians now are the 3 Canal lads, who have the virtues of youth, photogenic good looks, and media savvy connections their predecessors could only dream of. And it was Wendell Manwarren of 3 Canal and Omari of Kindred (another contemporary group) who were asked to talk about the ‘craft’ of Rapso in the evening session.

Manwarren and Omari were much less articulate and generally less interesting than their predecessors. Manwarren chose to tackle craft with an acrostic: Care, Respect, Attention, Form, and Tradition. Which all boiled down to the Romanticist tropes of ‘self expression’ and maintaining ‘purity’ in representing the ‘inner voice’, and respecting the elders, and all that. ‘The craft of Rapso is a quest of knowledge for the self. The quest for every man to say “I Am”’, in search of ‘timeless truth.’

Omari was even more oblique, choosing to address the question of ‘What is Rapso?’ and concluding that it was anything with a stamp of ‘Trinidadianness’, though he did not suggest what this was. But, as any toddler knows, combine Romanticist ideas about the soul, essentialist ideas about tradition and purity, and what comes out is fascism. I actually had the presence of mind to ask this question of Omari and Manwarren—and neither had any answer they cared to share.

Manwarren, responding to something I’d said about 3 Canal before, that their lyrics were naïve and clichéd, said he didn’t care, he did what he did and was what he was. The difference between Resistance and Book and Omari and Manwarren is that the former (elders) are more certain of their place, and take joy in the work for its own sake, and are rather less interested in money, props, and exposure. The younger fellows are creatures of media age; desire for fame, fortune and artistic satisfaction are inevitable and indistinguishable. Neither is the art of a previous age distinguishable from a fetishized commodity in these days of cannibalistic consumerism.

The actual practitioners aside, though, two other things emerged: one, the interest of the government; and two, the reinterpretation of Rapso by the present generation.

The Ministry of Culture’s involvement in this movement provides yet another article of proof of the government’s tentacles reaching into popular culture—from where counter culture should emerge—and attempting to poison it.

The main thing about the Culture Ministry’s events these days is an angry invocation of the horrors of slavery, and the transference of that anger to ‘claiming’ freedom in the present. And this claiming is always ‘oral’, never written in reasoned argument, or disciplined verse. The trope of ‘freedom’ is lavished on every artistic endeavour, and succeeds in demonizing reading and any form of what might be considered ‘Eurocentric’ thought for indigenous thought—though I have yet to see any evidence of indigenous thought.

I actually asked Resistance whether he saw the relation between promoting the oral tradition and the decline in literacy? He said the former was the basis for the latter. But this is not a view that is widely held. Why read poetry from 'outsiders'? We have we own ting here…all this is fairly standard territory for the local cultural politics. And sadly what is also standard is the state’s pervasive presence in all this, and we all know how that ends up.