ANU LAKHAN
I LIKE Machel Montano. A lot. If I had a team, he’d be on it. Nothing here is his fault. He has seven appearances, not including an Xtatic song or big collabs on the Scorch 101’s top soca hits list. Huzzah for him, I say.
The radio station has a hit of its own with this promotion. It’s hard to think of any other marketing effort this year that has created this kind of passionate excitement. The countdown counts down 101 days to Carnival 2025. In the vein of “Best of” lists like the ones done by Billboard, Scorch 101 has created a ranking of songs from musicians we know, ones we love and ones we just don’t get.
It’s described as “the 101 greatest soca hits ever.” I so desperately want to quibble over “the greatest” versus “their greatest,” but I’m not up for an aneurysm before seven in the morning.
They’ve been very open, posting their criteria everywhere possible. This may be a sign of the success of the campaign. People have tuned in, written in, battled and bantered online. Good to know the ground rules. The conversation’s flowing like cold beer and there’s no stopping it.
Not everyone is going to agree on the order of songs. Or who’s in and who’s out. There is a very definite scent of newness, and you begin to wonder where all your old soca favourites went. In the top ten there are two songs – Rupee’s Tempted to Touch at seven and Kevin Lyttle’s Turn Me On at two – that feel more like songs of Caribbean influence rather than soca.
The question of how soca is defined is hanging out there, but it’s not the most pressing matter at the moment. Because the moment calls for an answer to the question of who slashed SuperBlue (Austin Lyons), or Blue Boy (depending on what era we’re looking at).
You see, it matters little how or what soca is described as. SuperBlue is soca. Born in the year of the Bassman (we’re getting to that), if I look a little to pre-me, there was soca, and then for the rest of my life everything would be defined by it.
The soca we know and what is represented on the Scorch list bears no resemblance to what Ras Shorty I imagined when he thought he was revolutionising the sound. To be fair, I don’t think Shorty’s version is what we hear in our heads when we think of a soca sound. Apart from Om Shanti and one or two other Shorty songs, where did that idea go?
A younger version of me is trying to connect Rikki Jai’s 1989 Sumintra. That was from a time before-I-knew-about-chutney-soca. Here was a song doing what Shorty talked about. It was not soca referencing Indian food. It was not Bollywood rip-offs with English lyrics.
Present-age me is sceptical. There are other songs, but Sumintra did not feel othered, exoticised or parodied.
According to me, the holy trinity of our music is David Rudder, Shadow (Winston Bailey) and SuperBlue.
“Super?” people have asked for decades. Not Stalin or Chalkdust, or basically anyone else. No. SuperBlue and no other. It’s not complicated.
Rudder represents a thing that sits in our higher consciousness and our poetry and pathos. No o
