More than the land, sea and air assault on the government launched by the vast majority of the Revue line-up on Thursday night, the most entertaining splash of spectacle of the tent’s Port-of-Spain debut was the reinvented Sugar Aloes. He’s had a tough couple of years, which began with what his critics saw as a Mephistophelian pact with the government to keep the Revue alive. The deal, which included as a sweetener serenading the Prime Minister, enraged the always-vex-all-the-time posse, and his former good pardner, Cro Cro, for whom he had a few words.
A chastened, almost apologetic Aloes took the stage a year ago, but that persona was gone on Thursday night, as he announced: “I take my beat-up last year, and I still standing”. And one of his songs, Bounce Back, was a magic carpet ride through the depths he had plumbed and the heights he had soared through that period—“Lynch mobs the master never condone / let he who is without sin cast the first stone” – citing fellow travellers like Mandela, Obama, Larry Bird, Oprah, Moses and Col Sanders who had come back from crippling defeats.
The Revue, like its manager, has come through the tough times of PNM in opposition relatively intact throwing up a strong, if uneven line-up. One or two singers were just plain awful, and there was a dreadful incident with The Mighty Trini who apparently forgetting the lyrics of his song, but the show was strong in toto and two or three acts were super. The high points included Devon Seales, Brian London and the best act of the night by far, Marlon Edwards.
Seales’ Go Now would, if the PNM’s communications team could muster up a shred of sense between them, be bought by the PNM and played everywhere the PNM resides in spirit—“Go now. Immediately. / And don’t forget your AG.” Like all the other singers, Seales recited the litany of Section 34, Emailgate, Reshmi (who is enjoying an unwanted, I’m sure, resurgence of popularity), LifeSport and Anil, Chandresh (the Brahmin) Sharma girlfighting tendencies, Glen Ramadharsingh, even Collin Partap took a couple of blows in the rush.
This was the line taken by most of the singers, and naturally, when everyone says it over and over, it gets tame. Notable variations in form (varying the metaphor, and angle of attack) came from Skatey’s The Band, which likened the management of the nation to conducting a band—“she cyar fire Ramlogan / because he is the bassman”, and so forth.
Makeda went after Kamla womano a womano: “I never thought / another woman would make me froth,” because “I thought she would be mother and nurse / Instead she make the country worse.”
Brian London’s Beat Them and Put Them Up managed to combine successfully the Facebook flogging video a few months ago of a young girl being flogged by her mother as a deterrent to future misbehaviour with not-so-clever suggestions of who else could be flogged and put up.
More difficult than putting a new spin on ordinary things, though, is making the ordinary sound spectacular. And Fire Bun Them could, in a lesser performer’s hands, have been just another volley in six-hour fusillade. But in Marlon Edwards’ hands, and blended with his charismatic presence, good looks and sharp suit (a la Rico Tubbs of Miami Vice), the ho-hum became an anthem, delivered with force and verve.
Like an old-time preacher with right and might on his side, Edwards’ lyrics blended the banal with the brimstone of a country preacher to great effect— “When you practise the politics of distraction/to deceive the nation”—you get “the whole nation in ah uproar/and you release the dogs of war.” This is another fellow the PNM should have serious talks with about the rights to his song.
The forays outside what seemed to be the official calypso topics of 2015 were few. One of the more intriguing was Ninja’s Level Playing Field, a salty and at times squeamish look at the new sexual politics, to wit: “If you start exposing them macomere man / Is time you start exposing lesbian.”
There’s enough humour in the song to keep pulling you back into it (as it were) after the homophobic imprecations, which sound nasty-ish, but never quite cross the line. The song never gets mean or unforgivably offensive, and is frequently funny in its plaint that “them gyul ent leaving nothing for man again,” and his gesturing to the chorus line, “even the Revue/have a few.”
The absence of malice could not be said of Chalkdust’s non-political song. His paean to the Caricom leaders for pursuing reparation talks with the European governments started off with a queasy, Nation of Islam-ish proposition “What the whites and them did we /Calls for more than apology”. By way of restitution, the British should “Hand over London to the African/And here, Westmoorings and St Ann’s.” Not only there, but “Penal and Tableland” also needed to be handed over, since Indians got Africans’ land, as everybody who knows drunk history knows.
Chalkdust did big-up Ray Funk, a bona fide “white” to use the calypso lexicon, who was in the tent the same night I was, but there’s no getting around the fact of the meme of venomous and emotional logic being insinuated here, under the guise of avuncular wit and wisdom.
And the final digression from the preeminent politics was a fellow named Falco, who apparently took over the ethnic self-immolation part of the show from Rex West/East. What a waste of a wonderful winer-girl. (If said winer-girl wants career advice, my e-mail address is in the paper on Wednesdays.)
And it bears saying that the most appealing of the Revue’s attractions is the still potent portion of the previous generation in the line-up—Antigua’s Swallow closes the show, and Chalkdust, Baron and the Pink Panther are spread through the evening. The show’s management was tight by CG and Sprang, marred only by the inexplicable encores for mediocre singers, but that’s the audience’s fault.
