this in response to a padnah of mine who dismissively ignores Montano
Quote:machel montano may not be the jam and wine madness exemplary of idiotic bacchanalia that Soca has been manipulated into. his music makes sense/his stories organized and tells something that is legible.
as such however, like Obama is, Montano could be a more effective evil..much more effectively insinuating the idea of mindless and endless bacchanalia into the social body. but I don't think so.
Montano is much more than the lesser idiotic 'artists' who fill the stages with Caribbean Soca crap at Carnival times the world over..which with so many Carnivals around the world, is a year long flow now
Montano is not mindless, so how does sensible compositions describing, and about the normal events of west indian life produce idiocy?
is it possible for logical productions to turn the minds of the people into mush?
I mean even the great 'Black man' Stalin made and sang a party song or 2. but they were brilliant compositions, musically unimpeachable, and logical and consistent, out of and enhancing west indian life same way.
Sparrow did it all the time....so did Kitchener..
we know of the basic, enhancing and consistent brilliance of Kitchener, even with a song like the 'Doctors Daughter'. and while he was never accused of being political but was more effectively so than most Kai'sonians ..he was party at the same time, up front. but like the salt of the west indian earth so consistent with west indian life up to his time Kitchener was what I called IT..west indian.
we had gone past brilliant with kitchener. he had become part of the basic fabric of west indian life, rock, basic, solidity itself. and reassuringly always there..for 79 years...a point of total consistency in the life.
I wanted to sell Montano short. I could not! he is often musically brilliant like Kitchener and the best of the rest. Montano catches musical and social flavours I have not intimated in ages. I listen and I hear them in there like I have not heard them before..old, yet new and flavourful in his productions.
Montano was 'in the Junction' where everything meets on important days, at every important cross-roads in Trinidad..like Charlie King Junction in La Brea. Montano brought people into the Junction..Burning Flames too.
no more important days than Carnival in the Junction..stick fighting before it was outlawed.. to Steelbands in rivalry, when they clashed in the junction and the beating started..sometimes violent but more often than not beating pan with faithful sincerity, energised by the rivalry, nobody getting tired... music to beat or defeat the opposition musically, to drown them out, to win over by musical compositional superiority even the supporters of the rival, who ultimately had to admit who was the better band that time, day or night, in the junction..a fulsome event that would sustain the rivalry until the next year, the next clash..IN THE JUNCTION
I admit that I hear all that in Montano and more. I note the veracity and logic of his stories, his global popularity. admitting to all I have said, I feel real good..and go listen again to see/hear more..to discover if I had been wrong every previous time.
I have not found that I have been wrong about Montano yet.
and I have no problem with the female participation as dancers, the celebration of sexuality, of big 'bumpers' Bumpers are lovingly, magnificently celebrated for what they were and are...the source of life itself, of sustenance and survival. there the female body sequestered and stored the food for the babies, that allowed nomadic humanity to survive the days, periods when no food was found..in the big beautiful baxsides of black women..the original Madonna
the celebration of desire, attractiveness, the acceptance of and beauty of the Bumper is dutiful, right and proper.
and the overt sexuality is heterosexual..massively so, wonderfully affirming the union of man and woman in the original basic and essential human act... to have sex, to phuck, to use the rich, fecund term that contains fully all the rude plenitude of sexual emotion of man/woman sexuality, that along with food does all we need, produces all we need and more in the life
in this day of homosexual insinuation into the life by the enemies of life as substitute for the natural evolution of male female sexuality, perhaps all overt heterosexual affirmation is necessary to stave off that manufactured contagion, at the end of which is human death
I truly appreciate Montano at this point man. I am satisfied until I know better.
