Contents - Beth Lesser

Soca. Heat in de Place featured Arrow and the Mighty Duke on the Soca side
and Sugar Minott, General Trees and Wayne Smith, representing dancehall.
Today, Jamaica has its own Carnival, the inspiration of Byron Lee, who
continued to promote Soca music up until his death in 2008. * Started in
1990, the annual event has proven to be a very successful tourist draw. The
promoters have been able to enlist the support of many of Jamaican’s top businesses
and the event has given Jamaica a new group of soca and calypso stars.
dominiC
Another frequent guest on the sound, in the later ‘80s, was white deejay
Dominic, from England. Dominic used to love to chat, “Who say Dominic
favor Boy George…”, sparking a recrudescence of the homophobic lyrics
that had been largely in the background since slackness days. Dominic hung
around until he proved that he could hold his own in a dance. A tough little
roughneck, Dominic recorded a duet with a Peter Metro contrasting the two
cultures, ‘Yardie and Cockney’ (Germaine) ** .
At the time of the release of ‘Yardie and Cockney’, deejay duets were becoming
an integral part of the late ‘80s dancehall style. Artists like Admiral
Bailey and Josie Wales, or Chaka Demus and Bailey were teaming up in the
studio. But Metro got a head start. With little brother Squiddley Ranking he
had recorded ‘Bad Boy Posse’. With Sister Charmain, he did ‘Dibbi Dibbi’.
With Yellowman, he recorded ‘The Girl is Mine’. With Lady Anne he had
‘Bosa Nova’. With Zuzu, he had ‘Calypso, Calypso’. And he had still another
with Dominic, ‘Old Lady’.
The Tour Before The fall
In 1983, Metromedia did the same thing Gemini had done before – they
* Jamaica, being so close to Trinidad and Tobago, really felt the heat. The advent of this highly contagious
music looked like a fresh opportunity to divert people from their dancehall ways. As Frankie
Campbell puts it, “The gap between ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ was at its greatest as dancehall music
slowly began to replace reggae as Jamaica’s music of choice. The backlash led to the creation of
the Jamaican Soca industry (in which Fab five had a great part) and Jamaican Carnival.” An entire
Jamaican Soca movement arose to accommodate the popularity of the new genre. The Fabulous
Five, along with band leader, Byron Lee, were instrumental in developing an indigenous Soca industry.
On one extraordinary occasion, Prince Jazzbo agreed to deejay over some Trinidadian style rhythms
for the LP Soca Rockers (Dynamic, 1981), an act he later came to profoundly regret, claiming that the
intent of the LP was to “soak the rockers”, or to take the power out of reggae music.
“When I do those songs, I was illiterate to those kind of things. I wasn’t educated as much as now. If
it was now, I would never, never do stuff like that. For me, it’s not about sounding good. It’s about the
music. It’s about the lyrics. How can I want to soak reggae? I need to uplift reggae. That man who
write the lyrics is a ‘diplomat’ who is working for Babylon, who wants to keep the music down. So,
he sees me is a soldier who is keeping up the music, who is illiterate towards what is going on, and
he use me. There should be a court to send him to prison for that. He should be helping me uplift the
music instead of wanting me to keep the music down. But that only makes me work harder once I
understand what it’s all about, work harder towards uplifting the music”.
** Later recorded for King Jammy
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