Caribbean Beat — January/February 2018 (#149)

On Ash Wednesday 2017, MX
Prime — the performer formerly
known as Maximus Dan and
christened Edghill Thomas —
along with his production and
performance team, Ultimate
Rejects, were announced as the winners of Trinidad
and Tobago’s Carnival Road March competition.
Their song, “Full Extreme”, was played 556
times at competition venues around Port of Spain.
The second-place winner, Machel Montano’s
“Your Time Now”, trailed with seventy-two plays.
The Road March competition isn’t like most
popularity contests or talent competitions judged
by the public. Nobody sits at home to make a call
or send a text. To win the Road March, a composer
has to write a song that makes people get up
and dance — to be specific, all the people
who celebrate T&T’s Carnival every
year — and keep them on their feet for
two days of prancing. To stand any
chance of succeeding,
the modern
Road March must
be the anthem of wining, that rhythmic gyration
of the waist, often done in concert with a partner
or two, that found wider international notice in a
distinctly corrupted form as twerking.
Each year’s Road March and its contenders are
consigned to history along with the masqueraders’
costumes, and it’s a rare song that earns a
play on the road after its year of glory. The first
Road March title was recorded in 1930, Inveigler
(MacDonald Borel)’s “Captain Cipriani”, and a
song has won the accolade every year since then,
even between 1942 and 1945, when Carnival was
officially suspended during the Second World War.
There were, of course, enormously popular
songs before then, songs so entrancing
that they jumped from band to band in
an environment that was quite different from the
mechanised, industrially driven Carnival of today.
Back then, a Carnival band took to the road with
its own live music, the earliest form of which
were long sticks of bamboo rhythmically beaten
to accompany the chantwell — the singer leading
the costumed group — who considered life, love,
politics, and the bacchanal of the barrack yard in
his composition.
“The first song sung by almost every band on the
road was probably ‘Sly Mongoose’,” says Professor
Gordon Rohlehr, the eminent literary scholar
with a lifelong personal and academic interest
in the genesis of calypso. The song came to
Trinidad and Tobago in 1919, and was
sung in a tent by Houdini in 1921,
becoming popular on the road
in 1923. “It was likely to have
been a Jamaican folk song, but
melodies travelled throughout
the islands and became
songs with different lyrics and
Michele Jorsling courtesy ultimate rejects
The Road March
competition isn’t
like most popularity
contests judged by the
public. Nobody sits at
home to make a call
MX Prime (centre) and Ultimate
Rejects, 2017 Road March champs
58 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM