Mighty Sparrow: the King of Calypso on freedom, Windrush (and oral sex)

[JHan]

I've posted about Sparrow before :https://upload.democraticunderground.com/10348844

And now there's this great interview. Thoroughly fascinating and worth the read

He inspired Bob Marley’s political awakening, survived a coma, and has sung about everything from sex workers to Khrushchev. And at 83, the calypso great still wants to turn the news into song

"‘Can you put on the TV news?” asks Slinger Francisco, AKA Mighty Sparrow. While the photographer sets up in my living room in Queens, New York City, the 83-year-old calypso originator scrutinises the screen, where the US midterm elections offer gold to this instinctive satirist.

Watching Sparrow watch the news, eyes narrowed in concentration, is a reminder of the decades of conflict he has processed into poetry – from the impact of US naval withdrawal on Trinidad sex workers, on the infectious 1956 song Jean and Dinah, to the space age and cold war on 1963’s Kennedy and Khrushchev. More recently, he has hymned a pre-presidential Barack Obama, and railed against Russian oligarchs on Neurosis of the Rich. “If you have time to look at the news,” Sparrow observes, “you see where most of those songs’ inspiration comes from. There’s no question about it.” The concept of fake news is anathema to him. “Certain people are telling the audience: ‘Don’t believe what you see, don’t believe what you hear or what you read.’ But I do believe.”

The lyrical sting of calypso and the instrument associated with it, the steel pan, may be pop’s most embedded form of resistance. Starting in 1740, the legal banning of the African-style drum (made of wood and animal skin) under slavery and colonialism encouraged the invention of the steel pan. Hammering industrial metal into tempered scales, steel pans were made out of oil drums from the island’s chief export; this was music made by any means necessary, to defy those who benefited most from the island’s resources. Calypso’s lyrics, too, became a forum for thrashing out the issues of the day, reporting on anything from industrial disputes to sexual peccadilloes.

"The reason for today’s interview, however, is more serious. Sparrow has been called to England to perform at the London jazz festival’s Windrush celebration, curated by Anglo-Trinidadian poet and teacher Anthony Joseph, and featuring Calypso Rose, Cleveland Watkiss, Gaika and others. It is a strategic reminder, after the recent scandal in which some of those Caribbean immigrants were redefined as illegal by the Home Office, of the defining contribution that Afro-Caribbean artists have been making to British culture ever since Sparrow’s frenemy Lord Kitchener walked off the Windrush in 1948 and sang “London is the place for me” into a Pathé News microphone – a catchy line that heralded the arrival of multicultural Britain.

Contemplating Brexit, Sparrow mutters: “I wonder why that happened?” He has confronted such divisions and dashed dreams of solidarity before, in 1959’s Federation, his comment on the crash of the post-colonial ideal of a united Caribbean. “We were trying to benefit [from independence] and we wanted to get all these islands together, create a federation where we could bargain better and benefit by all being together,” he says. “But once individual prime ministers in the Caribbean had tasted power, nobody wanted to give it up. Suddenly, before you could really get together, it’s all broken up. What do you do? It was terrible.