The de­ci­sion of so­ca su­per­star, Machel Mon­tano, to re­frain from live per­for­mances dur­ing the Car­ni­val sea­son is pos­si­bly one of the most dif­fi­cult de­ci­sions he had to make in his long mu­si­cal ca­reer. Many fans and rev­ellers con­sid­er this move as cre­at­ing a vac­u­um in live mu­si­cal per­for­mances dur­ing these Car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions. How­ev­er, this mu­si­cal move can be a very strate­gic ma­noeu­vre if Machel utilis­es this pe­ri­od to re-eval­u­ate his guid­ing phi­los­o­phy in re­la­tion to where he wants to take the mu­sic. Many lo­cal mu­si­col­o­gists and old­er com­men­ta­tors have at­trib­uted blame to Mon­tano for the di­rec­tion of so­ca mu­sic in the last decade, since the lo­cal me­dia have al­ways tout­ed him as the ma­jor flag-bear­er of the new gen­er­a­tion of so­ca per­form­ers in the post Rud­der/Su­perBlue era.

The ar­rival of Mon­tano in his Big Truck for Car­ni­val in 1997 her­ald­ed a new dawn in the evo­lu­tion of so­ca. Most of the young so­ca artistes and rev­ellers lined up be­hind this mu­si­cal ve­hi­cle ex­pect­ing Mon­tano to lead them to "the mu­si­cal promise land," but this was not to be. When he ar­rived at the junc­tion of mu­si­cal de­ci­sion, he had the op­tions of re­main­ing in a state of mu­si­cal in­er­tia, drift­ing with the mu­si­cal tide in the di­rec­tion of left or right to any­where, or to make a con­scious ef­fort to take the mu­sic to an­oth­er lev­el with clear­ly iden­ti­fied qual­i­ties and spe­cif­ic goals. Al­most a decade and a half af­ter the mu­si­cal mas­ter­piece of Big Truck, the ques­tion re­mains, Has Mon­tano em­ployed his at­tained lead­er­ship role in the lo­cal mu­si­cal scene to im­prove the stan­dards of so­ca mu­sic and in­crease the uni­ver­sal ac­cep­tance of so­ca?

Mon­tano has re­mained a dom­i­nant star in the Trinidad/Caribbean Car­ni­val di­as­po­ra but has not been able to gen­er­ate the same lev­el of suc­cess out­side of this di­as­po­ra. Re­cent­ly, look­ing at a lo­cal week­ly tele­vi­sion pro­gramme, Kevin Lyt­tle, of St Vin­cent, ar­tic­u­lat­ed a clear vi­sion where he wants to take so­ca mu­sic. He al­so enu­mer­at­ed his love for the Japan­ese re­sponse to the mu­sic and high­light­ed his per­for­mances in Rus­sia. Al­though he has his own record la­bel, he has been able to en­sure the mar­ketabil­i­ty of his mu­sic through his as­so­ci­a­tion with a ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al record dis­trib­u­tor.

Mon­tano has a tremen­dous in­flu­ence on many of the so­ca per­form­ers who have en­tered the are­na over the last decade, and nu­mer­ous young par­tic­i­pants in the an­nu­al Syn­er­gy So­ca Stars com­pe­ti­tion em­u­late his pre­sen­ta­tion and the lyri­cal con­tent of his songs. This writer heard the son of an out­stand­ing pre­vi­ous Road March Cham­pi­on, So­ca Monarch and Ca­lyp­so Monarch, re­fer­ring to him as "Fa­ther," this con­firm­ing the no­tion that sev­er­al young so­ca artistes re­gard him as a fa­ther fig­ure/leader in the so­ca in­dus­try. The fright­en­ing as­pect of this sce­nario is his ap­par­ent lack of ap­pre­ci­a­tion of this re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.

An­dre McEach­nie, Car­ni­val

Stud­ies BA (Hons),

Car­ni­val Re­searcher

(CON­TIN­UED NEXT WEEK)