PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Nos­tal­gia ap­pears to con­trol the air­waves as many of the so­ca songs re­leased for the 2020 sea­son seem to have a hint of years past.

Swap­pi’s re­make of Baron’s 1983 hit Feel­in It and Ravi B’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Su­perblue on Oma­lay, it­self a re­make of Blue­boy’s 1982 hit, are the flag bear­ers for the flood of re­vis­it­ed records this sea­son.

The ap­petite for nos­tal­gia has on­ly been fed fur­ther by ap­pear­ances by Lord Nel­son with Patrice Roberts and Ca­lyp­so Rose with De­stra and Nailah Black­man) while Iw­er George has sim­ply re­cy­cled his 90s hit Yes Iw­er, as he did with Road March Bac­cha­nal last year. Count­less oth­er songs fea­ture in­stru­ments more close­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with past eras.

In Pre­ci­sion Pro­duc­tion’s syn­op­sis for the Skin­ner Park Rid­dim, they ac­knowl­edged that fol­low­ing the an­nounce­ment of the ren­o­va­tion of the fa­cil­i­ty, mem­o­ries of events held at the venue in­spired the work. The in­stru­men­tal sam­ples the 1978 track from Ed Wat­son and The Brass Cir­cle’s, Con­tro­ver­sy, an­oth­er homage in it­self to the past.

But so­ca artistes say while re­makes may be more preva­lent now, it isn’t a new trend.

“I guess for 2019, ap­proach­ing 2020 it’s a lit­tle more. The artist has tak­en a lit­tle more no­tice where that is con­cerned to bridge the gap be­tween the old and the new be­cause of the clas­sics, the clas­si­cal in­stru­ments, the clas­sic feel,” said Mar­vin Davis, bet­ter known as Swap­pi.

“Bun­ji did, Machel did it, Ghet­to Flex, he did it you know, so it has been done. But do­ing it is one thing but you know you al­ways have to re­mem­ber to do the right thing, to do it the cor­rect way,” he said.

“If you touch­ing a clas­sic, if you look­ing to dab­ble in­to a clas­sic piece of art, two things must hap­pen. It must be big­ger and it must com­ple­ment or en­hance that clas­si­cal piece be­cause a clas­si­cal piece is very frag­ile to the pub­lic for some­one to come and in­ter­fere with. Peo­ple pay very close at­ten­tion to clas­si­cal pieces, so if it is done it has to be done prop­er­ly.”

Ac­cord­ing to the reign­ing Groovy So­ca Monarch, the Feel­in’ It re­make was a child­hood dream ful­filled.

“With re­spect to the Baron, that was in the mak­ing ever since I was small. I was a tune that I al­ways love, a tune that I al­ways liked and I just keep telling my­self I would like to touch on this and do a re­make and you know the op­por­tu­ni­ty fi­nal­ly pre­sent­ed it­self last year when I saw Un­cle Baron at Es­tate 101,” he said.

Swap­pi said the re­make was not im­me­di­ate­ly dis­cussed then but hat meet­ing sparked the re­la­tion­ship that al­lowed it to be done.

Bun­ji Gar­lin is no stranger to re­mak­ing clas­sics, hav­ing re-in­tro­duced Lor­raine to mod­ern au­di­ences along­side Ex­plain­er in 2005, while his hits Fiery, Hold Ah Burn and Sav­age among oth­ers have all been rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of so­ca clas­sics.

He wel­comes the in­crease in the num­ber of re­makes, as he be­lieves it has helped bridge a gap that de­vel­oped be­tween age groups.

He re­called that de­spite in­ter­est from younger artistes dur­ing his ear­li­er years, they had of­ten found dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting the ap­proval from the es­tab­lished acts of yes­ter­year.

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“It was kind of a new sce­nario for every­body, for the peo­ple who own the orig­i­nal mu­sic and the peo­ple who want to tap in­to the mu­sic, so the peo­ple who own the orig­i­nal mu­sic too would have kind of been scep­ti­cal too be­cause they would not have al­ways un­der­stand. Well why you want to use my mu­sic, I build my thing, I fight hard.

“But it not re­al­ly that you were try­ing to take ad­van­tage of or look­ing for a free ride but some­times those things so spe­cial it just go to­geth­er with it and if it pre­sent­ed prop­er­ly both sides of the ta­ble stand to ben­e­fit from it. That’s my take on it,” said Gar­lin, who cred­it­ed MX Prime’s (Max­imus Dan) So­ca Train in 2004 for break­ing the bar­ri­er.

“That is where peo­ple re­al­ly paid at­ten­tion that if you remix these clas­sics in a sen­si­ble way, or the per­fect way, it will have a re­al im­pact for both the old ver­sion of the song and new ver­sion of the song,” he said.

Le­ston Paul, the pro­duc­er of Feel­ing It , wel­comed the mix­ing of old with new, as he saw the ben­e­fits for both sides.

“What it does re­al­ly too it gives those songs a fresh new ap­proach and gen­er­ates a type of aware­ness of the mu­sic back in those times. and par­tic­u­lar­ly to the young lis­ten­ers and artists al­so that wasn’t around when those songs came out so it sounds like some­thing new and some­thing fresh,” said Paul, who drew ref­er­ence to hip hop mu­sic, not­ing that as that genre grew in pop­u­lar­i­ty, younger artistes sam­pled old­er hip hop tracks as well.

“And the pos­i­tive things about that the writ­ers of those songs and the pro­duc­ers they have an op­por­tu­ni­ty again to make mon­ey off of the roy­al­ties,” he said., “I think it’s a pos­i­tive thing. Some peo­ple may find that when a song is that good, no­body should re­al­ly touch it to do any re­makes but I guess with the tech­nol­o­gy and every­body still search­ing for things mu­si­cal­ly it’s like go­ing back to come for­ward. Noth­ing is re­al­ly wrong with that.”