Aba A Luke

Farmer Nap­py has been nom­i­nat­ed as this week's MTV Ig­gy artiste of the week, and if you're won­der­ing what that is, it's a mu­sic fo­rum main­tained by MTV for the pur­pose of pro­mot­ing undis­cov­ered tal­ent.Last week­end, Farmer's nom­i­na­tion among a slate of for­eign artistes be­came big news that caught on like wild­fire on so­cial net­work­ing sites like Twit­ter and Face­book. Vot­ing was closed off on Mon­day at 11.59 pm East­ern US time, which gave Tri­nis some ex­tra time to cast their votes.On Tues­day morn­ing, it was all about Farmer Nap­py.

The artiste, whose hit sin­gles of 2012, Sur­ren­der and You Make Me were heard from pil­lar to post dur­ing the fes­tive sea­son, said com­ing out on top in the MTV Ig­gy poll was in­deed a vic­to­ry. "In Car­ni­val they tried to con­demn me with their com­pe­ti­tion," said Nap­py, whose re­al name is Daryl Hen­ry. He chose not to call the com­pe­ti­tion's name but said the pub­lic knew what he meant. "A lot of peo­ple told me that I was the artiste who set the car­ni­val pace this year by re­leas­ing Sur­ren­der so ear­ly," he said, adding that he was a bit dis­ap­point­ed by the re­sults of that ma­jor Car­ni­val com­pe­ti­tion as he had giv­en it his all and tru­ly be­lieved that he was un­fair­ly judged. As a di­rect re­sult, Farmer Nap­py said he would not be com­pet­ing in that par­tic­u­lar com­pe­ti­tion in the fu­ture. De­spite this sit­u­a­tion, his feel­ing of ela­tion could not be dis­guised on Tues­day, and he ad­mit­ted that the nom­i­na­tion for the MTV Ig­gy artiste of the week was the best thing that had hap­pened to him for the year thus far.

He thanked his sup­port­ers from across the Caribbean and the world for tak­ing the time out of their days to vote for him on­line.He said fel­low artistes, Fay Ann Lyons and Bun­ji Gar­lin, as well as fash­ion de­sign­er Anya Ay­oung-Chee had ral­lied for him on Twit­ter, point­ing out that Fay Ann had not­ed that it was im­por­tant for so­ca artistes and Trin­bag­o­ni­ans to root for their own. "I want to es­pe­cial­ly big up Fay Ann and Bun­ji Gar­lin be­cause these are the peo­ple who, since Sat­ur­day had been tweet­ing, tweet­ing and ask­ing peo­ple to tweet for Farmer Nap­py," he said. Point­ing out that none of this would have been pos­si­ble with­out Fox Fuse and its head, Rhona Fox, his US-based pub­li­cist, he said Fox and the team had sent out the mu­sic to Ama­zon.com and iTunes.com and it took off from there.He said they were now work­ing on get­ting in­to a movie sound­track dy­nam­ic and were shop­ping the al­bum around. "Right now every­body look­ing for record­ing deal and they don't know that when you have record­ing deals, record com­pa­nies own you. I don't want a record­ing deal, I want a dis­tri­b­u­tion deal; but right now I'm look­ing to dress up my mu­sic for the movies like Dis­ney and all those com­pa­nies," he said. Nap­py high­light­ed that three weeks in­to the car­ni­val sea­son, MTV had re­viewed his al­bum and he got a rat­ing of four out of a pos­si­ble five stars.

He said MTV had re-blast­ed the al­bum af­ter it was re­leased on Car­ni­val Tues­day and this was the re­sult of that at­ten­tion. Amid the suc­cess, Farmer Nap­py is record­ing. He told the T&T Guardian that he would be re­leas­ing an­oth­er al­bum next year and planned on call­ing it Is­land Hop­ping. "What I want to do is do a song in Bar­ba­dos, St Vin­cent, Grena­da and col­lab­o­rate with cer­tain peo­ple and pro­duc­ers. Farmer is about work­ing hard and set­ting Trinidad on the map... yuh see the red, white and black flag-is time for it to fly high­er," he said. He of­fered spe­cial thanks to T&T pro­mot­er Cliff Har­ris for al­low­ing him the op­por­tu­ni­ty to show­case him­self at his events this past sea­son, par­tic­u­lar­ly Fire Fete, which was the first big fete in Car­ni­val. He said af­ter ten years, Har­ris had shown con­fi­dence in his abil­i­ty and for that he was grate­ful.