For more than two decades, Jayron “Rawkus” Remy has moved through Trinidad and Tobago’s cultural landscape as a DJ, producer, broadcaster, musician, storyteller and entrepreneur. But beneath the different titles has been a remarkably consistent preoccupation: what happens to a culture if the next generation stops listening? As Calypso History Month begins, Rawkus reflects on the music that tells us who we were, who we are, and what we must carry forward.
“Calypso is our history, our stories, our soul”. That conviction has quietly followed Remy through more than two decades in Trinidad and Tobago’s entertainment industry.
Today, his résumé is difficult to compress into a single title. He has worked as a DJ, sound engineer, television and radio host, event and music producer, musician and cultural practitioner. He has worked with 3canal since the mid-2000s, became a DJ, performer and event producer with Freetown Collective, hosted radio and television programmes including Vintage Unplugged and the NOW Morning Show, produced concerts and cultural events, and used his talents to create space for conversations about T&T’s music and the people who make it. He has now launched Rawkus Designs, a lifestyle e-commerce brand that celebrates Caribbean culture and sayings through apparel and accessories accessible to the diaspora, with the tagline: Wear the Culture, Share the Story.
Yet the thread connecting those roles began much earlier.
The records in the house
Remy grew up on Simeon Road in Petit Valley, in a childhood in which music was rarely far away. His father’s record collection leaned heavily towards calypso, while his mother’s work with Carib Special Events gave a young Rawkus unusual access to the machinery behind live entertainment. He remembers watching bands arrive, set up and soundcheck, fascinated not simply by the performance but by everything required to make it happen.
Time abroad also sharpened his relationship with home. In a later interview, Remy described returning from his studies in Massachusetts with a stronger appreciation for T&T’s culture and an increasingly deliberate desire to contribute to its preservation.
“Seeing how the world appreciated our music and the way it made them feel inspired me to be more proud and to feel a sense of responsibility to ensure that it never goes unnoticed.”
That sense of responsibility would eventually become visible in his work at home.
Turning concern into action
In October 2014, Remy was driving while listening to local radio. It was Calypso History Month, but the station was dedicating programming to American R&B and hip-hop artists. He was struck by the contradiction: T&T had deliberately set aside a month to recognise its indigenous music, yet some of the media with the greatest access to young listeners seemed to be looking elsewhere.
So he did something about it. Remy created a series of Calypso History Month mixes designed not simply to play old songs but to tell the story of the art form through them.
The first, Teach De Youth, connected veterans and contemporary artists while moving through calypso’s history. Later mixes explored struggle and protest, double entendre, storytelling and calypso’s traditional role as a carrier of news. He was 28. More than a decade later, the question that motivated the project feels remarkably current. How does a tradition survive if each generation assumes the next one will somehow inherit it?
“If not me, then who? And if not now, then when? That is how I feel about cultural preservation.”
At Boom Champions, he helped develop a Carnival campaign that paired contemporary soca artists with earlier music, among them Shurwayne Winchester interpreting Sparrow’s Jean and Dinah and Fay-Ann Lyons revisiting her father SuperBlue’s Soca Baptist.
Later came Vintage Unplugged, which Remy hosted from 2014 to 2019 and which centred calypso icons and their music. His radio work has continued the conversation: episodes of Saturday Brunch have explored everything from preservation of cultural heritage with researcher Nasser Khan to the big-band years with Ronnie McIntosh, and more recently, calypso’s influence on younger artists.
The job is not simply to tell younger audiences that the old music matters. It is to show them why.
“Kaiso is cool, kaiso is kicks, kaiso is absurd storytelling, but it also shows us ourselves. Music written 50 years ago sounding like it was written yesterday because the human experience is a cycle that often repeats and persists.”
Passing the baton
His own understanding of cultural work has evolved too. Remy has since completed postgraduate study in Arts and Cultural Enterprise Management at The University of the West Indies in 2021. But perhaps the most significant evolution is personal. Remy is now a father.
“My daughter cannot grow up not knowing who Sparrow is, who Shadow is. It is my duty to make it accessible, engaging and relatable to her.”
Who tells the story next?
This October, Remy is returning once again to the question that animated those mixes in 2014. For Calypso History Month, he is bringing contemporary Caribbean music practitioners into conversation with the calypso catalogue, asking what the art form means to them, where its influence appears in their own work, whether modern Caribbean music has retained calypso’s extraordinary economy of storytelling, and which songs from decades past still speak directly to the present.
“We’ve seen a resurgence in young artists sampling kaiso and I think it’s important to show their fans that it is intentional and it’s worth their time and attention.”
Calypso does not need to audition for relevance. Its stories have survived precisely because human beings keep finding themselves inside them. This is what inspired his latest venture, an online lifestyle brand called Rawkus Designs. It is, in many ways, an extension of the same work Remy has been doing throughout his career: finding new ways to make Caribbean culture visible, relevant and worth talking about. The brand takes the things that are unmistakably ours, gives them a contemporary canvas, and allows people to recognise themselves in them. Because cultural preservation is not only about remembering what came before but about creating reasons for people to carry it with them now.
“If we get this right, we will empower a generation to know themselves better and appreciate the work that went in before them in order to carry the baton to the next place, wherever that may be—according to 3canal, ‘everyday we walk where these giants walked’.”
Perhaps that is its own kind of cultural heroism: to love where you come from loudly enough, consistently enough and creatively enough that somebody coming after you learns to love it too. Rawkus, we applaud you.
