Nigel Teles­ford &

Sama­ki Fe­li­cian

Five-time Pow­er and two-time Groovy In­ter­na­tion­al So­ca Monarch, Machel Mon­tano, be­lieves that the time for that com­pe­ti­tion has passed and more col­lab­o­ra­tions are need­ed to take so­ca mu­sic to greater heights.

Ques­tioned about the re­cent an­nounce­ment of a new So­ca Monarch com­pe­ti­tion com­ing on stream for Car­ni­val 2025, dur­ing the of­fi­cial launch of the Pineap­ple Rid­dim at the Queen’s Park Oval, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, Mon­tano said, “There is a de­sire by some peo­ple to go back, to go back to the glo­ry days of the So­ca Monarch com­pe­ti­tion, but in life, we doh get to go back. We on­ly go for­ward. I must com­mend Mr William Munro for his con­tri­bu­tion, so give him a round of ap­plause.”

He added, “In my hum­ble opin­ion, So­ca Monarch has done a lot for us as artistes who were ris­ing, but in this time of MONK—The Move­ment of Now Know­ing—we need to know what we need to do now and in my hum­ble opin­ion, in­stead of com­pet­ing against each oth­er, we need to col­lab­o­rate more.”

Mon­tano ref­er­enced the rise of Afrobeats and Reg­gae­ton mu­sic, which are both com­pa­ra­ble to the sound and speed of so­ca and said the fo­cus needs to be on mak­ing so­ca a glob­al prod­uct.

“I don’t per­son­al­ly feel we need a com­pe­ti­tion right now to take us to where we need to go. It will hap­pen or­gan­i­cal­ly again at some point, but right now we have Afrobeats be­com­ing the most pop­u­lar mu­sic in the world and it sounds like so­ca.

“Afrobeat is right be­hind Reg­gae­ton mu­sic, which is do­ing some of the biggest num­bers in the world with artistes like Bad Bun­ny, J Balvin and oth­ers—and it sounds like so­ca! So what are we miss­ing to take our mu­sic to the next lev­el? We need to fo­cus on mak­ing so­ca mu­sic a glob­al prod­uct.”

He added, “Be­yond the com­pe­ti­tion, we should be fo­cus­ing on the qual­i­ty of our mu­sic; the qual­i­ty of our writ­ing; the qual­i­ty of our mar­ket­ing and most im­por­tant­ly, the qual­i­ty of our mes­sage—to in­spire the young peo­ple, to in­spire the na­tion and we know that where two or more are gath­ered in HIS name we can ac­com­plish a lot.”

Mon­tano joined crick­et icon Dwayne Bra­vo; Ba­jan singer Ru­pee (Ru­pert Clarke); US-based tal­ent Lyrikal (De­von Mar­tin) and ris­ing star Roni­cia “47Ronzy” Joseph at the of­fi­cial launch event. So­ca queen Patrice Roberts is al­so fea­tured on the rid­dim but was out of the coun­try.

DJ Bra­vo, re­flect­ing on the part­ner­ship, shared his vi­sion for it, “This project, when Machel said to me now is the time, he didn’t say now is the time to just do a rid­dim, now is the time to make a dif­fer­ence and cre­ate an op­por­tu­ni­ty where it is a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween MONK and 47, that it would be glob­al, in­ter­na­tion­al.”