Soca music
| Soca music | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Trinidad and Tobago |
| Typical instruments | |
| Fusion genres | |
| Other topics | |
| Music of Trinidad and Tobago | |
|---|---|
| General topics | |
| Related articles | |
| Genres | |
| Media and performance | |
| Music media |
Music television |
| Nationalistic and patriotic songs | |
| National anthem | Forged from the Love of Liberty |
| Regional music | |
|
|
Music television
Soca music (also known as the soul of calypso) is a genre of Caribbean music that originated within a marginalized subculture in the Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1970s, and developed into a range of styles in the 1980s and later. Soca developed as an offshoot of kaiso/calypso, with influences from chutney, cadence, funk and soul.
Soca has evolved in the last 20 years primarily through musicians from various Anglophone Caribbean countries including Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, United States Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, The Bahamas, Dominica, Haiti, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, Belize, and Montserrat. There have also been significant productions from artists in Venezuela, Canada, Panama, Guatemala, United States, United Kingdom and Japan.
The "godfather" of soca was a Trinidadian man named Garfield Blackman who rose to fame as "Lord Shorty" with his 1963 hit "Cloak and Dagger" and took on the name "Ras Shorty I". He started out writing songs and performing in the calypso genre. A prolific musician, composer and innovator, Shorty experimented with fusing calypso and elements of Indo-Caribbean music for nearly a decade before unleashing "the soul of calypso", soca music.
Shorty was the first to define his music as "soca" and with "Indrani" in 1973 and "Endless Vibration" (not just the song but the entire album) in 1975, calypso music took off in another direction. Later, in 1975, Shorty visited his friend Maestro in Dominica where he stayed (at Maestro's house) for a month while they visited and worked with local cadence artists. There, Maestro experimented with calypso and cadence ("cadence-lypso"). A year later Maestro died in an accident in Dominica and his loss was felt deeply by Shorty, who penned "Higher World" as a tribute.
...
Wikipedia