Music Essays: NIGHT SWEAT

This series is an edit from assignments I've shot in late night soca and dancehall clubs over the last few years for the FADER magazine.

story by Edwin “Stats” Houghton

In the mid-1950s a calypso craze swept the US with three major results: 1) Jamaican-American heartthrob Harry Belafonte used the sound as the launchpad for a brief career in Hollywood. 2) 99 cent bins in record stores across the US have been flooded ever since with easy-listening versions of “Yellow Bird”. 3) The groundwork was laid for Bob Marley and the reggae explosion of the ’60s and ’70s. But somewhere this dollar-bin logic got twisted around. If your local record spot is deep enough to even have a “reggae” bin, it’s as likely to contain Kevin Lyttle as anything from Kingston. It’s not just clerk smirk ignorance at work; as dancehall kings court urban radio with faster, ever more soca-like rhythms, it’s beginning to seem like West Indian artists don’t know what bin to put themselves in any more.

New York City is ground zero in this culture war. Every borough is an island kingdom unto itself. Queens is Indo-Caribbean and BX is a coalition of smaller islands like Antigua and Dominica, but Brooklyn has always been the heartbeat of West Indian life here. In the ’80s it was home to endless fêtes and basement revels like the one immortalized in Andre Tankers’s 1980 calypso “Basement”. These kept the scene bubbling under while giant venues like Soca Arena on Empire Blvd drew crowds of thousands a few times a year. By 2000, however, Soca Arena subdivided much of its cavernous interior into several storefronts to pay the mortgage. The diminished space, renamed the Base, now hosts a monthly party called Sokalypso, the only 100% soca event left in a second-generation Brooklyn interested in a less purist diet of hip-hop, reggae and soca. Even at soca jams it’s hard to say whether the scene is more driven by Trinidad carnival or the hybrids (Latin reggae, chutney soca, rapso) that circulate freely in a melting pot like NYC. Both calypso and reggae were born of the assertion of Afrocentric resistance to colonialism but as their bastard children—dancehall and soca—come of age in a shrinking world, it seems increasingly that this generation rules the nation with miscegenation.