Last night I went out in the evening to see a Bollywood Movie
(yesterday was Indian Arrival Day) but ended up seeing Spiderman 3 (I
got there a bit early and sat in for a few minutes and then just
decided to go with it). That part kind of sucked, but when I got
back to the boat I thought I'd check out what was going on at the bar
next door to our marina and what do I hear but the sounds of
karaoke! How perfect.
I sang Word Up and Like Glue. Like glue went okay, and I got some
help from somebody who started singing "Nuttin no go so" at the end
(another buy out riddim song but with really shitty macho lyrics) and
then I started singing Red Red Wine and closed with that. It was
okay, though Word Up went better. The main attraction were the
other people.
The book was really good. It had a couple stand-out songs you don't
see much like "My Hood" by Young Jeezy which I don't know well and
probably nobody else knew at all and "Candy" by Cameo (though I had
seen that before). Most people gravitated towards the light rock
and slow james, like "Winds of Change" and "More Than Words". After
I did "Word Up" I met a fun group of kids (it was one girl's
birthday) and a few songs later one of them did "Tarzan Boy". That's
such a fun song to sing. Lots of deep breaths and tightening of the
stomach muscles, and very silly lyrics to read.
The thing you're dying to know is "was there anything awesomely
Trinidadian about this karaoke night?" And of course there was, but
it was sprinkled in like seasoning. On an instrumental break in
"Karma Kameleon" this guy busted out a verse which was most likely
from a Karma Kameleon influenced dancehall song. There was one guy
with a great voice who when he sang slow jams they'd sound like
reggae covers of slow jams, but just because that's how he sang (e.g.
"Me and Mrs. Jones have a ting going on"). I thought that was really
nice. Then there was a woman who was the inverse to that: she sang a
Bob Marley song, but with a strong, steady, R&B voice. The
synthyness of accompaniment co-conspired to disguise any hint of
reggae and I thought it was some R&B song until I asked somebody.
One really weird thing was that somebody sang "I will always love
you" by the Cure and the beat was very reggae. But the guitar sounds
sounded just like any karaoke imitation of the cure would sound--not
third generation from some reggae version of the song--and the lyrics
were completely faithful as well, making me wonder if the reggae-
ization of the song happened in its karaoke transcription, where
somebody Caribbean in front of a MIDI sequencer just *heard* a
different beat. This is improbable, but still a very good
description of the overall effect.
And then there were the calypso songs. There were only two while I
was there, but they were gems. One was about a lizard that escaped
in class, and the children go crazy and try to find the lizard,
except teacher Mildred, well (chorus) "The way she Joooolly and
Haaappy must be the lizard is ticklin she". Then the other one was a
song by Sparrow (aka the Mighty Sparrow) about having sex on the
beach. One of the memorable lines was "When we roll... Sand get in
me nose hole".
A guy who'd spent some time in Rhode Island explained that it was
from a time before it was okay to sing explicitly about sex on the
radio, and that Sparrow was one of the masters of insouciant double
entendres. It made me think how hard it is to do good double-
entendre when you can also just talk explicitly about sex. Without
the constraint of censorship, double-entendre becomes like Olde
Sturbridge Village. Maybe the only way it can survive is to be like
the Amish, and have a elaborately codified and evolving set of rules
about when it's just better to use a modern implement like an
antibiotic or a cellphone.
All this talk about double-entendres recalls something I've been
obsessed with for a while. It's the funny closing quote of a New
York Times article on the New York subway branded condom that a bunch
of public health institutions partnered to distribute (to great
success). And I think it may be the best funny closing quote that
has ever happened in the American press. The article is winding up
by riffing on all the funny promo slogans (e.g. "New York's Hottest
Wrapper") and how there are a ton they haven't even used yet. The
quote? "The possibilities are endless, and so are the double
entendres." You sly public health official, you. The reporter must
have been so pumped.
