Caribbean connections: The diaspora generation moves global music
Before Bajan superstar Rihanna — The Right Excellent Robyn Rihanna Fenty, if you nasty! — starred in the Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show in February 2023 to millions, Trinidadian Nicki Minaj boldly rapped with Madonna in the 2012 version of that show. Pride and passion for Caribbean creativity and music on a world stage was not muted in the region, but the continued paucity of editorial space in mainstream metropolitan media highlighting that Caribbean presence and connection harkens back to a time when children in the West Indian diaspora were experimenting with music to create new pathways for entertainment.
According to the accepted timeline, 50 years ago in the summer of 1973, a Jamaican-born DJ, not yet 20 years old and almost seven years removed from his island existence, played at his sister’s block party in the Bronx, and birthed hip-hop. DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) shares a subliminal connection to Nicki Minaj as immigrant children in the diaspora boldly breaking barriers in music. In 2003, Caribbean Beat magazine gave notice of hip-hop’s Caribbean musical roots. Today, the influence of Jamaican sound systems and their deejays toasting and chatting on the microphone over ska and dub rhythms in the 1950s and 60s on the development of rap music that emerged during those Bronx summer parties in the 1970s has been codified by musicologists.
Herc himself said:
“Hip-Hop, the whole chemistry of that came from Jamaica, cause I’m West Indian. I was born in Jamaica. I was listening to American music in Jamaica and my favorite artist was James Brown. That’s who inspired me. A lot of the records I played were by James Brown. When I came over here I just had to put it in the American style and a drum and bass. So what I did here was go right to the “yoke”. I cut off all anticipation and played the beats.”
Herc’s peers, other hyphenated Caribbean-Americans — born here, raised there, as well as U.S.-born — developed and grew the genre to where it is the main music export of the United States. A roll call of those founding fathers includes Grandmaster Flash (Barbados-born, Brooklyn-raised), KRS-One (Barbadian father/American mother, Brooklyn-born), and Afrika Bambaataa (Jamaican /Barbadian parents, Bronx-raised), and more.
In a new century, Caribbean-American artists have embraced hip-hop and its variations. Riding on the shoulders of pioneering female rapper Foxy Brown (Trinidadian parents, Brooklyn-born), Nicki Minaj and Cardi B (Dominican Republican father/Trinidadian mother, Manhattan-born) have taken the genre and the role of the female MC to superstar status. Rising star Young Devyn, representing a modern incarnation of hip-hop, Brooklyn drill, is proudly “waving her Trini flag, [as] she fuses soca, hip-hop, and R&B into her sound palette.”
Hip-hop’s evolution was global. Across the pond in the U.K., grime and jungle music had their genesis among children of West Indians there, post-Windrush, who heard the music of their parents — reggae, ska, calypso — and moved in another direction. On both sides of the Atlantic, a new generation of artists born in Caribbean households were influenced by the spirit of an island milieu — family, food, festivities — but have gone “beyond the confines of cultural heritage.”
The new music industry looks to social media for artistic discovery, and to tap into the purchasing power of the influential Gen Z. A pair of Los Angeles-based self-described Trinidadian-Americans, Bryce Drew and TRISHES, are stepping boldly into the deep end of the popular independent singer-songwriter market online to project the possibilities inherent in, and to chart the impact of a dual heritage on a modern music career in the U.S..
Bryce Drew Davidson (Trinidadian mother/American father) was born and raised in Miami before moving to Nashville, Tennessee, first for a degree from Belmont University, then to launch her music career, before moving out west to L.A. One reads that her “Trinidadian heritage is an important part of her identity as an artist,” and she tells Caribbean Beat that:
“I was raised on the storytelling of Calypso music. In my lyrics and song-writing, I feel that the conversational storytelling nature stems from this. Trinidadian music is based around connection and that is at the core of what I do. In addition, there is a common thread between the central themes of balance, hope, and love in music from the Caribbean and the messages found in my songs. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
Trinidad memories of dancing to the music of Kes and David Rudder at her grandparents’ home linger. Since partnering with multiple-Grammy winning producer Greg Wells a few years ago, Bryce’s deeply personal and confessional songs have taken on a decidedly pop sensibility that she admits is just a first step towards a more all-encompassing cultural embrace. She explains, “although it may not be noticeable to the average listener, to me the influence of Caribbean music is in everything I do. It’s deeply rooted in who am and I absolutely would love to lean more into my heritage of Caribbean music in the future.”
TRISHES is the alter ego of Trish Hosein, whose albums Ego was reviewed in Caribbean Beat in 2019, and The Id in 2021. She is the child of an immigrant Trinidadian computer genius who relocated with his family to the U.S. when she was about seven years old. This Berklee College of Music graduate challenges the confines of art and constructs of self by using live looping, visual art and spoken word to delve into one’s psyches, and defines her music as “conceptual experimental pop.” Her undeniably original song-writing, fleshed out by hip-hop beats and pop hooks, examines human struggle through an anthropological lens to prompt listeners on a journey of self-inquiry.
Beyond the jargon, she, however, recognises her place in the world. On her career in the crowded California indie-pop market, she notes that, “I think it’s just hard being heard. It’s the act of being blindfolded and taking an axe to a tree. Sometimes it can feel like nothing is happening because the tree hasn’t fallen, even when you’re only one swing away.” Unlike many of her peers, she makes a living off of her creative endeavours and has never had a 9–5 job, and is looking to work with some Trinidadian artists doing more traditional Caribbean styles on a project, whether that be new music or remixes.
Her migration from a Trinidad childhood to an American adult has allowed her to have a unique view on privilege, on ethnicity, and on race there. “I think it’s also the reason my [TRISHES] project focuses on seemingly contradicting aspects of self,” she says. “I think a lot of that probably comes from being of two places in a way that I had to decide whether I belonged to neither or both. And I decided I belonged to both.”
Searching for and accepting a new identity is the continuing exercise of these music artists with a heritage spanning regions. Mirroring the hip-hop genesis half a century ago in the U.S., British-Caribbean youth are driving a new kind of renaissance in music with global potential. A new generation of creatives in the U.K. are spearheading what the Guardian (U.K.) called, “a new and thrilling jazz movement…born out of fresh experimentalism, [that] is reaching far younger, more diverse audiences and doesn’t care for snootiness.” Nubya Garcia (Trinidadian father/Guyanese mother), Theon Cross (Jamaican father/St. Lucian mother), and Moses Boyd (grandson of a Dominican and a Jamaican) are among its leaders since the 2010s.
There is an old Caribbean witticism that says: “If a dog has puppies in an oven, do you call them bread?” This question mirrors one asked by sociologists that ponder nationality and identity, what does it mean to be a Caribbean if you are not born there, but your parents are? Garcia reminded readers a few years ago that, “I am Caribbean and I play jazz.” However, she would never used the term, Caribbean jazz, to describe her brand of music that freely pulls from the sounds of the African and Caribbean diasporas — calypso, dub, Afrobeat. She said, “because I did not grow up in the Caribbean. I honestly don’t have a first-hand knowledge of what that is. I don’t really know enough about what Caribbean jazz is to call myself part of that.”
Caribbean people hold on to heritage as a badge of honour. A contemporary metropolitan experience driven by connections to that heritage has been a driving force for the expansion of the Caribbean footprint on new music everywhere. The migrations of colonial Caribbean folk to mother England from the late 1940s and beyond — a metaphorical movement from the periphery to the centre — and the inherited cultural memories down generations sparked a culture shift in the U.K. that continues today. The tacit connections to lived experiences, in the new milieu of America have guided creativity that either broadly transforms the music landscape or subtly adds new twists to the canon of popular music there. The creation of new Caribbean music legacies is happening right before our eyes, and these stories are still to be told, albeit from the new perspective of the wider Caribbean diaspora.
© 2023, Nigel A. Campbell. All Rights Reserved.
