Soca stagnating

“I was expecting it to become progressive, but it seems to be stuck in a rut to an extent and that bothers me. I’m looking for people with more creative ideas, looking at different angles, changing the form of the music. But, coming back to our own selves, it’s too much of influences from outside.

“Long ago we would take all these influences and turn it into our energy. Now I find it is going the other way around and I am kind of worried about that. But then art always reads where the society is at and we are in a state of a kind of chaos. That’s what my song ‘‘Madness’’ was about years ago,” Rudder said.

He said while on one level “Madness” was a party song, it was also about a society going mad. “I have lived to see that kind of crumbling and hopefully it could reach a point where we could say okay, enough is enough, time to turn around now and go forward,” he said. Rudder, who has been in the business for 51 years, said he appreciated the fact that his work has been recognised, which showed that he was doing something right.

“It just goes to show that every level of society my papers have been corrected, from the mad man on the street, straight up to university level. Once I get a correction from the people, once they correct my papers, I’m happy, everything else is extra, it’s like dessert,” he said.

Rudder was awarded a degree of Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, for outstanding cultural contributions.

He thanked the people for the gift of listening to his music, and giving him the freedom to create it. He said while ours was a society where sometimes we were a bit too free, but he would choose that anytime. Rudder also said “Power Soca” and “Groovy Soca” were just myths and names given to things. He said society was too caught up in “fast” music and did not recognise that a slow song could also be powerful.

He said a song could be as slow as ever and have all the power.

He said “Soca Baptist” and “Bahia Girl” had people “catching power” on the streets, and they were not fast.

“The thing is we get caught up in speed and our whole generation grew up with just speed.

Long ago we used to laugh at people in the smaller islands playing fast music.

Now it has turned around and we playing with speed because that’s all they know.

“The first thing we should deal with is music. If it invites a fast tempo, fine, but if you’re to construct something, that’s where you get stuck in a rut and everybody trying to go for a formula. Eventually you hear bum bum, rum, bum bum, rum’. So what do we do now? Just go back to the music and take it from there and things flow.

Observe the society, observe life around us and try to create out of that,” he advised.

Rudder said treated his work like my children, saying that was the key to its longevity.