MP: Chalkie should apologise

Criticising Liverpool’s composition “Learn from Arithmetic”, which addressed child marriage, Khan said in a media release, “Not only has he failed as a calypsonian but also an academic, as even basic arithmetic will teach anyone that 75 into 14 will produce a result of 0.18667.” The San Juan/Barataria MP said he was not surprised though disappointed to learn that Liverpool has no intention of apologising to the Hindu community or others who have criticised his song.

Liverpool has told Newsday he does not sing calypsoes for groups but for intelligent people. Despite this claim, Khan said, “His song demonstrates very little intelligence.” As a performer, Khan said, Chalkdust has often been accused of using the calypso forum to advocate PNM policies, especially after winning the party’s Buy Local Calypso competition a record eight times in the 1960s and 1970s.

Therefore, it was not difficult, Khan said, to find similarities between Chalkie’s latest composition and Government’s position on child marriage. No one has asked Liverpool, Khan said, why it took him such a long time to compose and perform Learn From Arithmetic and the significance of its coming on the heels of legislative reform. Noting when Liverpool won the Calypso Monarch competition in 1976, he performed a song entitled No Smut for Me, in which he resisted singing about sex when there were more pressing issues facing the country, Khan said, “It is therefore an embarrassment to witness him eat his own words in 2017, when a song describing the lubrication of a copybook with margarine for sexual depravities would secure him his ninth win in the competition.”