Super (Soca) Bowl
This weekend saw an average of 123.4 million people worldwide tune in for the Super Bowl final between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers. I have to admit, I wasn’t one of them. I’ve never much cared for American Football. Growing up I was more into Ice Hockey, Basketball or Boxing. These days you’ll just about get me to watch a big Football or Rugby match if Wales are playing, but that’s not to say I won’t take my seat in the arena for the thrill of competition. In fact, these last couple of weeks have seen the most exciting time of year for me, and competition is right at the heart of that. That’s because It’s been Carnival time in Trinidad & Tobago, and whilst I’m not lucky enough to be there in person and appreciate the full glory of bacchanal at its best, I’ve been keeping an eye on those competitive elements like it was my Super Bowl.
Sadly one of my favourite contests, Soca Monarch, was cancelled for the second year in a row due to the lack of funding. This meant most of my anticipation revolved around who was going to win this year’s Road March.
Road March is essentially the biggest tune of the Carnival. In Port Of Spain, the man parades on Carnival Monday and Tuesday are split into various groups, called ‘bands’ which are then split into sections, all with their own costumes. By far the best way to enjoy Carnival is to ‘play mas’ and buy into one of these bands.
Each of the bands get judged on their costumes, creativity, presentation, energy and more. There are various judging points along the route with the main one near the end at the Queen's Park Savannah. This is when you really have to summon up the last of your energy and give it everything you’ve got on stage. It’s not always easy when you’ve been out ‘on the road’ all day in the hot sun, drinking your bodyweight in rum at the free bar.
This is why soca is so important to Carnival. For the most part, it’s the fuel that fills the tank and drives the parades (maybe even more so than rum). Carnival is all the fun, but it’s also really hard work when approached properly, and I honestly couldn’t imagine making it through to the end without that mixture of heavy electronic Afro-Caribbean rhythms and huge pop melodies, with well crafted songs that speak to the reckless abandonment, humanity, and shared euphoria of Carnival, which in itself exists as an annual antidote to the everyday struggle of an often unfair and oppressive system (whichever yours happens to be).
So of course it takes something extra special to give you that superhuman surge of strength that might just help your chosen band gain those all important points. This is where the Road March contenders come into play!
Like any good contest there are many potential winners at the beginning, but you can quickly spot maybe a dozen or so that will become favourites, usually by well established names who might well have some titles under their belt already.
A number of these artists will likely have a couple of songs that could catch on, and whilst there’s no official rounds to this competition, through radio and TV play in particular, plus the various warm up fetes in the lead up to Carnival weekend, there will usually be just two or three that really stand out as going the full distance. This year it was between Mical Teja’s ‘DNA’, Bunji Garlin’s ‘Carnival Contract’ and Patrice Roberts’ ‘Anxiety’.
Personally I’d have loved to see Patrice (or Patsy to us fans) win Road March this year. She always releases an impressive amount of fantastic tracks, and is almost always in the running, but has only ever won once, with a collaboration alongside Machel Montano, the undeniable king of soca, who ties with the elder Super Blue as having the most Road March wins, at 10 each. Patrice also lost her fiance, much loved Antiguan soca artist Ricardo Drue, in December, just a few days after releasing Anxiety. There’s no doubt it was a tune worthy of the title, but this time Patsy was to come in third with 48 plays in total.
As the parade kicked off on Carnival Tuesday, most bets seemed to be on last year’s winner, Bunji Garlin, who came out with all guns blazing this year, offering a slew of big tunes. In fact ‘Carnival Contract’ was probably not the best of these, but it certainly had all of the right elements for Road March, an emotive hands in the air feel and a respectable fast paced power soca riddim from Canadian producers Banx & Ranx, who have been dabbling in Caribbean music for years, but as far as I’m aware, are newcomers to the soca arena.
Bunji has long been my favourite soca artist. His dancehall style, booming voice and larger than life presence coupled with an ear for great beats and anthemic tunes, mean he has been a regular in my DJ sets since the days of playing soca at Moloko in the early to mid noughties. Plus his killer collaborations with my good friends Jus Now, helped to rekindle my love for the music and led to forming the Super Soca Show in Bristol, with Dub Boy, Atki 2 and Jonesy Wales.
Surprisingly last year was Bunji’s first solo win, with just one previous collaboration, the epic ‘Famalay’ alongside Machel and St Vincent’s Skinny Fabulous. However unlike the Kansas City Chiefs, there was not to be a second win in a row, despite a respectable 225 Plays.
That means this year’s Road March goes to Mical Teja, with an impressive 341 plays of his track ‘DNA’ at the judging stations this year. It’s a very different track to last year’s winner. Bunji’s ‘Hard Fete’ won with a relentless, raw, almost military energy, running at 160 BPM, whereas DNA bucks the trend of Power Soca winners entirely, coming in at just 128 BPM and very much falling into the ‘Groovy’ category of Soca. So how did it manage to win? Because it absolutely nails the Carnival feeling of freedom, togetherness, euphoria and belonging. More than that, it speaks to the sense that everybody is the Carnival, and the Carnival is deep within everybody. It distills all of that into one seriously catchy, uplifting song, and tells the listener that their chance to express this is right there on the stage. It’s a born winner. It probably helped that there were some ‘road’ mixes that toughened it up a little too.
At first glance Mical Teja is a relatively new artist, but he has been in the background for some time now. From the age of 14 he was co-writing songs, and he’s provided hits for massive names such as Machel Montano, Destra Garcia and Farmer Nappy. He also co-wrote ‘Mind My Business’ for Patrice Roberts, arguably the biggest Soca tune of the last decade thanks to going viral on Tik Tok. Mical is also half of System 32, one of my favourite Soca production outfits. He’s built up a strong name and now it’s his time to step out of the shadows.
But the wins don’t stop there for Mical and ‘DNA’. Mical took the title of Young King this year, the island’s second longest running Calypso competition. Plus the huge steel band contest Panorama was won by BP Renegades using ‘DNA’ as their signature tune. It’s too early to tell at the moment, but are we witnessing the next person to take the Soca crown from Machel?
For his part, Machel did not enter any songs into the race for Road March this year, as he’s been working hard towards a masters degree in Carnival Studies. He did however, release one Calypso tune and managed to bag the Calypso Monarch title. I don’t think he’s quite ready to retire just yet.
There really is no better feel good or party music in the world than Soca. If you want to hear more of the tracks released for this year’s season then check out my 2024 playlist, and make sure you tune into the Super Soca Show with Dub Boy and Atki2, from Midday (GMT) every Saturday on Ujima 98FM Bristol (or online here).
