The 2025 Carnival songs fill the airwaves right now. Generally, they focus on tempo more than rhythm, and much less on lyrics which are difficult to grasp without repeated listening.
This is not a lament for the good old days, but the current style makes it hard to argue that our songwriting is poetic. Sparrow, Kitchener, Baron and some of the younger singers use the rhythmic quality of language to express ideas in their songs, which gives them a poetic nature but is not the norm now. The sensibility has changed.
The argument about whether the two world-renowned songwriters Bob Marley and Bob Dylan were/are poets is an interesting one, because it reveals who the purists are. They think poetry is all about language, but it is not. Poetry uses sonic devices that produce a mood in us, just as songs do when lyrics are set to music. It’s instructive that Bob Dylan received the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, not poetry.
It means that while his lyrics may not be poetry exactly, his body of writing constitutes literature. According to the Poetry Society, poetry is literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound and rhythm.
Carnival purists might argue that soca does that for them. So be it.
Bob Dylan, the Minnesota-born singer, songwriter and guitarist (baptised Robert Zimmerman), is celebrating his 84th birthday this year. He is widely regarded as a genius. His influence on contemporary music culture is profound and his literary influences are wide, from his namesake Dylan Thomas – the Welsh poet, Shakespeare and the great English classics to the early authors of the Beat Generation and the modernist poets. His lyrics are peppered with literary references, from Romeo to Cinderella, and Ophelia to Robin Hood.
The beautifully rendered film about the enigmatic Dylan, A Complete Unknown, which just closed in local cinemas and is up for many awards, is set in 1961, when Dylan appeared on the NY folk scene, and 1965, when he caused a musical revolution by breaking ranks with the folk purists.
The word “revolutionary” belongs to the 1960s, when young people decided not to be versions of their parents, but to challenge what went before. That decade and the 1970s produced vast changes in society, and the arts were an important conduit for that new buzz. It was a kaleidoscope of invention in fashion, literature, dance and most vividly in the multiplicity of musical genres that erupted.
When Dylan arrived in the Big Apple aged just 20, his genre of music was folk and Joan Baez was the young doyenne. His hero was the older composer, singer/songwriter, mouth-organ player and man of letters Woody Guthrie, to whom Dylan dedicated his first significant song. Guthrie was the great touchstone of US folk music, singing about American socialism and anti-fascism that inspired the big folk fandom, both politically and musically. Dylan’s musical trajectory goes from Guthrie-inspired traditional folk to fully
