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COPYRIGHT 2002 Center For Black Music Research
"What use will you make of your independence?"--Dr. Eric E. Williams (Cudjoe 1993, 266)
If they hadn't just called it gospelypso, everything would have been fine!
--Roddie Taylor
What might or should a Christian response to national independence sound like? What musical shapes can contribute a constructive, uniquely Christian perspective to a nation-building project? For that matter, how can music perform a redemptive task in a post-colonial, post-Christian society? These questions occupied Trinidadian Protestants during the drive toward political independence from Great Britain beginning in the 1950s and continued unabated after Dr. Eric Williams became the country's first Prime Minister in 1962. The ideological agenda mapped out by the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, furthermore, created an atmosphere within which these questions were transformed into burning issues. (1)
Enter gospelypso! Not that gospelypso was a new innovation--far from it. Rather, gospelypso was refocused and came to be understood as a means of answering many of the questions that so concerned Trinidadian Protestants of the time. More to the point, it provided a vehicle that lent shape to a particular type of response to these issues, for Protestantism itself was engaged in a struggle for independence. Different in kind and degree from the national movement toward political autonomy, Protestant discourse nevertheless drew on nationalist themes and found itself inextricably bound up in the political agendas of the 1960s and 1970s.
This article examines the ethical and religious dilemmas produced when local expressions of Protestant faith in Trinidad and Tobago intersect with a transplanted, North American, Pentecostal worship-ideal. Specifically, it investigates the central place that gospelypso occupies in mediating and articulating these dilemmas. Because gospelypso has in large part grown out of Pentecostal churches and in order to contextualize the discussion that follows, I should like briefly to review a few key aspects of the Pentecostal presence in Trinidad and Tobago.
Pentecostal missionaries invited themselves into Trinidadian history during the middle third of the twentieth century and introduced a new paradigm for thinking about and performing worship. The missionaries preached a faith and practice that refocused and heavily emphasized the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Christianity. The importance that Pentecostalists placed (and continue to place) on spiritual gifts, healing, and the work of the Holy Spirit within the church offer the most striking evidence of this new emphasis. While these teachings were not wholly absent in the worship-life of other denominations, the Pentecostal message placed them center-stage, making that message a powerful and unique alternative to more long-lived paradigms.
Pentecostalism, however, not only challenged the practices of the Baptist, Methodist, and Moravian denominations, among others, but it also necessitated certain equivocations and adjustments on the part of new converts. North American Pentecostal missionaries were working in Trinidad and Tobago at the very moment that national independence from Great Britain became a political reality; moreover, the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s forcibly articulated the need for, and right to, autonomy, thereby strongly influencing the thinking of Trinidadian Protestants.
Eric Williams himself, attempting to maintain the credibility of his party's political platform during the height of the unrest, put the following spin on the task at hand: "[The people] must, after more than four hundred years of being acted upon, act for themselves" (quoted in Cudjoe 1993, 92). The ironies embedded in this statement notwithstanding, strong currents of national pride and cultural empowerment were indeed enjoying wide circulation even as missionaries were spreading their good news. Consequently, an overarching ethical dilemma came to occupy local Pentecostal discourse about worship during the 1970s and 1980s--a dilemma focused on fundamental questions concerning the appropriate measure of national autonomy and the proper place of cultural identity within the larger Christian community in Trinidad and Tobago.
Within this religious and political context, music provided an expressive mode through which competing visions of Protestant Trinidad and Tobago could be articulated. In fact, I suggest that musical style was, and continues to be, so closely linked to the ethical concerns of Protestants in Trinidad and Tobago that it is possible to formulate a concept that I call the "ethics of style," which is constituted in and through a discursive field within which religious histories, political agendas, doctrinal imperatives, personal aesthetics, and communal identities intersect with one another and find musical expression. It is principally concerned with the performative linkages forged from those intersections and with the ethical freight that musical style is subsequently obliged to carry. It constitutes a flexible, scalable approach to the myriad internal and external ethical challenges confronting Trinidadian Protestants, an approach that clears space for multiple levels of local agency. The ethics of style is continually being enunciated from different subject positions, creating vastly different interpretations of the same musical and historical situations and challenging dominant articulations in the process. In other words, the ethics of style is both the product of and the catalyst for mutivalent discourses about music and practice in Protestant Trinidad and Tobago. Throughout this article, I seek to illustrate the ways through which the ethics of style has become a highly sophisticated mechanism of local control over religious identity, and in order to illustrate this concept, the following pages offer an analysis of gospelypso's reception history.
Stuart Hall (1996, 4) cautions us that, "Precisely because identifies are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies." With this advice in mind, we can trace the beginnings of modern gospelypso in Trinidad and Tobago from the early 1970s. It was during this decade that pioneering artists associated with the Youth for Christ organization coined the term gospelypso and began to wield the style in direct, Christian response to the imperatives laid out by the Black Power movement, acting for themselves after four hundred years. Following the watchwords of the Youth for Christ organization--'Geared to the Times, Anchored to the Rock'--artists worked to organize the first gospelypso concert at Greyfriar's Hall in Port of Spain on February 5, 1972. The concert was deliberately planned to coincide with the height of the carnival season and demonstrated the commitment of Youth for Christ members to reaching their nation with the gospel. This, then, constitutes the historical site and moment within which artists chose their enunciative strategy--gospelypso.
What necessitated this new use of style? A partial answer lies in the institutions within which the artists were at home. Trinidadian Pentecostalists had inherited an American, intensely spiritualized, and by this I mean gnostic, faith that demanded surrender to the rightness and superiority of the cultural and aesthetic models that the missionaries left behind. (2) In a discussion of the basic "turn within" that characterizes gnosticism, Philip Lee (1987, 10) observes, "the concentration on self is a natural result of the passionate need to escape the world. Because no one can escape the real [or physical] world except by death (suicide being the ultimate self-actualized escape), the only other solution is to effect an escape by withdrawal into the self." Lee seeks to illustrate that Christians have historically approached gnosticism through the act of pitting the physical (evil) world against the spiritual (pure/good) world.
The problem with denying the physical is that the physical world--along with its attendant complications such as environmental concerns, social welfare programs, world poverty, and...
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