New Mode Caribbean Music

Hoa Chung

Professor: D. Keller

Music 104

February 26th, 2019

New Mode Caribbean Music

The transatlantic slave trade, which lasted from the 16th to 19th centuries, found millions of people taken from their homes in central and western Africa and shipped across the ocean to work in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Toiling as unpaid laborers on sugar, coffee, cocoa and cotton plantations, in gold and silver mines, and as servants in houses, these enslaved people took with them the rich and vibrant cultural traditions of their homelands. Over time, as slavery ended and governments changed hands, these cultures began to blend with that of their colonial rulers (the English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese).In some cases, they also incorporated influences from the area’s native Arawak Indian populations, forging new fusions that stand today as a testament to the beauty of integration. This is the reason Caribbean music styles and other cultural elements are so rich.

In recent years globalization has been identified, particularly by developing nations, as a source of major challenges, and in some cases a threat to their very survival. However, its musical manifestation precedes the widespread use of the term in political contexts, and the representation of the Caribbean’s popular music provides key evidence of this. A central concern of most small cultures is the assimilation and utilization of foreign influences without distorting the content and representation of the local. Typically, the recording industry’s corporate motivations have been capitalist rather than cultural, rarely synthesizing the two successfully. This raises concerns about the legitimate representation of the music and the communities from which it emerges, when commercialization dilutes the art to the point where it may become only product.

Caribbean music is in a new mode because of the result of development year after year, in the contemporary, and the African antecedents retained in the region's religious rituals now. This chapter further contends that in the African derived context, no distinction is made between sacred and secular, and that popular festivals like carnival, rara, junkannu, or grambay are rooted in an Afro - religious mode. In this respect, one finds commonality of themes, the major ones being cultural, affirmation, aspirations to freedom. Cultures was mixed is a main reason for departure from traditional presentation of music and culture of the Caribbean.