Soca

Soca is a dance music which is a mix of Trinidad's calypso and Indian music and rhythms, especially chutney music -- it is not, as is often said, a fusion of soul and calypso. It combines the melodic lilting sound of calypso with an insistent percussion.

The acknowledged father of soca was Lord Shorty (né Garfield Blackman), whose 1963 recording of "Cloak and Dagger" started the trend. Shorty experimented with calypso by adding Indian rhythm instruments like the dhantal, tabla and dholak. His "Ïndrani" was the first mainstream hit from the genre, and was followed by a watershed album called Endless Vibrations, which spawned numerous imitators. Lord Shorty initially referred to his musical discovery as "solka", meaning the true "soul of calypso". "Solka" was changed to "Soca" by a musical journalist.

Like calypso, soca was used for both social commentary and risqué humor, though the initial wave of soca acts eschewed the former. Lord Shorty was disillusioned with the genre by the 1980s because soca was being used to "celebrate the female bottom, rather than uplift the spirits of the people".

Soca music has evolved like all other music over the years, with Calypsonians experimenting with other rythms, some examples are:

1. Rapso: trinidad dialect rap with smooth calypso melody and bold lyric.
2. Chutney: A fusion of traditional Indian percussion and style of singing and Clypso, Tempo usually around 154 BPM
3. Ragga soca: A fusion of Jamaican Dancehall style Reggae and Soca

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Soca".