Bring drinks

In mid-November, Vaughnette posted: “List of favourite local Christmas songs…ah waiting.”

She didn’t wait long. Within two minutes, the first response came, from Marsha Rodriguez: How I Wish I Was A Child Again. A hundred or so of us followed, in a winding trip down memory lane.

I too jumped in, sharing six of mine. None were sentimental childhood favourites, though; each a very adult discovery that stood out for its wit or storytelling.

Daisy Voisin’s lyrical ten-verse nacimiento Esto Se Pasó is the seasonal song with most plays on my iTunes. Its slow crawl, bombast and warm clichés like, “Allá en un ámparo en un pesebre cercano y entre las bestias cristo se nació,” typify so much for me about parang, an artform about which I know too little, and whose well-worn lyrics remain remarkably unpublished.

That made Vaughnette’s list, but I forgot Lord Beginner’s war-era song On Christmas morning, the overnight rum had me yawning. He sings of bouncing up a rhythmic bamboo band, in the Christmas-morning street singing “John-John Cobo, take a stick and you knock down you brother, and you take the stick and you lick down you father.”

The rhythm and dancing women are so infectious they captivate the shoulders of a remonstrating priest outside the Rosary church. Gwendolyn, who “done drink…cacapoul” declares herself “cooler than the pool” and compelled to “entertain Father Christmas,” and invites him to join in the band and “shake up you bone,” “wagging she dustbin” such that Beginner warns she is “edging my teeth, rolling that thing all over the street.”

A tune I could keep on repeat for half-an-hour, over a decade after its release, is Dennis "Sprangalang" Hall’s soca parang Bring Drinks. Not only does he best Crazy at Spranglish, but Hall’s superior ability to set a scene persists from start to finish, in both the sung and spoken text (the singing has stopped two minutes before the end). There’s no wittier invocation of the drunkenness of paranging. “Explease me cuse, amigos, a toast I bring to you: Here we all are gathered today, in a thirsty way.”

The piece’s finest lines are the designated driver monologue: “Mister gentleman: you is to drink, I is to drive…But you telling me: Drink, don’t frighten; you go drive. And two of we drinking…If you know you can’t take the pressure, drink; I go drive. But two of we is not to be the same thing, because one of things go put two of we in trouble.”

The melodic mid-relationship romance of Baron’s Come Go is one of the last of these tunes I discovered. It reprises the theme of the frustrated parandero’s partner, with an admirable tenderness: “This year I trying something new. I staying home with you. All the chores I helping you do…So when they come for me, I want you go with me. Then you go see how the parang does have me. Now you go know why I love my parang so. Just come along; you don’t bound to learn the song.” And perhaps that was the woman putting French into the parang at the end.

An even more poignant tune work on the list was Penitentiary Parang, Breed’s lament of Christmas behind bars: “They could make a big man cry. You done know how I love parang already. Whole day is water in my eye.”

“For breakfast Christmas morning, two hard hopsbread…If you eat five of them bread, just so you could dead. Coco killing you nature slow. In one bread, a take of butter small so; in the next one piece of cheese thin like a page…If you think of Christmas lunch in remand yard, boy you bound to regret…Is old turkey with no seasoning they does boil in some dirty water. The peas you getting smelling like lamp oil. And the rice grain and them hard like bangra…Well they run a Christmas bag, that was trouble…a plastic bag with a Kiss cake and a apple. In my bag I notice some water. When I check my bag, the apple rotten. So I call the officer. He tell me: Sorry, Breed, boy I can’t do nothing. You have to wait till next December.”

The final two tunes are about dogs. In Pitbull, Melan Garcia shares a (thwarted) “plan for all wayward parang band.” In previous years, “when I had one pothound alone, by Christmas I down to hambone. But this year I have a plan…Two pitbulls I want. One in the back, and one in the front. Let them sing they parang from far…If was long time they had me…creeping through my kitchen…Now is pitbull in they pweffen. They eh coming here for nothing…I have rum to last me till Carnival.”

The best lyrics of my favourite, Pothound, Conqueror’s slurring plans for a Christmas return home to parang, aren’t pressworthy. But, “Tie you pothound in the backyard!”