'Justice' is Kurt Allen's 2020 offering

With parang rapidly giving way to pan music, soca and calypso with the start of the Carnival season, former Calypso Monarch Kurt "Last Badjohn of Calypso" Allen, has released his 2020 composition, Justice.

“I dedicate this song to all those who have lost their lives, those whose lives have forever been disrupted and to those who have experienced directly or indirectly the horrors of crime and violence,” Allen said.

"As part of the song goes, 'I say to you be strong because you are not alone, yesterday it was you, today or tomorrow it could be any one of us. Injustice, we want Justice!'” Allen said that as a calypsonian, he chooses to deal with issues affecting the country.

“I think this is the role of the calypsonian, to deal with serious matters through rhythm and expression,” he said. The digitalised era, he said, is saturated with fake news, alternative facts, social media hype and hysteria, twitter blitzes and rants; where mocking pretenders are taken at face value.

In true kaiso tradition, he said, the song addresses local and global concerns simultaneously, giving voice to the pain of a nation besieged and bewildered by cyclonic violence and frustrated with systemic failure.

Breaking the interview to sing a line from Justice, Allen belted out, “The whole country reeling. Bewilderment at the systemic failure of the state. To stem the flood of violence or convict the perpetrators. And we sure that the system fail/murderers not making no jail.”

The calypso opens with a small child’s cry, “Daddy, Daddy, they want to pull trigger on me” and Allen replies saying children are the future of tomorrow, not simply another statistic of collateral damage.

Allen’s voice was crystal clear when he sang a verse of Justice, “Murder, hear Ramlogan scream; Murder wake me out of this dream; Murder, his son just got an award scholarship to study abroad; Murder, for two pieces of jewelry, he body in the cemetery.” Allen said he knows the essence of true calypso is storytelling and he wanted to describe, in song, the horror experienced by law-abiding citizens.

Allen sang his first calypso composition in 1982 while a student of Curepe Junior Secondary School (now St Joseph Secondary School) and he began singing calypso professionally in 1983, with the song, The Budget, at the Junior Calypso Monarch.

In his career, spanning over 30 years, he won the Young King Calypso Monarch in 1993 and in 2010, he won Calypso Monarch with Too Bright, a song about common sense in the face of crime, poverty and unemployment.

He has placed second in the Calypso Monarch competition on three occasions: 2012, with Long Live Calypso and When Will It End; 2013, with Political Sin-Phony and Black Stalin Say, and in 2014, with: Sweet Sizzling Summer and The Lost Psalm of King David.

Allen will be at the Kaiso Karavan tent, La Joya in St Joseph in the weeks before Carnival.