Tuesday, February 9 2010

TRINITY CROSS recipient Pat Bishop yesterday said she is concerned by the “apparent noisiness” of Carnival music today as she questioned whether the festival had lost sight of its rationale amidst ever changing trends.

“I’m bothered by the apparent noisiness of the electronically driven music,” Bishop, the director of the Lydians choir, said at a luncheon hosted by the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago at the Trinidad Hilton. “I don’t understand the lyrics but whoever said you was to do that?”

In an emotionally-charged speech in which she paid tribute to the late Jamaican academic and cultural theorist Rex Nettleford, Bishop called for a renewed focus on what she termed “our sense of local capacity”. Noting that the funeral for Nettleford, who died this month after suffering a heart attack, will be held on Carnival Tuesday, Bishop said he was an example of a person fearless enough to offer honest assessments.

“This was a man who feared nothing, who had belief in the worth of his people. He was a man who knew Trinidad and Tobago as having more dollars than sense.”

“We have lost our sense of local capacity to do and be. Instead we are constantly looking over our shoulder...Things change, but they must not change in such a way that we are factored out of the play.”