Let’s start with a warning: This is not a traditional
review. This is a first hand account of an event from a witness of something
great. This is what needs to be known of the happenings of Friday night, where
Celebrate Brooklyn held a free performance in Prospect
Park, showcasing the talents of
soca sensation Machel Montano and BeIO.
Take a trip over to the social media site Twitter.com.
Search for Machel Montano in the hashtag. Look for tweets about the show, and
how wild it actually was.
Wait, GB. There’s only two or three.
Exactly.
One of the reasons there are no tweets is no, not because
Caribbeans don’t roll deep on twitter. It is that it was virtually impossible
to tweet anything about the show from the moment Machel stepped foot on the
stage. It was—pure mayhem. There’s no time to write, “Man, this show is positively
bana…”—someone pushes you from the side, there’s massive lights, the dancers
are wearing black and gold, everyone is jumping up and down and waving their
hands…which leads to the next point.
There was no moment of silence during the show. No recovery.
As soon as BeIO got off the stage, it just seemed as if the crowd couldn’t
handle the silence, and so to fill it, a random steelpan band in the audience
started playing. What in the world—where did they come from? They couldn’t even be
seen, they were surrounded by concert-goers dancing. One could see the sound technicians
just sitting there, temporarily jobless.
Most of the audience is full of seasoned Machel Montano
fans, who know every word to all of his songs, like “So High” and “Mr. Fete.”
Only a snippet of the medley of songs that he played spanning his 30-year
career. But in addition to his own songs, he brought out Farmer Nappy and Patrice
Roberts to sing some of theirs, capping it off with classics such as Destra and
Machel’s “It’s Carnival (Remix)” and “Palance,” by JW & Blaze--soca staples
to any certified party.
And the dancers? Let’s talk about the dancers. These dancers
brought all of the energy, all of the funk, all of the sweat, all of the whine—and
the raunch. It’s something like, Beyonce meets LMFAO’s “I’m Sexy and I Know It," on the way to a Jersey Shore fist-pumping shindig. There were also dancers on stilts in
the audience; it was just, really hype in the venue.
Not that dancing was only for the experienced. Learning the
dancing of soca is kind of like learning the electric slide—slide to the left,
slide to the right. Wave your flag. Jump up and down. Preparation always comes
in the form of a count, “1, 2, 1, 2, 3 go!” Some people manage to even mess
this up, but probably on purpose, because part of the fun is bumping into
people, and the islanders are really good with pardoning themselves.
One thing sensed about Machel is that he works hard. Some
artists don’t work hard. Some artists try hard, some artists are always busy,
but still don’t work hard. And Machel works hard--and yeah, it probably took some time to get to that point. I think there is envy in his
control of the crowd; it is an art, and it is not easily learned. There was not
a dull moment in the show, and at the end, we just prayed for an encore. But
the encore we got was too short. If there was any disappointment at all, it was
that the show was over.--GB
Machel's has recently released the song "Going For Gold," celebrating 50 years of Trinidad and Tobago Independence.
