Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture hosted by me, alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello, we are back with another episode. I am Alexandria and, as always, I'm tremendously excited to continue learning and sharing the stories that make our Caribbean community and diaspora beautiful and unique, especially in today's episode, where we are focusing on one of my favorite things in the world, as you all likely know music. As a region, we have contributed so so many music genres to the world and influenced the creation of so many others.

Speaker 1: 0:50

Today, we are discussing one genre that you may or may not have heard of whilers. But before we jump in, I will introduce our lovely guest joining me today, dr Jessica Swanston-Baker, assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago and the author of Island Time Speed and the Archipelago from St Kitts and Nevis, which is due out by University of Chicago Press this October. So, dr Swanson-Baker, it is so great to have you. Why don't you kick us off a little bit with you telling us, of course, where is near and dear to you in the Caribbean and what inspired your passion for Caribbean music and ethnomusicology?

Speaker 2: 1:30

Yes, thank you, alexandria, so much for having me. Thanks for the invitation. It's always like such a pleasure to be able to talk about the Caribbean, to talk about music, because I, like you, feel so connected to the region through the sounds that come from it and, yes, big up to the Caribbean as being, like, disproportionately responsible for the sounds that we know of globally as popular music. So I like to think of myself as a Caribbeanist, as a musicologist, because I think a big part of my whole spiel is the fact that the Caribbean as a region is just like this infinitely entangled space where our ability to know anything about one part of it, one genre, is so dependent on our ability to think with the rest of the space, um, and that's why I think of the archipelago as such, like a useful geographical form for that um, and that's you heard that in the title of my book. That's one of the central themes of my work.

Speaker 2: 2:25

But maybe more important than like the theory or the archipelago, is the fact that my mom and my dad, respectively, are from St Kitts and Nevis and, as far as I understand, generations before them also were from these two islands and Anguilla and other small islands of the Leeward. So I think of myself as a daughter of the leeward archipelago, what I know about myself and my family, thinking about my grandfather. He was a Calypsonian and instrumentalist. Most of my uncles also played music. My father was a gigging studio bassist and vocalist for decades. In New York City, where I'm from, my cousins all sing. I'm a singer, and so my relationship to the Caribbean in music is kind of one and the same. I know myself as a Caribbean person or as a petition division descendant because of being steeped in the music that comes from that space.

Speaker 1: 3:21

I always love hearing what our impetuses were for beginning our careers in academia, right, I think sometimes there's that impression that, you know, scholars just go to a place and are outsiders, which are some people's stories from the Caribbean, of the Caribbean diaspora. It's beautiful for all these things to come full circle, which we are definitely going to talk about a little bit more later on in our discussion. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, why don't we start off with the history of whilers, right? As I said, I don't know how many people are familiar with whilers as one of our genres of the region, especially native to St Kitts and Nevis, so could you tell us a little bit about how it came to be and its origins and things to that nature?

Speaker 2: 4:12

Sure, I realize that your first question. You asked me about how I came to ethnomusicology. Would it be worth me talking about that a little bit more? Sure, sure, okay. So I said that my family was really musical and part of that was also my parents being rather intense about musical training. I started piano at three. When I got to high school I realized that it was voice that I was mostly interested in and decided to do a bachelor's degree in vocal performance. But I ended up in a small music department that believed very intensely that the music work singing and studying was Western classical music. And when I talk to my undergraduates now it feels like this was like centuries ago, that that would be the case, that there would be spaces that would not see Black musical traditions as legitimate music. But I'm telling you that in the early 2000s that was still very much the case for me. And so I came to ethnomusicology.

Speaker 2: 5:09

I feel like a lot of ethnomusicologists and perhaps like the field altogether as a kind of haven for folks who wanted to think seriously about musics outside of the Western canon. And so I think of ethnomusicology as a because of ethnography, our ability to think with people, to not necessarily have to rely on archives, which I think in my experience I'm curious about your experience too, alexandria that like sometimes that archives are kind of scant or because they, if there are archives, are gonna be colonial archives mostly, and so it's still this process of like reading through the lines for the thing that you're actually getting at. But ethoneucology, I found, was a field that was interested in talking to folks. I was interested in alternative methodologies of how we might get at information and that, just like very much appealed to me, and so I found myself as an ethoneucologist because it was a space that I could do the things that I wanted to do.

Speaker 2: 6:06

Now to your second question. You asked about just the history of Wyler's. Wyler's is a form of carnival music that's how I would describe it in the most abridged form from St Kitts and Nevis this. I think it's most easily identifiable by its upbeat tempo, a really consistent like heavy, deep kick drum that you would hear as much as you would feel it, because it is largely happening in very highly amplified spaces. It's like speakers stacked upon speakers upon speakers, um, and I think there's always a synthesized metallic kind of ping pong-y sound.

Speaker 2: 6:47

I've been writing and thinking about Wyler's for a decade now and I still haven't come up with a better term to describe this sound. And because producers are kind of protective of the specific mixture of synthesized sounds that they're using, I haven't gotten anybody to tell me specifically like what button is they pressed or what sound it is that they're using. But to me it's a sound that sounds like iron. It sounds like metal which, if we think about other Caribbean genres the idea of an iron band, the idea of scrap metal in like Antigua, in Trinidad, that it is a kind of distinctly Caribbean sound but there's a particular timbre of it and a tempo of it that happens in wilders. That for me is a really distinctive factor, thinking about how the genre came to be, of course, complicated and I think one could trace several different lines backwards. I'm so hopeful that my work is helpful to people of doing that project, of maybe tracing it somewhere else other than I have, but I think of Wyler's first as a jam band music.

Speaker 2: 7:53

So in the Caribbean, think of a jam band kind of as like an improvisatory sort of band, not necessarily playing original music, but they can be, but something that feels maybe less formal than some of what, like some of my interlocutors called the pretty shirt bands. Right, these tourist bands or bands that were, you know, everyone had on the same floral shirt and we, you know, did a kind of like I don't know robotic, but you know what I mean. So I think of wilders, um, as coming also out of out of the jam band tradition that also was playing like catchy jump up music that was really first intended to incite carnival feeling, feeling of getting loose, releasing energy, and to make audiences go wild. I'm thinking here mostly of the early 1990s, um, but also in the late 1980s we had jam bands. We had, you know, like more kind of electric dance bands that were coming around Before this.

Speaker 2: 8:50

We have a history of like large brass bands in the small island Caribbean that were taking popular hits from around the world and putting them into new arrangements that sounded fiery in a local kind of way. So we can see that kind of trajectory and the going wild part that we get in the 90s and the 2000s really comes from the fact that this music again is carnival music. I like to call it popular music, but to the extent that carnival is so central to so many societies in the Caribbean. So for those of you who haven't been to a carnival A you should find one. There's so many fantastic ones in the region and in the diaspora.

Speaker 2: 9:28

But if you're thinking about being on the road that's the context for carnival on the road, for eight, nine, 10, 12 hours you're jamming, you'll be behind a band, those same stack speakers that we're talking about are rattling your body. Let's say you start out in a Jube context at, let's say, 3 or 4 am by, let's say, 10, 11 am. You've been on the road for a long time and this is when the kind of energy starts to shift. You might think of this as a trance-like state for some people, or just being in a zone where things start to take a turn. I think for those of us who enjoy carnival, this turn can be something that's kind of euphoric. But for audiences or folks on the periphery, perhaps an older generation of folks, this can be kind of a scary moment where people are really moved by music, where they feel like folks are susceptible to the things that a band might be saying. And so if you were chipping along at first, and then now the rhythm changes and there's a distillation of what was happening musically from something that's kind of maybe vibey to something that feels a lot more intense. And this, to me, is what wireless is. It's a distillation of the kind of gooey, energetic core of what soca and carnival music offers. We can think of this and like other traditions like, this is the vamp. This is kind of the break section if we're thinking about like salsa. Right, it's just like. This is the good, heavy part, and I think Wilder's is about condensing that and making that the entirety of the thing.

Speaker 2: 11:03

Again, we can see an example of this from videos like bands like 14 Minus in the early 1990s. There is a YouTube channel I don't know if there's a way to put this in show notes or something, but there's a YouTube channel by someone named Daddy Play SKN and he does such a wonderful job of archiving videos of early 90s and through the 2000s of these small island bands. And you can see in one video that I like very much and that I write about in my book, where you see this band after several hours the rhythm kind of changes. You just have someone chanting and the drums and these kind of weird sounds. It becomes really sparse and then you hear somebody say are you rougher than them? Then push them Rougher than them, jam them, wind your waist and you just sing that over and over again and as much as that is in.

Speaker 2: 11:58

Maybe some sense is nonsensical if you can imagine yourself being in the moment. It's really provocative, um, and I guess for some audience is kind of scary about what happens when you tell people push or jam, and they take it literally and not necessarily metaphorically. So I talk about that as a kind of distillation, it's a condensation, just for the sake of kind of thinking about it metaphorically. And taking 12 hours on the road and Wilders becomes a condensation of just the most kind of energetic part, and I think that Wilders over history, we might think of it as a condensation of a lot of other things, kind of the most energetic or forceful moment of other kinds of practices. So another line of history that we might follow, or at least that I follow, is Christmas sports, and the word sport here refers to a more general use of the term to mean something like to do something for the sake of entertainment, to do something for sport, and so Christmas sports were various practices that emerged and developed in the window of time when enslaved Africans and European indentured servants were able to have an extended period of leisure relatively extended of course, during the days surrounding Christmas and the New Year, and so a lot of these practices participated in different forms of like ridiculing the upper classes, which is standard Caribbean bangs.

Speaker 2: 13:22

Participating in roving bands. I listened to your fascinating episode with Danielle Brown, which you talked about Parang. So think of something similar Christmas time, people mobile on the street playing music, many forms of recitation. This would be when, like you know, a play would be memorized and then recited throughout in a kind of dramatized way. Different kinds of oratorical performances uh, string bands were very popular and then 500 drum ensembles, which in saint pitts and other parts of the leewards would just be called big drum. It's worth noting that big drum is a term that comes up also in a lot of places in the Caribbean, but does refer to different ensembles depending on where you are.

Speaker 2: 14:08

And so, looking throughout history, folks have been lamenting the loss of Christmas sports since, like the 1940s and 1950s. This, to me, the lamentation of the loss, is as integral to Christmas sports as the actual sports themselves, which is kind of an interesting idea about, like, what kind of rituals we consider when we think about a performance practice. But particularly in 1950s, we have folks talking about how clowns and masquerades there were different performances of whatever iterations of cowboys and Indians. This is a time when in the United States we have like a lot of cowboy hero story movies that are being pumped into the Caribbean, so we see how people are receiving this through Christmas sports, the creation of different types of troops, and we're losing this, according to the folks who are lamenting in the 50s because of certain kinds of political uplift regimes that were so central to the push to independence and statehood. And so if Europe or Britain is deciding that these small islands that are not really that useful to them anymore are going to be self-governing in some way, it's also dependent on kind of creating a public that they feel is worthy of self-governance.

Speaker 2: 15:33

And a lot of this is happening internally where the elites, folks who have perhaps left and gotten education elsewhere or just who believe themselves to be like the kind of thinker who can lead, these are folks who are really vocal about the idea that some of the Christmas sports, especially the, you know the particularly like what's a good word, I want to say a vulgar, maybe the vulgar ones of the Christmas sports should be the ones that are left in the past and that, if we think about, christmas sports be the ones that are left in the past and that if we think about Christmas sports we should be thinking about this in terms of a potential national product.

Speaker 2: 16:10

And so another condensation, I believe, happens there, where the practices of like listening through the slats of another person's house and then turning the gossip that you know from their business into a song, or making real bad fun of the elites, those kinds of practices are kind of sort of left behind and the other ones are amplified, the ones that can become a kind of national product.

Speaker 2: 16:38

So we see by the 1970s that pipe and drum bands, big drum and masquerades become more prominent in the Christmas sports than the other ones.

Speaker 2: 16:47

By the 1980s, when we have the tourism product that's necessary. This is when we have another kind of condensation where something like a big drum performance that would be like maybe all day of, like a band roving around, and a relatively short portion of it would be like the energetic, gooey part, like I was talking about on the road, that at some point kind of became the bulk of it, like this fancy, flying feathers, intense kind of performance became really emblematic of St Kitts and Nevis. And so I think that if we might think about Wyler's as a product of Christmas sports, wyler's as a product of carnival, but Wyler's also a product of 1980s technological innovations, which meant that folks had synthesizers to be able to translate what it is that they were hearing into their own kind of personal sound, and we might understand how, like, a condensation of these different things comes through in the music that we're hearing in the 2000s, which is my personal favorite era of Wilder's music.

Speaker 1: 17:51

I really appreciate you setting that scene for us, obviously for us to more deeply understand the history of Wilder's, but also the connections or interlocutors that you raised right.

Speaker 1: 18:02

We are now obviously you tied to Dr Brown talking about Parang.

Speaker 1: 18:08

You know, while we all have our own carnivals, we all also have our own individual histories and frameworks and things that these come from right, and so that's one thing that I think is always so powerful for me in terms of studying music it's that Caribbean music is our history in a lot of ways, and I really appreciate the way that you were able to not only share with us the history of Wyler's and its formation and evolution, but also you know the evolution of St Kitts and Nevis and all of the political movements, and you know resistance strategies as well, and I will be sure to definitely link Daddy Play SKN in our Strictly Fact syllabus.

Speaker 1: 18:49

So don't worry about that, for our listeners, you will see that on our website. You raised a point that also, obviously, is the focal point of your book as well, and it's this idea that the tempo, or you know, there's this perception of Wyler's being crazy, being fearful potentially, as you were raising right, but also it being fast, right. Where did this notion of it being too fast come from, and how does this idea of Wyler's being too fast compare with, you know, some of the other very numerous Caribbean music genres that we know and love today?

Speaker 2: 20:09

Yeah, thinking about this question, there's also so many ways to answer it, um, so one of the things that's important to know is that everyone was just saying it when I went to St Kitts, when I was doing what I call the field work of course, I've been to St Kitts so many times in other parts of my life, but when I was asking these pointed questions in the context of the dissertation and research, it just kept coming up that what I wanted to talk about, marla, is that folks, the first thing that folks went to talk about was the fact that the music was too fast, and that's why it occurred to me that perhaps being too fast wasn't just about the actual sound of the music, although let's agree that the music is incredibly fast, that that is a feature of it and that a feature of petition and the vision women walking up is that it's like intense and energetic. I think there is something kind of proprietary about the energy and speed of folks in St Kitts and Movers, um, but I think one of the reasons why the music was seen too fast was, like I was saying about this condensed moment, this wilders. The word wilders comes from the fact that the music makes people go wild and wild out, um, and it comes from both sides. It comes from folks who want that and who, you know, enjoy that because they're young and that's what you do, you know, at 17, at three o'clock in the morning, but also from, I think, an older generation of concerned citizens who recognize that the emergence of wilders or the diffusion of wilders was also coinciding with an unprecedented uptick, that the emergence of Wyler's or the diffusion of Wyler's was also coinciding with an unprecedented uptake in violent crime in St Kitts and in this.

Speaker 2: 21:51

This is at a moment in, I think, global politics where there are different I'm thinking here about neoliberalism, like kind of an open economy idea where there's just more movement, I think, in and through St Kitts and Nevis for different kinds of people. I think St Kitts and Nevis in the 1990s is newly drawn into like a global drug trade. I think there's a different kind of public view of St Kitts and Nevis as something, as a place that folks like literally never heard of before, to somewhere that's on a global map, but on a global map because of, maybe, the underworld, of what we think of as globalization, and I think that was terrifying to citizens in St Kitts and Nevis and folks in St Kitts and Nevis who were used to thinking of this place as slower, as a sanctuary, as a kind of haven, as a small place as compared to bigger islands. So I think that's one way that we might one reason why the music became fast. It became kind of representative of the actual feeling of things changing, which I think of as a feeling of speed. But musically speaking it was also too fast because the folks creating it weren't necessarily proper musicians. And so I mentioned earlier that, like music technology of the 80s that became affordable and easily accessible in the 80s and early 90s, we have synthesizers, we have drum machines, which means you can buy a keyboard that is going to have preset sounds in it. And interestingly, a lot of these keyboards that were initially circulating in like Western markets they were preset with like world music sounds. They had Brazilian drums and congas and you know different kinds of iron sounds, triangles and steel pan sounds, so the sounds that were already in the Caribbean. But now they were easily harnessed and accessible to just regular Dianian people, which was kind of new, new, and so it made it so that folks who didn't have to go through the same kind of hoops that older musicians had to.

Speaker 2: 24:07

When I talked to musicians who were really prominent in the 50s and 60s, they were talking about the fact that not only did you have to maybe order an instrument from somewhere far away and wait the six months for it to come on a ship, um, after you had spent a year saving up the money to get the instrument, um, you also like say you did have the wherewithal to form a band. You can just play anywhere. You had to prove to the party promoter or the chair of the whatever social committee that you were a respectable enough band to be playing at their event. This is a long-term process, but by the 2000s a young person could have a keyboard and a cassette or whatever in their room, make 12 rhythm and get speakers from whoever and be playing it at full blast whatever they wanted to on a basketball court at a whatever time of night. And so this idea that you could be visible and audible without going through these particular gates, I think also felt like some younger musicians or were bypassing, you know, the normal temporality of musicianship and I think that also made musicians, older musicians feel like the music was way too fast.

Speaker 2: 25:21

And finally, I think these conversations always in the Caribbean I don't want to say always, but I do kind of think always. I think maybe it's Alexandria, you might have someone who thinks about women in the region and music. I think that even where women aren't audible or visible, there's always this conception of proper womanhood and proper femininity. That seems to be like the straw turning the drain for a lot of these discourses, and so a lot of the discourse that I was hearing about the music being too fast, like even if it didn't stop at talking about women, there were always times where we'd touch on fast girl, fast women, sexual immorality. You know that you're walking up too fast, too hard, too much of your bum is visible, you're jiggling in ways that are not becoming, you know, a respectable person, respectable woman and the idea of respectable motherhood.

Speaker 2: 26:19

You know I went to a high school reunion for one of my aunts and you know it was maybe like a 30th high school reunion and like one of the main topics of conversation was still about how in St Kitts and Nevis, how it's because of bad mothering that there is crime, like all of the problems of the nation can be really pinned on mothers who aren't doing it well enough, and whenever there were women in the dance in a jam on the road, it was always indicative of the fact that she was not otherwise taking care of her responsibilities toward children that she currently had or children she should have been having you, you know or for building whatever kind of wealth or home that she should be participating in as a feminine member of society. And so the idea of too fast in the English language throughout, like the English-speaking world, the idea that girls or women who are too fast are ones who are doing things that men are only allowed to do, was also, I think, a really important contributing factor to why the music was perceived as too fast.

Speaker 1: 27:32

That's a really interesting point, I think, one that even parallels some of the work on Jamaican music right, thinking especially on studies on dance hall, carolyn Cooper's work on dance hall, especially in Slackness, donna Hope several others Shout out to my committee member, donna Hope but yeah, that's a very interesting point to think that, you know, even when women are not always central or as especially like creators of the music or of the genre right, just our mere presence and performance is one that is always sort of put down or demeaned, in a sense, and even something that I'm looking at in my own work on reggae.

Speaker 1: 28:16

So that's a really, you know, interesting point, I think, one that I would love to learn and study more about in terms of how it pervades in St Kitts neo-colonial resistance strategies in a sense, but also those who may be of the earlier generation are sort of also buying into these ideas that have been put in place by our colonial. I don't even like saying for fathers or whatever, um, but yes them, um. You know how that also even affects this idea of the tempo and your analysis of of Wyler's today, and you know its history. How did you get to this sort of these conclusions about Wyler's being too fast and it being seen in, you know these various ways, from the musicianship to Black women's sexuality.

Speaker 2: 29:25

I think this is where the ethnography portion of my project, I guess, shines through the most.

Speaker 2: 29:31

Let's say, if I had to critique my own work, it would be that it's like not always obvious that so much of what I'm coming to is because this is what people were telling me and that may be maybe a conversation about what it's like to do research with, like your family and in the place where you're from, which seems super enticing but has its own kind of methodological kind of obstacles.

Speaker 2: 29:59

I really came to it because it's what people were saying.

Speaker 2: 30:01

It just kept coming up and the fact that it kept coming up in so many different contexts that I do like just saying too fast or focusing on the speed of a thing, of a way somebody is moving a particular song of, when people are describing a song, talking about it just in terms of its speed, talking to musicians outside of St Kitts and Ligets, talking to people from other parts of the Caribbean, and when I would say I'm interested in the condition of visual music, be like, oh that fast stuff, that stuff is too fast. I can't even dance to that, gosh, I'd be out of breath. I don't know how y'all do it, you know, know it's, it's just like became so central. And what's interesting, I feel like about a lot of the way that Caribbean people talk, if you'll allow me to generalize about Caribbean people, is that it's just so poetic and kind of archipelagic. It's like the metaphors just run so deep in a way. And this is I'm not forgetting his name and you will know repeating island I write so much about.

Speaker 1: 31:09

No, is that Benitez?

Speaker 2: 31:12

Yes, benitez Roth, thank you, okay. So I write so much about him, I'm embarrassed, okay. But so the repeating island. The idea, of course, is that, like, we can see all these things from the Caribbean in other parts of the Caribbean, but always in a different way. So if in Cuba it's the way that the wrought iron on a fence is curved, we'll see it in the way that someone moves her hips in Guadalupe and, like you know, it obviously takes a certain kind of eye or, in my argument, a certain kind of ear to be able to pick that up. But I really felt, like in St Kitts and Nevis, that when I'm talking to people or when I'm watching performances, when I go to a queen show, you know, when I hear people gossiping that speed and tempo was just so central to the way that folk were able to categorize behavior without explicitly castigating it. To suggest that was too fast was already pointing to social norms and the ways that it was outside of it. I think, because this project for me is also about my family, it's about my grandfather, it's about my father I don't know if I mentioned my grandfather that I came to ethnomusicology because it was also a space that I was able to do the legitimizing work that my father very explicitly asked me to do about his father who was, like I said, a califsonian and an instrumentalist.

Speaker 2: 32:35

When Roger Abrams and Alan Lomax, who were folklorists, were in the Caribbean in 1962, they were recording in different islands and when they got to Nevis they recorded a few hours or maybe a few songs of my grandfather singing. Later these recordings ended up on some anthologies and there was a whole repatriation project where descendants of Lomax and others who were part of his foundation went to the different islands that they visited to give back copies of these recordings. Many, you know many people didn't even know the recordings existed. It's only kind of through lore Like they'd heard at some point. You know, daddy was recorded, daddy has albums and it, you know, we find out 30 years later that the albums are these field recordings. Anyway, they received these field recordings in Nevis. My uncle was in Nevis at the time. He receives them, sends them back to my dad in the way that Caribbean folk do. You know, this is in a suitcase with a bunch of other stuff, a lot of tamarind jam and, you know like maybe a fruit, clandestine mangoes. Okay, so there's an envelope with these recordings and they were contextualized in terms of, like Alan Lomax and Roger Abrams project.

Speaker 2: 33:51

But my father really wanted more context in terms of us, our family, in terms of the Caribbean, in terms of St Kitts and Nevis, and so he was like, yeah, you seem into all of this research stuff. This is on your plate, jessica, and I've taken that really seriously. Actually, of course, I've had to translate my questions about daddy into questions about the Caribbean region and about small islands and big islands, and what is history and what is the utility of music, and how do we think about tempo and what is the utility of music and how do we think about tempo and what are the methodologies that work when thinking about people who know you, who know your history but see you as outside of it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, these have been questions about my family. I think I lost the thread of my question.

Speaker 1: 34:43

No worries, we were talking about how you got to these conclusions in terms of musician strip and sexuality. But I mean, what you were saying definitely even brought me to my next point. Going into St Kitts and Nevis and you know, doing these recordings, as you noted, right them becoming part of archives abroad without even the knowledge, you know the knowledge and potentially even permission. You know all of that stuff also gets muddled right when sometimes scholars are going into places. But what it was like for you and your family to even find out about that was, you know. One of my following questions and I guess to pivot from and sort of continue on that point, what advice do you have for any of us from the region, you know, hoping to write the stories of our families and of our ancestors in ways that are meaningful, ancestors in ways that are meaningful, and you know, especially in your case, to not necessarily challenge but maybe better expound the work that has been done before.

Speaker 2: 35:54

I was thinking a lot about this, about, like, what kind of advice I would give and you know, of course, advice always comes from this place of what you wish you had done better, or at least for me it does.

Speaker 2: 36:06

Um, I will say one thing that has been surprising to me, and is how quickly all of the kind of archival spaces, whatever they may be, whether it be like one woman on Facebook who posts very often or, you know, a national archive how quickly these things do actually change.

Speaker 2: 36:25

I think it's maybe easy to say that I checked in this one place for something and it wasn't there, or I didn't find what I wanted, and now I have to move on, but I'm finding that in the Caribbean, really broadly, that folks are very quickly recognizing the importance, the utility, the relevance of, like their family trove of things of cassette tapes, of pictures and it's becoming even more commonplace to be posting those things or to recognize that they could be donated to a national archive.

Speaker 2: 37:02

And so I think that maybe part of this is recognizing that whatever story you're writing and telling is a living thing. It's a living, breathing, ongoing kind of story. There is no definitive history of you or me, or Wyler's or Reggae right. There is a story that we can tell and that the archives are changing and the stories are changing too. So in one way, this is about not giving up because you may go back to a place and find that there's new information, but also being perhaps not so tethered to the idea that there is one way to talk about the thing that you're interested in.

Speaker 1: 37:40

Beautiful, thank you, I mean I think I will take that into account for my own research. No-transcript or patriarchal perspective, one-sided perspective in some regards. So I take that for myself but also hope that it is helpful for several of our listeners. We have gone from whilers to writing in, I think, a beautiful and organic way, but I do definitely, in addition to Daddy Play SKN, I definitely do want to give our listeners some more ways to check out and listen to Wyler's music. It's something that I enjoy doing and compiling playlists and things of all the songs that we discuss here on Strictly Facts. So what are some of your favorite Wyler songs? Or you know videos, albums etc. That you could share with us that I will add to our Strictly Facts syllabus.

Speaker 2: 39:00

Okay, so, in addition to Daddy Play again, this is fantastic, really great repository of like a kind of era of like home video, which you not aren't getting a lot of other places um, and St Kitts and Nevis at least this was the case, you know, over the last several decades is that you kind of have a band and this is your band. You sort of stick to it. I believe that me and my cousin are New Vibes fans. This is kind of we have an allegiance to New Vibes. So I think my first pick for quintessential whilers, even though it's not the fastest, is People's Sugar, which is a song from the 2001, 2002 season by New Vibes. This is one song that a lot of my interlocutors who you know were in their late teens, early 20s, in the 2000s and early 2000s, just remembered this juve so vividly and talked about it with like such detail and kind of reverence. Like this is what wilders and carnival can be, and also it's from it's from an album called Sugar. I'm really interested in the way that Sugar does this very interesting reinvention in St Kitts and Beavis right, like we're thinking about the very source of enslavement that's metamorphosized into, you know, the fuel that is behind the emblematic energy and speed that we think of when we think of contemporary music. So, people sugar, and then the Small Axe Band, which also the fantastic band I am under Brad's head, but Small Axe Band also quintessential Wilders.

Speaker 2: 40:38

I like their album from 2013. It's called World Tour and I think the album does a really good job of showing how the bands that make wilders are also making a lot of other kinds of music. I think there's a song on there called Zouk. There's some that have like a Latin flair and that is part of being, I think, from a small island, but being from the Caribbean in general, which is the idea that you are really familiar with other kinds of styles. You feel like these styles belong to you or are in you in some way and can come through in the music. So even the idea that any one genre is from one place, which is another point that Danielle Brown made on that really fantastic episode that your listeners should listen to if they haven't already. Yeah, I think they do a good job on that album and I really love it.

Speaker 1: 41:26

Perfect. Well, I will, as I said, be sure to add that to our Strictly Backed syllabus and check it out for myself. I always enjoy. You know exploring, as we've talked about today right, exploring our music from across the region, and you know noting the similarities and differences in the sounds that we create. And so for my final question, there are so many ways that I think we can study and document music. There have been people who you know analyze lyrics and performances, aesthetics, you know what somebody might be like wearing in a music video, things of that nature. I've certainly done that in my own work as an ethnomusicologist. What do you think studying tempo adds to our analysis of Caribbean music? And especially in our growing digital world of remixes and cross-genre collaborations and things like that, how can we use tempo to either maintain or track the evolution of Caribbean music genres going forward?

Speaker 2: 42:28

I love this question. It's a really great question. Thank you for asking it, not because I have like a particularly good answer even, but just because I think that tempo is kind of something different than the traditional metrics that we use to recategorize music, you know, and when we're able to use different metrics we get different answers. And, as someone studying the small island Caribbean, that's always kind of the kind of undergirding question is like well, what can I study that allows me to take this place seriously? And I study all of Caribbean music.

Speaker 2: 43:03

Unfortunately, speaking, I should probably be talking about reggae, right, I should be talking about Marley. I should be talking about steel pan. I should be talking about calypso. These are like very legitimate and important genres. I should be talking about salsa. I should be talking about sun. I should be thinking about Cuba. But what questions can I ask to take this space seriously?

Speaker 2: 43:25

And I think tempo is a metric that allows me to think differently about how we're thinking, about what is influential, where things are going and coming from and how people in the Caribbean define themselves sonically, where there is the repeating island timing effect, where it's not exactly the same, but you could trace whatever is happening probably to somewhere else, if you wanted to. As with most places in the Caribbean, there's no kind of origin story. We did not invent pan, we are not the progenitors of reggae or dub, which revolutionizes all of global pop music, but what the folks in St Kitts and Nevis feel like they do have is a kind of lock on tempo, on creating an experience of speed, on pushing the tempo, on being able to perform in such a way that, like you, can keep it at a high tempo for a long time. These are the things that they imagine as proprietary, and I think that, yeah, our ability to talk about different kinds of spaces by looking at different kinds of metrics is really important to our ability to tell a really fulsome story about the region altogether. And I think another thing that was important for me is that when I was first starting to think about tempo and speed, all the literature is thinking about Europe and the United States.

Speaker 2: 44:50

When we think about acceleration, moving forward, being at the forefront, technological innovation, nobody's thinking about the Caribbean for real. It's about accelerationists, it's about cybernetic. It's a conversation that is related to the Caribbean for sure. Um and uh Louis, uh Chudes, soke's work on, like black music and technology, I think does a fantastic job of making it clear that the that there is a bridge between like technological, accelerationist kind of discourse and Caribbean music.

Speaker 2: 45:28

But it occurred to me that the idea of having to innovate quickly and often, of having to kind of anticipate trends, that that is also a decidedly small island attribute. It's necessary. People live on islands and have moved through islands pre-colonially until up till now, and probably forevermore, in a context knowing that their ability to have resources that they need is dependent on a moving throughout, that things are coming from elsewhere, they're going elsewhere. There's this archipelagic idea and so being innovative, changing things up and being like responsive to like what's happening in the world climate, wise, politically and these are also the things that make up acceleration, that make up tempo and speed, and that this is not just the like European people, white people, the US, they don't have an ownership on these ideas.

Speaker 2: 46:33

And when I was able to think about it like that, it also led me to see how something like Wyler's is related to genres like Detroit and Chicago, house music that's also coming around, you know, within the 1980s, young like black youth with a keyboard and a cassette player, thinking of how they can like change the thing around. I'm thinking about New Orleans bounce music to think about like an extended kind of circling Caribbean also is coming from this idea about tempo pushing it a little bit. Um, I'm thinking also about regional hip-hop genres that are also that like, if we think about tempo, other kinds of things come into the fore and then it sort of has to shift the whole thing in a way that I just think is really beautiful.

Speaker 1: 47:13

I am so excited for the book to drop, personally, um, and so I thank you so much, dr Swanson Baker, for joining us for this episode. Um cannot plug enough for everybody to get Island Time Speed and the Archipelago from St Kitts and Nevis when it is out in two weeks, because this is coming out just a few weeks before the book, and so definitely be sure to grab a copy. The link will always be in the show notes in our Strictly Facts syllabus. And again, dr Sw, again dr swanson baker, thank you so much for sharing a bit about whilers with us. I didn't want us to give away too much because I definitely want everybody to check out the book when it comes out.

Speaker 1: 47:55

Um, but, as always, um tremendous episode on music, on the various caribbean musics that we, you know, pivot and shape and change and just create as a region and for our listeners. I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about St Kitts and Nevis, about Wyler's and, of course, about Dr Swanson Baker's history and writing experiences as well. And, as always, little more. Thanks for tuning in to St facts. Visit strictly facts podcastcom for more information from each episode. Follow us at strictly facts pod on instagram and facebook and at strictly facts. Pd on twitter.