Radio Tank: for centuries, carnival's liberating ... - Tank Magazine

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Radio Tank: for centuries, carnival’s liberating celebrations have contained the blueprints for another world. Art by José Luis Pescador, words by Adam Bychawski

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Carnivals as we know them today are no longer localised celebrations. The most renowned, from Rio to London, have grown into spectacular tourist attractions that draw millions of revellers from across the WORLD.

To understand the story of carnival, we must begin in medieval Europe: In the 13th and 14th centurIES, the catholic church attempted to rein in the ecstatic and hedonistic forms of worship – possession, speaking in tongues, drinking and dancing – that early Christians had inherited from Greek mystery religions.

Until the late medieval period such wild behaviour remained common in churches, even priests and nuns were known to participate.

The influence of corporations loom large over them, as does the presence of police and the hand of the state.

But that has not always been the case: carnivals have served as the crucible for civil rights movements, independence campaigns AND revolutions – musical and political.

With a complete ban almost impossible to impose, church leaders instead allowed the festivities to continue on the condition THAT they took place on religious holidays and outside OF church grounds.

The compromise inadvertently invented carnival: the dozens of festivities that filled up the catholic calendar, now no longer confined to the church itself, became, in effect, secularised.

Much to the chagrin of church authorities, an epidemic of dancING mania spread across northern Europe.

One outbreak of frenzied dancing, which began in Aachen, Germany in 1374, lasted four months, gradually spreading from city to city. It culminated IN 1,100 people dancing simultaneously in the city of Metz. attempts to exorcise the dancers provided ineffective.

The contagious, ecstatic dissent alarmed both the church and the state AS it posed a threat to the church’s monopoly ON the divine and incited violent revolts.

THE CARNIVALESQUE INVERSION of hierarchies has long been a source of interest to scholars. In 1965, the Russian academic Mikhail Bakhtin published a book ON the 15th-century French writer François Rabelais. LOOKING at Rabelais’s WRITING ON FOLK CULTURE, Bakhtin wrote that carnival offerS “a second life outside officialdom” where people were liberated from political and religious dictates.

carnival is the world standing on its head

Carnivals also PROVIDED an occasion to send up the local, secular and church authorities.

One of the traditions of carnival is thIS mocking ritual. During the celebrations, social hierarchies were temporarily inverted with the village fool crowned king – the local baron, by implication, taking THE FOOL’S place.

In Europe, the king of fools has its roots in the Feast of Fools, an event created by the lower rungs of the clergy. This parody OF A mass involved clergyMEN dressing in women’s clothes, replacing the priest’s censer with a sausage and CONDUCTING the usual Latin incantations IN gibberish.

Some critics ARGUE that carnival strengthens authority rather than contesting it, serving as a release valve in which anarchic energies are safely UNLEASHED. In Europe, at least, this proved to be true: carnival gradually became formalised by the Renaissance. Only centuries later, ON a different continent, would a subjugated people finally realise the latent revolutionary potential in carnival.

Recognising the subversive power of the instrument, the colonial government attempted to prohibit drumming in 1884.

From the 16th century onwards, Europeans plundered, enslaved and colonised vast swathes of the WORLD.

European settlers brought the traditions of carnival with them to the colonies.

But musicians soon found ways around the ban, using bamboo – an abundant natural resource – as a percussive instrument. Bamboo groups (or tamboo bamboo) soon became the sound of carnival.

During the Second World War, tRINIDAD island was used as a base by the US Navy. Oil drums were LEFT in abundance and musicians began experimenting with them. By the V.E. Day celebrations of 1945, they had become integral to carnival.

Kasio also evolved over the decades into modern calypso. Long before hip-hop, calypso played a similar role, with calypsonians often – but not exclusively – providing commentary on political events.

In Trinidad, carnival was initially a white celebration imported by French colonists WHO would often dress as slaves for the occasion.

Once Trinidadian slaves were emancipated in 1838, they begAn TO THROW their own annual event to celebrate their freedom, appropriating elements of French carnival alongside African-derived traditions, in turn mocking the elites.

By 1934, the authorities had also banned tamboo bamboo and, following increasing calls for independence, songs “that insult members of the upper class”.

The majority of crime is through poverty because/The high cost of living, lord!/Higher than a mountain/People like me and you so/Have to stand up and watch the goods at Hi-Lo * *mighty sparrow

In 1943, a young calypsonian named Lord Invader debuted a new song that militated against RACISM – not just in Trinidad but in the diaspora as well. It became an instant hit and was later popularised in the US by THE SINGER Lead belly.

Negro fought in World War One and Two, So if Negro are good enough to fight, I don’t see why we can’t have equal rights

Music was central to the festivities. The participants sang kaiso, narrative song from west africa with lyrics that satirised the island’s white elites. Drums also played a crucial role. As the scholar Dawn K. Batson writes: “they gave voice to the confusion, pain and strength of a people brought against their will from Africa to the New World.”

over a century after the abolition of slavery in Trinidad, the descendants of former slaves BEGAN TO MIGRATE to the nations that had colonised them. Caribbean immigrants brought with them a radically reinvented form of the Lenten celebrations that the Europeans had imported to the West Indies.

Among them was one of Trinidad’s top calypsonians known as Lord Kitchener. His arrival was caught on camera by a News reporter, who asked him to sing. Kitchener didn’t miss a beat.

In responsE, a Trinidadian communist CALLED Claudia Jones, who had been imprisoned in the US for her political activISM, WAS inspired by her memories of carnival to celebrate Caribbean arts and culture WITH AN EVENT.

London is the place for me

In 1948, the Empire Windrush, a former German cruise ship that was captured by the British, CARRIED the first wave of WestIndian immigrants to Britain.

His optimistic outlook would soon be tempered by the harsh realities of urban life as a person of colour. AS WAS CLEAR FROM SONGS like “My Landlady”.

But it was his 1957 song “Birth of Ghana”, marking the country’s independence, that struck a chord in Ghana and back home.

A dirty sheet with half of a blanket

And she has the audacity

We will be jolly, merry and gay, the 6th of March Independence Day

First staged indoors at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959, the carnival included costumed masquerade bands, WITH performances of drama, poetry and steel band music. Calypso also featured prominently.

To tell me I’m living in luxury

By 1958, with the rise of facist and nationalist groups and growing calls for BORDER control, raciST attacks WERE REGULAR IN BRITAIN. That summer, violence erupted in the streets of Notting Hill after armed teddy boys OPENLY ATTACKED West-Indian residents.

The carnival quickly outgrew its humble beginnings and spilled out onto the streets of Notting Hill in 1966. As communities from across the West Indies became involved, carnival came to reflect Barbadian, Dominican and Jamaican traditions as well as those of Trinidad.

The Notting Hill carnival has been the soundtrack to Britain’s multicultural evolution since the 1960s. Its sound reflects the music of the “Black Atlantic”, the scholar Paul Gilroy’s term for a fluid, black identity born from slavery and forced migration, which encompasses everything from calypso to hip-hop, jazz to techno. it has also served as the catalyst and testing ground for new sounds. The black Atlantic links artists as diverse as Mamady Keïta, Sister Nancy and Drexciya’s James Stinson.

jungle is a collision of hardcore, Jamaican dub and the breakbeats of american hip-hop. it emerged from the immigrant communities of 1990s London.

Some musical revolutions have even emerged in opposition to established carnivals. In Brazil, Rio carnival began as a marginalised and illegal practice but over the course of the 20th century it became increasingly commodified, co-opted and institutionalised.

Jungle was black Britain’s answer to the musics of the Afro-Carribean and AfricanAmericans; it unified the diasporic musical traditions encapsulated by carnival and provided a new sense of identity grounded in London.

Goldie, one of the most famous producers in jungle, fittingly described the sound as “ghetto blues for the nineties”.

The gentrification of carnival has led to the growth of new cultures in the favelas, such as funk carioca, which offers a greater sense of participation than the event proper.

Originating in the 1980s, funk carioca borrows heavily from the hip-hop sub-genre Miami bass. In 1998, DJ Luciano Oliveira made the sound his own by combining capoeira, candomblé and maculelê drums with 808 bass. The resulting loop would dominate funk carioca for years to come. In bringing together disparate communities, carnival has forged solidarity between ethnic groups and, in the process, brought about musical transformations. In Trinidad, a new musical style, soca, arose in the early 1970s with the explicit aim of “uniting the East Indian and African peoples”, according to its creator Ras Shorty I, by fusing traditional calypso with east-Indian rhythms.

To unite people as one ah create a song

Ah hope it live on from generation to generation

By the late 1980s soca became the dominant music of carnival. Although soca today features few Indian sounds, it remains emblematic of a pan-West Indian identity.

Hundreds of parties, called funk bailes, where MCs and DJs perform on huge sound systems, take place in the favelas each weekend. Strict government legislation makes it almost impossible for events to be held legally and many are shutdown by the police.

Like samba before it, which was also born in the slums, it remains to be seen whether the genre will eventually be celebrated rather than demonised.

As Rio carnival has become synonymous with the establishment, funk carioca has supplanted it as the chief expression of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque”.

It’s possible to see traces of the carnivalesque in the seizures of public space that have defined Greek protests against austerity in 2010 and 2011 ...

Since the 1960s, many other cultures have gathered and celebrated in ways that fit bakhtin’s definitions of carnival. and Much like in the late Medieval ages, carnival in the 20th century and 21st century has found new life outside of its licensed forms.

In 1967, the belgian situationist Raoul Vaneigem conceived a theory of carnival as a model for revolution. He wrote, in his book The Revolution of Everyday Life ...

... the UK student protests of 2010 ...

... the Tahrir Square protests in 2011 ...

... and the 2011 Spanish indignados movement.

In 2012, as part of the protests against the re-election of Vladimir Putin, Pussy Riot performed an iconoclastic punk prayer in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on shrove Tuesday, the traditional date of the Lenten carnival.

The following year, Paris was overtaken by a wave of student protests.

revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society

Vaneigem’s concept of “revolutionary carnival” has since been taken up by other movements. In 1999, the activist group Reclaim the Streets organised a global “Carnival Against Capitalism” to coincide with the G8 summit.

From Brazil to Zimbabwe, there were protests in 40 different countries. In London, thousands of people turned Europe’s largest financial centre upside-down, while a Carnival of the Oppressed in Nigeria brought nearly 10,000 Ogoni, Ijaw, and other tribes together to close down the country’s oil capital, Port Harcourt.

While the protests themselves may be short-lived and often brutally repressed, they have nevertheless served as the foundations for longer political projects.

Bahkin saw carnival as a “second world” in which people are liberated, albeit briefly, from the oppressive structures that govern their lives. Today, the carnivalesque revolts occurring across the globe are a blueprint for that other world.

THE END