Bye Bye Soca Monarch
Unpopular opinion, but it's about time they canceled that farce of a competition. For years the International Soca Monarch (ISM) has been circling the bowl and finally someone has decided to flush it. The surprising yet not surprising part is the reason.
It wasn't because of the usual poor production quality or the dwindling appearances by the main soca stars or the inconsistencies in judging (let's call it that rather than outright thiefing)....no, the organizers decided to blame lack of enough government funding. Ok, that's not surprising given the economic guava season we in. Right now every week is the week before month-end where we eating bread and love or rice and salt butter.
What baffles me is the number of idiots who sincerely believe the government should be responsible for an event owned and managed by a private entity. Rather than put on a proper production and charge a price suitable to earn a profit, people believe it is somehow the government responsibility to ensure that ISM could continue to cheat people like Iwer or Shal and Kerwin every year. Yeah I said it.
I would never forget the year they rob Iwer (I need to be more specific ent). The boss roll in on a plane (a cardboard plane attached to a manlift) with his "Come to Me" song and had the whole stadium shaking like King Bubba belly. I stayed up until sunrise watching that grainy footage like I stealing a feed from my neighbor satellite dish in the 80s, only to see that nonsense.
I would admit, I have no evidence of this, but I feel Machel putting his show on the same day had something to do with it. Maybe ticket sales were lagging. This is not the first time Machel could only find a date that would clash with another big fete to put his big show and we know who usually wins that cage match. First is Machel Monday now is Monk Friday next it go be Hee Haah! Wednesday and Huuy! Thursday.
To be fair though, ISM started dying when the big stars started pulling out (not a fan of pulling out). The quality has gotten progressively worse with the only real entertainment being listening to the tone deaf contestants in the prelims. Allyuh remember the year J Angel announced she was "the future!"? Say no more.
Anyway, maybe ISM will be back bigger and better but I hope the powers that be don't cave to the calls from the misguided public to intervene. If the government wants to be the sugar daddy for every private entity then I find they should sponsor all them big all-inclusive. That way I could pay $100 to eat geera string bean and drink gin whole night.
Somebody talk to somebody and make it happen nah.
TANA