Soca is as close to an ultimate pop music as I want to get. If you download any random soca track the chances are you will be presented with a song that’s exquisitely catchy, remorselessly danceable and entirely replaceable (by your next d/l, probably). Like other Caribbean pop styles, soca takes a shanty-town approach to song content – whatever’s kicking around, we’ll knock it together. So Mighty Pawol Play mix up drinking, dancing and global terrorism in one of the strangest bits of Apocalypso you’re likely to hear.
Dancehall can slow down if it needs to get heavy (see Jess’ Mr Ring-Ding review); soca is a single-gear music, which of course doesn’t stop it. So ‘Osama Say’ – a call-and-response tune from last year with Simon switched for Bin Laden – jumps in thirty seconds from ‘Osama crippling the world economy’ to ‘Osama say take a bow / Osama say milk a cow’. How the fuck do you make sense of it? ‘Grab a beer / grab a rum / jump up in the burning sun’ Fair enough, then. Feverish, frightening, and funny – get a copy of this before history swallows it.