This Carnival was the smuttiest in SVG

08.JUL.11

Editor: Thanks for the privilege of writing to your prestigious newspaper. With the carnival season being over, I can’t help but write about some of the songs that bombarded our airways for the past few weeks. I write firstly as christian, then as a teacher.{{more}}

I am over 40 years old, and have been exposed to carnivals for that many years. But, I must say that it has been the smuttiest carnival in the history of this little country of ours! I have been exposed to carnivals for a few years in TnT, the home of carnival, but have never had that much smut in one year! And, that is a much bigger country than ours! I do not wish to impose my Christian values on Carnival, but I wish to speak as a teacher.

It was very sad that our artists could find nothing but these lyrics to use for their ‘songs’. In the history of this country’s carnival, I have never had such a painful time travelling in our vans as I’ve had this year. It was well over ten of these songs that had nothing positive to say to our young people. What values are we cultivating for the future of our country-our young people? Can we go so low that even a natural disaster can be used to portray our depraved minds? Are we so narrow that all that we can think about is just having a song that we consider to be popular, not being cognizant of the innocent minds that we are destroying with the filth that we are exposing them to, at such an early age? What has happened to our values, that all that we can sing about is this trash?

If my definition of culture is still correct, it is “The way of life of a people.” If carnival is a part of our culture, then are we telling our young people the culture of St Vincent and the Grenadines is a depiction of a people who are as filthy-minded as what the 2011 Carnival was? Is it that our culture is the degradation of the female species? Or, better still, that Vincentians are a smutty people? Can’t we sing something that

is clean, wholesome and shoplifting for a change? Can’t we sing something that even our young people can safely sing?

YES, WE CAN!

Susan Wilson