It really is Mas outside. Turning over and pushing back on state imposed violence and order. Mas is about misconduct, a shedding of respectability, chaos, pandemonium, bacchanal in every sense of the word. What a powerful parallel. https://twitter.com/jamilaamarah/status/1266087622142832641

As @drchatakmatak told me, “Mas is the disrupting of respectability and explores the politics of disrespectability.” I can’t shake this. Our means of shaking things up may have a different set of visual optics, but they’re all bound up in the same strive towards liberation.

We center the fun and pageantry of Mas, but times like these remind us that it’s similar praxis being employed.

I’m thinking specifically about Voice, Wuss Ways and Travis World’s “Pandemonium” and how we move from the narrative that “soca is happy music” and reconfigure or tilt our lens to see soca (and similar Caribbean genres) as music that soundtracks and score resistance.

Just a thought, and a loose one at that, but something about this parallel is so illuminating to me right now.

"Lawd, it look like pandemonium, woii, dem people dem don't give a damn, no! Start to run now! Throw everything up in the air! Swing everything up in the air! ...It's a riot in here, Oh lawd!"

The connections here despite the geographical context—of overthrowing colonial, racist, anti-Black, oppressive order—are worth exploring.