In Orbit: Bunji Garlin

By Eddie "STATS" Houghton

“In Orbit” spotlights some of the stars joining us at the Planet Brooklyn music and culture festival this weekend. Bunji Garlin, “The Soca Viking,” is set to perform as part of Machel Montano’s all-star show at Barclays Center on Sunday, August 24. Buy your tickets today. 

Soca star Bunji Garlin, arguably the unofficial poet laureate of Trinidad Carnival, returns to NYC to bless the stage at the Planet Brooklyn festival this Sunday, August 24. There, he’ll be sharing the spotlight with a who’s who of Afro-Caribbean music that includes fellow Trinidadian Machel Montano, Jamaica’s Skillibeng, and Ghanaian-American it-girl Moliy (among others).

It’s tempting to gloss this momentous home-away-from-homecoming as a “Return of the King.” Garlin, born Ian Alvarez, is a serial winner of Trinidad’s’ Soca Monarch and International Soca Monarch titles. He is also married to artist Fay-Ann Lyons, herself acknowledged soca royalty, both by virtue of being the daughter of Superblue–the very first artist to win a Soca Monarch title–and her own record-setting string of Soca Monarch and Road March wins. For those looking in from outside, Bunji’s hits, like “Big Bad Soca” and “Differentology” (which garnered a remix from Major Lazer in 2013), more or less define the genre. 2019’s “Famalay,” a call-for-unity anthem and three-way collaboration between Garlin, Montano, and Skinny Fabulous, is literally the first song that pops up if you type “soca” into your streaming platform’s search field.

However, Garlin, a native of Arima in East Trinidad, has taken an unlikely and sometimes lonely road to the top of the heap, a path that winds through Jamaica by way of Brooklyn. In fact, he never set out to make soca at all.

“I started as a battle artist,” Garlin recalls by phone from Miami, a layover on a nonstop global itinerary that at the moment we’re speaking will include Tortuga, Toronto’s Caribana festival, then Grenada before he returns to Planet Brooklyn. “A lot of us, what we call chanters or deejays in my era, that’s what we used to do. We were all battle artists. The high point for us would be when it’s time for clash; lyrical exchange, lyrical warfare.” As the term “clash” indicates, Garlin began his career in the late ‘90s as a dancehall reggae or “ragga” artist, shaped more by the show-no-mercy ethos of Jamaican soundclash culture than the more genteel lyrical duels of Trinidadian calypso. This early trial by fire on Trinidad’s soundclash circuit is immortalized in the memorable verses of Garlin’s underground 2020 hit “The Struggle.”

I come from a different timing/Where you walk on a very thin lining
Was either music or badness and you could lose your life in the rhyming
Many place we woulda go to sing, man have icepick and blades and long things weh shining / And the adversary of the night might enter the venue with a death squad behind him/…the incorrect path of speech could make you end up in the Gulf of Paria / But the mic right and the light bright and you fight like a warrior!

It was by happenstance that Garlin tried his hand at soca, focusing mostly on his homegrown version of dancehall until about 1999, when Garlin was scouted by Darryl Braxton, the producer behind is 1999 soca debut “Send Them Rhythm Crazy.”

“He [Braxton] was in the next room producing something else and he was passing by. He heard me and came in to ask, Who is this, yunno?” A few months later, Braxton approached Garlin to voice a soca rework of Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody” conceived as an answer record to Alison Hinds’ “DJ Ride,” thinking the young deejay’s clash-honed talent for spinning an opponent’s own lyrics against them, judo-like, might make the concept work. 

“That’s what we used to live for, that’s what we was designed for,” emphasizes Garlin. “Everything for me was basically like…you have this, I’ll do a different version of it against you. Flip your version or do something to counteract it.” This danger room-style training left Garlin with a unique vocal style, adding a gravelly minor-keyed edge to soca’s major key power ballads, instantly recognizable by his vivid imagery and poetic wordplay, as on 2022’s “Hard Fete” where he paints a picture of Carnival revelry with couplets like:  “All I know is pace, feathers rough like sea.”

On “Big Bad Soca,” he adopts the royal “we” to speak as the spirit of Carnival itself:

We are the sound of a hundred thousand coming on the road / We are the vibration that you feel when the music load / We are the mud and the oil and we come to dutty up the clothes / And make the gal dem wine an’ strike the electric pose.

Far from undercutting soca’s famously high-tempo energy, the intricacy of these lyrical passages serves to build atmosphere, immersing the listener in the emotion of the moment line by line, something like the panoramic establishing shots of an action film. By the time the chorus of “Big Bad Soca” kicks in, Garlin channeling his considerable lung capacity to match the blazing hornlines and jump-up exhortations more commonly associated with the form, listeners of every nation find themselves ready to wave a flag and shout along “We Are The Sound of Soca!”

If Garlin’s booming voice seems to resonate in New York’s concrete jungle as strongly as it does in Port of Spain’s Queens Park Savannah–traditionally “ground zero” for Trinidad Carnival–it may be because it has been resonating here almost as long. “My first introduction to New York was my first year professionally in soca, 1999” he reminisces. “It was everything in one, my first breakout song, the first year I get to experience [Trinidad] Carnival in real life…and I was blessed enough to be able to receive my first NYC bookin’, because–that time especially– a lot of [NY] promoters would be hagglin’ to have the first show after Trinidad and that year I was fortunate to be on the cast. It was a wild ride for me from day!”

When “Send Them Rhythm Crazy” became a runaway hit and “took life,” New York, and Brooklyn in particular, quickly became a second homebase for Garlin, as it has for so many Caribbean artists. “When you come to this side of the world from Trinidad, you have to make up your mind, this is your base now,” he explains. “Because any time you make a mistake and fly back home, that’s it for your touring season for the rest of the year. No promoter not flyin’ yuh back out from Trinidad!”

With its large pan-Caribbean population and numerous local venues, New York was a natural hub and jumping-off point for any Caribbean artist looking to tour elsewhere in North America. “The whole movement was that,” Garlin expands, “…and I think that’s what contribute to the deep relationship between the soca fraternity and Brooklyn itself. Because what would happen is, all these top-tier artists coming to Brooklyn and then basin’ in Brooklyn, operating from Brooklyn, from the rest a’ the year, straight down to Miami Carnival.”

As with his war reporting on ’90s soundclash, Garlin memorialized this era of Brooklyn soca in a 2016 freestyle that has become a staple of mixtapes and pirate radio broadcasts every Labor Day since, an informal history of soca’s impact in Little Caribbean NYC, complete with a handy guide to the key venues, artists and promoters of the day:

I remember in the early days when Soca had many venue ‘round de place / Club Carnival on Church Avenue right between 37 & 38 / Before Soca Arena turn to Base…Elite Ark, that was the flow / Ian Wiltshire come from Toronto / Throw an all-white party, next week Booze Taylor answer back with the Brass & Glow

Brooklyn’s pan-Caribbean melting pot also afforded Garlin the opportunity to develop his clashing skills even further, taking on competitors of all backgrounds in the freestyle sessions that once sprung up spontaneously in record stores like Brooklyn’s Super Power and Moodie’s Records in The Bronx. His fearlessness and unique flow soon found Garlin sought after by NY’s reggae producers as well, and in the mid-2000s he voiced dancehall songs like “No Heathen” for (Shaggy and Super Cat’s manager) Robert Livingston’s Big Yard label, as well as “Brrrt” (later included in the in-game soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto IV) for Bobby Konders’ Massive B label, all off the strength of these unplanned auditions. “It end up working in my favor,” says Garlin of his focus on battling and improvisation.

“But what it did, it also kinda borderlines you. You’re not able to be seen outside of that, so it took a little while for me to expand. It’s only yeeears later that songs like ‘Differentology’ and ‘Big Bad Soca’ was able to come out. Before that, I wasn’t able to tap into those kinda thing…but one of the person who help guide that is Fay-Ann, because she have a very unique writing skill. She might say I influence her, too, but she influence me a lot, to be able to tap into soca of a more contemporary form.”

If Garlin’s journey to the top tier of soca was more painstaking and circuitous than that of his contemporaries, the struggle nevertheless left him with a stylistic range that is unmatched within the genre, moving easily from the wistfulness of “Carnival Tabanca”—a moody dancefloor anthem that perfectly captures the uniquely Trini concept of tabanca, the emotional low and sense of longing that follows the intense high of carnival celebrations—to the unrelenting energy and detuned 808s of “Road Bunx.” Ragga soca tunes and hybrids like “Jiggle It” (with Kardinal Offishal) and “Free Up” (with dancehall’s warlord Bounty Killer) fit easily between the rap and afrobeats that are staples in London and New York, while “Hard Fete,” “Famalay,” and this year’s “Carry It” are pure power soca, adrenalized African polyrhythms that can clock in at an astonishing 180 bpms.

With this restless eclectism running through his extensive catalog, Garlin is perhaps too much of a stylistic nomad to be a sedentary King of any one genre. Hence, the appropriateness of his longtime nickname, “The Soca Viking,” which nicely captures a certain Beowulf quality to his persona—part warrior, part bard. His griot-like penchant for oral history and his battle-ready spirit anchors Carnival—in its modern form, a major driver of Trinidad & Tobago’s economy via destination tourism—to its more rebellious roots in Canboulay celebrations. In its earliest days, the newly emancipated African population of Trinidad took the Catholic tradition of pre-Lenten Carnival as an opportunity to assert their sovereignty, taking over the streets in celebrations lit by stalks of burning sugar cane and characterized by Kalinda stick-fighting (a martial art depicted in the video for another Garlin/Montano collab, 2017’s “Buss Head”), as well as costumes that both expressed African heritage and satirized the white planters who had so recently oppressed them.

In the hands of a skillful warrior-poet like Bunji, the cultural pride inherent in these hard-fought traditions can inspire a fierce joy and depth of feeling perhaps unequaled in any other genre. Not surprisingly then, competitive feelings can also run high. Recent headlines from T&T have hinted at such feelings between Garlin and Montano, noting the controversy that arose in this year’s Road March competition when a judge publicly favored Montano’s tune “Pardy” before voting was done, effectively putting a thumb on the scales. For his part, however, Garlin seems too much of a warrior to be phased by such minor distractions.

“Those headlines are created by people outside the thing,” he says. “When you’re a competitor, you understand that every time you go in, somebody has to win and that means somebody has to lose. Machel, Fay-Ann, and I have each won and lost so many times that is not something we stress or take personally. It’s all love.” As the genre’s top draws prepare to reunite onstage at Planet Brooklyn, New York fans can rest assured that soca is still a “Famalay” affair.