Music of Haiti
The music of Haiti combines a wide range of influences drawn from the diverse population that has settled on this Caribbean island.
It often has hints of French, African rhythms, Spanish elements and others who have inhabited the island of Hispaniola and minor native Taino influences.
[2] Regardless of its various spellings, compas refers to a complex, ever-changing music genre that fuses African rhythms, European ballroom dancing, and Haitian bourgeois aesthetics.
[3] Haïti Chérie is a traditional patriotic and most recognizable song of Haiti that was written and composed by Dr. Othello Bayard de Cayes and was initially called Souvenir d'Haïti.
Within the Haitian community, at home and abroad, it is widely considered as a second national anthem to La Dessalinienne and the song has recorded several different versions.
Gede, a spirit associated with death and sexuality,[4] is an important spiritual presence in Rara celebrations and often possesses a houngan (male Vodou priest) or mambo (female Vodou priest) before the band begins its procession, blessing the participants and wishing them safe travels for their nightly sojourns.
[5] It is in some ways similar to Son Cubano from Cuba as a result of Haitian migrant laborers who went to work on Cuban sugar plantations at the turn of the 20th century.
[9] Starting in the late 1970s (with discontent surrounding the increasing opulence of the Duvalier dictatorship), youth from Port-au-Prince (and to a lesser extent Cap-Haïtien and other urban areas) began experimenting with new types of life.
They drew inspiration from the global movements such as Black power and Hippies, along with a major influence from reggae superstar Bob Marley and extensively from rural life in Haiti.
The Sanba dressed in the traditional blue denim (karoko) of peasants, eschewed the commercialized and processed life offered by global capitalism, and celebrated the values of communal living.
Later, they adopted matted hair similar to Jamaican dreadlocks, but identified the style as something that existed in Haiti with the term cheve simbi, referring to water spirits.
Both those who stayed and those who traveled between countries began adding more non-Haitian (strictly speaking) elements and implemented a more commercial sound to earn more money and a wider audience.
Compas direct is a modern méringue popularized in 1955 by the Nemours Jean-Baptiste, a Haitian saxophone and guitar player, which was appropriated by the Antilleans who labeled their version cadence-lypso and later, zouk or zouk-love.
However it was too fast, and the style lost ground in the 1980s due to the strong presence of kadans or compas, the main music of the French Antilles.
zouk-love (the current zouk) is the French Antilles cadence or compas, characterized by a slow, soft and sexual rhythm.
Carrefour Collaborative,[13] an NGO based in Chicago, promotes and produces Underground music and musicians in Haiti by providing high end audio recording equipment, video production help and mentors.
Ten days after the 2010 earthquake, the "Hope for Haiti Now" telethon event was launched in the United States, effectively taking over the mediasphere and reaching hundreds of millions of households and viewers.
[15][16] The telethon attracted support through a variety of celebrity musical performances and staged calls for empathy, using digital social networks to disseminate its appeal to the moral responsibility of the viewer-consumers.
It offered the possibility for viewers to text donations on cell phones, and raised a reported $58 million by the day after its launch.
