BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – SOCA artistes from across the Federation are being asked to keep their ears to the ground as information about the revived Culturama Soca Monarch Competition will be back on stream for the Cultural 2012 Festival slated to begin in early June.
The competition was instituted in 1999 as explained by Culturama Chairman, Antonio ‘Abonaty’ Liburd, but was suspended some five years after because “we did not get the kind of response that we wanted”.
He said the decision was taken to revive the competition having observed the upsurge in the number of local soca artistes and producers in recent times.
“With the amount of young soca artistes and producers who are producing beats on a computer and all of that, we realise that people are now getting into soca and understanding what soca is all about. We want to give these young artistes and these producers an opportunity to bring their music to the public…so we want to reintroduce the Soca Monarch this year.”
He indicated that, much like other soca competitions, it is hoped that the Culturama Soca Monarch Competition would have two categories, the groovy and the power.
The logistics, terms and conditions, criteria and prizes for the competition are still being worked out and the Culturama Chairman said once those processes are completed, an announcement would be made and soca artistes would be welcomed to begin producing and eventually submitting their material.
Until then, however, the artistes are asked to prepare themselves to participate in the regenerated event.
And in highlighting part of the elimination process, Liburd informed, “What I can say is that persons would have to submit their produced or published songs on a CD to the committee and we would have an elimination process from that and then we would decide on the way forward; whether we would have a semi-finals depending on the numbers or whether we would just have the artistes go straight to the finals.”
The Soca Monarch Competition is scheduled for July 28 and will be twinned with the King of de Jungle Band Clash, a move which Liburd said is designed to “bring some hype to the band clash. It started off on a good note then we have seen a decline in the interest from the general public, so we decided to add the soca monarch to it”.
