Music
Music is an important part of the country's culture. Modern Barbados has produced popular stars of calypso and the indigenous spouge style, and also has a large jazz scene. Reggae, soca, and tuk are popular as well.
The vast majority of contemporary Bajan calypso and soca music centers around the five-week Crop Over festival, whose events begin in late May and run throughout the summer, climaxing in the first week of August with the Grand Kadooment (also known as Kadooment Day), a national holiday in Barbados.
Every January, Barbados hosts the Barbados Jazz Festival. In mid-February, Barbados hosts the Barbados Holetown Festival which celebrates the arrival of the first English settlers.
The popular singer Rihanna was born and raised in Barbados. Although the better portion of her work mainly appeals to R&B audiences, Music of the Sun contains a mixture of Barbadian rhythms and American urban-pop songwriting, just as her Loud album has a mixture of Ragga / Ska rhythms, along with Pop music and R&B / Hip Hop. Robyn "Rihanna" Fenty has been declared Barbados' ambassador of Tourism, securing her a seat in the island's political arena, at least for the next 3 years.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Barbados
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“He turned out to belong to the type of publisher who dreams of becoming a male muse to his author, and our brief conjunction ended abruptly upon his suggesting I replace chess by music and make Luzhin a demented violinist.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.”
—Bill Cosby (b. 1937)