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:
“The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)