As tempers increase over the future of the Parking Meters Project and the manner the project is being implemented, one Guyanese artiste is vocal about the issue but from a humorous standpoint. In an interview with the News Room on Wednesday (March 01, 2017), Dave Martins spoke of the birth of his latest single.
The Guyanese musician and songwriter has done it again, as he skillfully took the controversial parking meter issue and created the perfect lyrics for a song identical to that his hit single ‘Not a blade of Grass’. Dave Martin New Song
His early exposure with calypso music allowed him to create that marriage with the issue and his voice.
Unlike that previous hit, this new song started out as a poem and was never going to make it into a recording studio.
He explained that it was taken from a Louise Bennet poem called “Postponement”.
“I took that concept from her poem and restructured the whole thing around the parking meter thing. I wrote a poem about that and put it in the Newspaper and the reaction to that from a lot of people, because they know me as a music person was ‘this is a song, this is a piece of music’…to cut a long story short, I finally agreed to do the song” he said.
The much loved Artiste further related that a lot of the stuff he has written over the years is as a result of his calypso mentality.
“You see something serious and the Calypsonians say ‘you can get people to discuss this issue or confront this issue better if instead of rowing with them, you bring humor into it and make them laugh at how ridiculous this thing is’” he added as he went on to reference some lines of the song.
“It is ridiculous; the guy driving home with he buckta because the parking meter money taken away, he sell he clothes but in other words, it brings it across in a way that I believe is more acceptable, people and in the middle of that laugh they realize, this thing stupid and true you know.”
Dave said turning his poem into a song and having it recorded only took seven days because of the dynamic team at KrossKolor Records.
“I sat down at home and worked it out into a song, changed some of the verses a little bit, streamlined and more or less wrote a chorus…and went into the studio with all of that fixed. The studio time took about three hours, really quick” he outlined.
With some amount of hesitation Martin believes musicians should be the one to hold up a mirror of what is happening around them.
“The fact of the matter is that Kartel and those people, what they’re doing, they’re not inventing any of that, it is a mirror, they’re holding it up and say look how we doing. That should be the function of the artiste, to tell society you may not recognize this as a problem but this is a problem”
For Dave, his job is completed after creating the song but on the note of a music video, his work is in the hands of the Movement Against Parking Meters given the weeks of footage from their protest in front of City Hall.
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