Carnival Radio: Soca-Calypso Music and Afro-Caribbean Voice in a Restricted Service License Station in Manchester

Abstract

This article examines the sociologial significance of the concepts of voice, dialect, and accent, using as a case study local area commercial and nonprofit radio stations in the northwest of England. The article argues that whereas much of local and regional radio is dominated by a form of working-class voice, this tends to be homogenized and has little relationship to the reality of distinct spatially located communities. However, taking the case of a small scale, restricted service license Afro-Caribbean station in the Moss Side and Hulme inner-city area of Manchester, the author argues that radio can serve the socio-cultural needs of specific and identifiable communities. He elaborates this argument by looking at soca-calypso music, which was a key feature of the station's broadcasting, and adopts Barthes's concept of “grain of voice” as well as the ideas of Appadurai, Gilroy, Bhabha, and Hall in the cultural diaspora and new ethnicities research. The article concludes that similar cultural strategies need to be applied to address the sociocultural problems facing white working-class communities in transition.