Rifling Through the Music Attic: Glamour Girl Sue

Today I was excited to see my friend Daniel, who lives in Washington D.C., for many reasons, but the over arching one was to see his face when I played him Madd’s “Maddy Maddy Patrol.” (listen via link below). D. was raised in Dominica (not to confused with the Dominican Republic) but moved to Brooklyn when he was fourteen. Besides a shared Caribbean immigrant status, he and I get nostalgic and slip comfortably back into our accents (mine being Bajan) when we are in his car where the radio is often tuned to any station playing soca or calypso.

Yesterday, for some reason I’m still not sure about, I got the urge to celebrate Christmas the way my parents did before we left Barbados when I was eight. Maybe my memory made this up, a sort of magical remembering, but a Bajan Christmas in my childhood neighbourhood of Deacon’s Farm included pineapple and clove studded ham and healthy volumes of roots reggae. So I started my 2009 Christmas with Sanchez, the Jamaican not quite roots reggae singer most famous for covering Tracy Chapman’s “Can I Hold You Tonight.” As nostalgia always does with me, I associated Sanchez’s songs with a trip to Barbados I’d made back in the early 90s where I’d bought a one-off tape by a comedic calypso group called the Unbannables (one song, “Concorde Panties”, needs to be heard to be believed), who were the creation of the famous Madd Entertainment crew best known for their satirical calypsonian take on island happenings.

This led me to “Maddy Maddy Patrol”, a Madd-produced song I’d virtually forgot about until the opening phrase “Rue, Rue, who you calling you” boomed out of my speakers. I was knocked back to when I was 17 hearing this song for the first time with my sister. By that point, our yearly Barbadian summer vacations had stopped nearly four years before, and she and I were still craving our cousins and anything that sounded remotely Bajan. We had dancehall powerhouses (Shabba Ranks, Patra, Capleton), but nobody with that sing-song accent that Bajans are known for. The fact that the song tells a hysterical story about a truant schoolgirl (Glamour Girl Sue) being admonished by a buffoonish police constable (PC Broomes) to a calypso-doused reinterpretation of MC Hammer “Can’t Touch This” helped to connected us in a humorous way to the island we were so homesick for.

So, it was with great pleasure that I pressed play on my iPhone this afternoon while cruising through the rain with Daniel, and I saw his face light up as he listened to this song story that he’d not heard before. Distinctly Bajan vocally, but West Indian totally. We could not have been happier.

Maddy Maddy Patrol