"Calypso in its modern incarnation (from roughly the turn of the century onward, that is) has always been commercially-oriented, always creole and cosmopolitan, always "compromised," shaping and re-shaping itself according to bourgeois imperatives and market forces; this is in great measure what made it "modern" (see, esp., Cowley). ... And as for the U.S. market, calypso had been cultivating it since the first luxury-liners put into port in Trinidad in the early 'teens. ... So if, by the end of World War II, calypsonians had figuratively speaking bought the bungalow (as West Indians did quite literally two decades later, when they snapped up not only the row houses of Flatbush and Crown Heights, but also the cottages of western Long Island), then buying into a dodgy proposition like "world music" amounted to just one more mortgage payment." --The Author
