ABSTRACT
This chapter will attempt to show, using Trinidadian calypso music as its primary source of example, the part that popular music can and does play in a society and how it can actually form the context for social processes against which everyday life is played out. It will take a different approach, attempting to go beyond the common forms of ethnomusicological analysis that concentrate on the composition and performance of music, to look at the more far-reaching effects of its consumption. The concern is not with how music is created but with what may happen to it after it has been conceived, performed, packaged and released for the general public to buy or hear; that is, how a calypso can embed itself in the public consciousness, and as such exert an influence over social processes.
