By Jason Sookram
Yearly, Pauline Johnson Elementary School (P.J.) located in Longmoor, Burlington, invites members of the community to come and speak about their respective professions as part of their community helper program. The program seeks to educate kindergarteners on how different professionals contribute to the development of their community. Participants in the community helper program are either invited or volunteer their time.
This year, one of the invitees was Jason Sookram, who is better known as DJ Floops or Floops (pronounced Flew-Oops). DJ Floops’s son, Liam, was in senior kindergarten in P.J.
DJ Floops is originally from the Caribbean twin island republic of Trinidad and Tobago (TnT). TnT has a small population of approximately one million people and is made up of two main ethnic groups, Africans and Indians, who settled in the country more than 177 years ago to work on the sugar plantations. [Editor’s note: enslaved Africans were fully emancipated in 1838; many Indian people came as indentured servants after the end of slavery.] They brought with them their respective instruments from their motherlands and fused them with Latin influences to give the world the music genres of chutney music and soca.
Chutney music is a fusion genre of Indian folk music, specifically Bhojpuri folk music, with local Caribbean calypso and soca music, and later on Bollywood music. Soca music is a genre of music defined by Lord Shorty, its inventor, as the “Soul of Calypso,” which has influences of African and East Indian rhythms. This was the basis of the high-level overview that DJ Floops gave to the students. The children were much more interested in getting to play with the professional-grade DJ gear like turntables, microphones, and piano that DJ Floops brought.
Floops was proud to see that the children were engrossed in his discourse about music from Trinidad and Tobago. Piquing non-Caribbean interest in chutney music is part of his media house chutneymusic.com’s mission.
Chutneymusic.com is a user-driven platform dedicated to promoting East Indian culture. It aims to provide citable information about Indo-culture and be considered the chutney music encyclopaedia. The website educates people about Hinduism, East Indian customs and the Hindustani language through this popular Caribbean-born art form called chutney music. On a daily basis, chutney music is teaching people the Hindustani languages, culture, and the beauty of this is that it does not feel like a classroom.
DJ Floops got an opportunity to play some chutney music for the entire school when he was asked by the school’s administration to be involved in their dance party. Floops started off with familiar Top 40 hits and when he won over the crowd, slipped in a song from his debut album, Finding Floops. The children were perplexed at first but the happy and catchy beat made them move their feet.
