So to enrich the market with quantity, the current trend is to copy and hope. In essence, you go to the marketplace and offer up the tracks, and like most things in nature, one rises to the top, and succeeds. There is a built-in premise by this action of multiple voicings that the song structure would be secondary to the lyrics a motivator for movement, the flow or 'riding di riddim' being the audience differentiator. Riddims, a staple of Jamaican dancehall and reggae since the 1980s, have taken a hold with a vengeance in recent years here. The era of the sampled and interpolated song is a memory, with Kernal Roberts giving us songs influenced by Enya, A-Ha, Cyndi Lauper disguised as soca anthems, but the shelf life of a trend in TT is, luckily for us, short. Riddim is it, and if you look sharp, a handful of riddims could dominate a TT Carnival season.

That's not to say that Benjai, hot off his 'Give Away' riddim driven Ah Trini did not have an extended bumper 2011 with Wine to the Side on the 'Honeycomb' riddim shared with Machel Montano and Lil Bitts. But history has shown that the big winners of Carnival 2011 and before have been those unique soca compositions not shared with other artistes: Wotless (Kes The Band) and Advantage (Machel Montano), to name a couple. All the breakout hits in the first week of parties and significantly on the radio have been riddim-based. To say that riddim is king in soca 2012 would be partly true. 'Infinite Stupidity: A Talk With Mark Pagel.' Retrieved 15 December, 2011. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators.

We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen.

State of emergency riddim