What the Music Carries. Forty Years Inside the Soul of Soca

I did not go to the New York Premiere of Like Ah Boss: Journey of a Soca King at the Brooklyn Public Library simply as a journalist. I went as someone who had spent years watching this Machel Montano from the crowd in Trinidad, at fetes, at performances, always somewhere in the thick of it, always feeling that what was happening on that stage was bigger than entertainment. That it was telling us something true about who we were as a people, and who he was still becoming.

What I found that evening, in the film and in the man himself, was something I had not expected: something more than the icon himself. The documentary, directed as a portrait of Machel's life, anchored in the extraordinary 2015 Carnival season, did not simply celebrate his artistry, it excavated many things we looking in from the outside never see.

The Weight of Becoming

From the very beginning, Machel Montano was playing a bigger game than those around him understood, though he will tell you he never meant to. He admits he genuinely loved music, but his only goal was to "be in a band and play for friends at their birthday parties". And yet his performances led to stages, and those stages led to competition, a child standing before seasoned Calypso singers at National Soca Monarch competitions before most children have found a hobby. By May 1984, at just nine years old, he was performing at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum in New York City. The music, it seems, always had somewhere it needed to take him.

He went on to win Road March competitions again and again. But the image of a triumphant, untouchable king is, as he revealed that evening, only half the story.

Machel spoke candidly about the years he wanted to quit, the stretches during those early years when success felt elusive despite the work, when the industry's validation lagged behind his vision. He took risks many considered reckless: rejecting the established local producers and writers everyone else relied on, choosing instead to forge a sound entirely his own. Decisions that, in retrospect, look like genius, but in the moment felt like gambling everything.

"When you want something, sometimes you have to let it go. That surrender was the beginning of everything."

- MACHEL MONTANO, BROOKLYN FILM PREMIERE, MAY 2026

The Birth of Xtatik and Big Truck

There were moments of depression. Tears. The decision to step back from music entirely, to get healthy, to release the relentless grip of ambition. It is the kind of confession that reframes everything that came before it, and reveals that what the music carries, it sometimes carries quietly, even when the artist himself cannot hear it.

"I was looking to find a connection to a higher purpose and looking for it everywhere." 

Xtatik in 1989 evolved from Pranasonic Express (1984), the band that would reintroduce Machel Montano to Trinidad and to the world as an adult artist on his own terms. A couple years of building a new sound, not designed to please industry gatekeepers, but built to move people, to carry them somewhere, and bring renewed energy.

By 1997, "Big Truck" arrived and it was definitive. The following year confirmed it: this was not a comeback. It was a beginning.

The depression did not disappear with the success. Machel was honest about that too, the continued waves of it, even through years of extraordinary achievement. What is remarkable is not that he struggled, but that he developed a deeply spiritual relationship with his own unraveling. He spoke of signs, of chaos arriving not to destroy, but to redirect. When things collapsed, it was always pointing him back toward himself, back toward what the music had always been trying to say.

The stage collapse at the Real Unity Concert in 2001 stands as the most terrifying of those redirections. The kind of disaster that ends careers and haunts people for decades. But for Machel, it deepened something. His instinct in that moment was not to retreat, it was to step forward, to reassure the frightened, to hold the room with his presence. It revealed the pastoral in the performer. The music had always carried something sacred. In that moment, so did he.

The Artist as Auteur

By 2003, Machel was expanding what a Soca performance could even mean, introducing theater, spectacle, narrative, and emotional arc into the music. That year's collaboration with Destra, "Carnival," became a cultural landmark, arriving after a failed Atlantic Records deal that might have broken a lesser artist's belief in himself. Instead, it sharpened his independence. He had learned, perhaps definitively, that the industry would never fully understand what he was building. So he kept building it himself.

He said it plainly: "Once I reflect the highest expression of who I am, it comes in my music, whatever my art is. It started to give me something else to base my art on...integrity, service to mankind. Those low moments really had to happen to push me to another level."

The film captures the full scale of what that building has become: a Coachella main stage. Millions at Sadhguru's Maha Shivratri Festival in India. A 2015 Carnival season in which he delivered sixteen performances in seven days, beginning with 25,000 fans at Machel Monday in the National Stadium. These are not simply achievements. They are the visible surface of a life of invisible labor, the isolation, the self-doubt, the moments when everything felt public and nothing felt protected.

Many artists chase longevity. Few successfully reinvent themselves across four decades while staying culturally authentic. Machel has done both.

What Comes Next

When I finally sat with him that evening in Brooklyn, what struck me most was not the legend. It was the man still in the process of becoming. He spoke about finding where the music lives in the corners of the world, not conquering new markets, but listening for the places where Soca's heartbeat might already be resonating, waiting to be found.

There is something profound about a man who has achieved everything his younger self could have imagined, and who remains genuinely curious about what's next. Not restless in the way of insecurity, but restless in the way of an artist who still believes the best chapter has not yet been written.

He hopes viewers who see the film feel it deeper than the surface story. "I want them to feel the spirit of ying and yang,"he said. "The spiritual journey of rockstar to marriage." The music, in other words, carries all of it - the chaos and the peace, the collapse and the resurrection, the man and the myth.

Four decades in, Machel Montano is still asking the music where it wants to go next. And if his story has taught us anything, it is that the music always knows, even when he doesn't.

Like Ah Boss: Journey of a Soca King will be available on Amazon from May 29, 2025