I am an avid music lover. I grew up with every genre from country to rock and everywhere in between. I can sing songs word for word from Teddy Pendergrass, Bon Jovi and Kenny Rogers but as much as I hold music dear to my heart there is no genre that can compete with soca. So you can imagine my surprise when I signed on to twitter this afternoon (follow me here) and caught a tweet from Dr.Jay  (follow him here) that indicated that Soca Therapy was unfortunately one of the shows that had been cut from Flow 93.5 due to format changes.   

For those of you who are not familiar, Soca Therapy has been around for over ten years and over those years it has become a staple of the West Indian community in Toronto. Every Sunday evening we turned our dials to 93.5 fm and invited the warm familiar voice of Dr. Jay into our homes. As a community we shared the love of the music, and every week it was like meeting up with family. Through Soca Therapy we shared the triumphs and trials of soca music. We welcomed babies, mourned deaths and got caught up weekly on headlines from the islands. Even though the program was only three hours, it was three hours dedicated strictly to soca that we could not get anywhere else in the city.

As for the host? He’s thrown parties with one thing in mind- to always promote soca artists and promote the music. He’s even thrown parties in which the ticket price is canned goods with all proceeds going to the daily bread food bank. I’ve known Jay for a long time, he even gave me one of my first writing gigs, so I have no doubt that he will continue to push soca music through every available avenue. After all he is one of the pioneers of soca music in Toronto- a feat that has earned him recognition with the West Indian community worldwide. God has an ironic way of showing us it’s time for a change; I know he will move on to bigger and better things.

Many have asked why news of the format change upsets me so much. Do I understand the business aspect? Of course I do. I can understand that they will pull in more revenue and listeners playing top 40 than they will if they play soca music. It’s hard though to know that while we may live in a multicultural city- essentially big corporations could care less about multiculturalism. Do I want soca therapy back on flow? Not if CTV can’t appreciate and understand the values of the Caribbean population in the greater Toronto area.

So has CTV taken away our voice? Not a chance, they’ve empowered us to unite as one, and raise our voice to say that yes our culture does matter. Its incentive to put the work in to launch our own station and show them through our success that letting go of the program was a huge mistake on their end. One day…

Xoxo

Elle

P.S. As much as I know this has enraged us all saying F**k Flow on Twitter isn’t the right way to go about it. If you are angry, you need to communicate that to CTV without seeming like we are an uneducated group of individuals who lack ability to properly communicate our words effectively so we resort to profanity.

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