New TV series to focus on local artistry

by Shamar Blunt

A 30-minute, episodic deep dive into Barbadian pop-culture, music, film, and the arts is now being featured weekly on a television screen near you, with the launch of the newest local series dubbed ZEIGIEST!

The project, which was made possible in part by the Cultural Industries Development Fund of the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados, is the brainchild of K.F. Cumberbatch, a young local media producer and filmmaker.

Her past experience includes diving into local pop-culture with her 2016 thesis project for her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of the West Indies called Cosplay Pride & Industry.

Now she takes a microscope once again to the local creative scene, with what she says will be an expanded look at the true foundations of Barbados’ artistic blueprint, as well as its international influences.

“It’s about Barbadian and some international popculture entertainment. We have three segments of the show, which include film, music, and interview segments we call Feature, where we are basically doing reviews of Barbadian films, retrospectives of classic Barbadian songs, legends of Barbadians music and more.

“We definitely focus more on Barbadian pop-culture entertainment, but there are some international pieces in the show as well,” she explained. The basis of the show was a spin-off project in many aspects, with the online blog of the same name which was started by Cumberbatch in 2016, also sought to bring greater attention to the then quickly growing pop-culture scene on the island.

“My whole thinking with ZEIGIEST was that we have films, we have music and other things, it’s not as much as you see coming out of the US, Japan or Europe, but we have enough aspects of our culture here that we can treat the same way as others do theirs in terms of media coverage.”

The two hosts for the new series, Kofi Jones, a local media practitioner and DJ, along with Josué Nelson, a fellow media personality and podcaster, both expressed their surprise with the large number of facts and history surrounding many of the topics they researched for the show.

According to Nelson, the film sector locally was one that in his experience, has often gone under the radar for many locals, who on occasion would see a local film, but generally did not understand the wide scope and reach local films have had on the island, and further abroad.

“My thing is film – so of course outside of doing international films that are so well known, I got a chance to look at some local films, some films that I probably would not have checked out and did not know about until I started doing this.

“I was very glad that I got to dip into that, because some of the stuff I saw was really cool and interesting, and it gave me a bigger appreciation for Barbadian cinema,” he said.

Jones himself highlighted the vast amount of history within Barbadian music that sadly not known or taught in open public forums, with once such hidden fact being found in spouge music, the native genre to the island.

Jones said for years the general belief has been that spouge has two main sub-genres, however, to those musicians and locals in the know, that is not an accurate train of thought.

“A lot of people think that there are two different types of spouge… dragon spouge and raw spouge.

I found out that raw spouge is just the name of an album by Draytons Two, it’s not a sub-genre of spouge, and then dragon spouge is just Cassius Clay making karate sounds at the beginning of songs, and people assumed it was a whole sub-genre.’ He just liked Kung-fu movies.”

New episodes for ZEIGIEST air weekly on Tuesdays.