{"id":30303,"date":"2026-06-05T22:17:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T02:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/?p=30303"},"modified":"2026-06-06T13:05:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T17:05:41","slug":"more-than-a-festival-how-bpm-guyana-marked-a-cultural-shift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/more-than-a-festival-how-bpm-guyana-marked-a-cultural-shift\/","title":{"rendered":"More than a festival: How BPM Guyana marked a cultural shift"},"content":{"rendered":"
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-by Kefa Smith<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be honest, I am not the person you would normally send to an EDM festival. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My usual beat is governance, national development, press conferences, infrastructure briefings and ministry statements where someone uses three paragraphs to explain something my grandmother would communicate with a single cut-eye and a steups<\/em>. I grew up on soca, R&B and old-school classics playing in the background on slow Sundays while soup bubbled on the stove with dumplings and every other obstacle inside. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Electronic Dance Music (EDM), the world of flashing lights, bass drops and dancing until your body forgets it has bones, never felt like my scene. So, when I was assigned to cover the Guyana Electronic Dance Music Festival (GEDM Festival) as part of Guyana\u2019s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, I stared at the schedule the same way you stare at an unexpected GPL bill: confused, concerned, and slightly betrayed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, underneath the reluctance was curiosity. Guyana\u2019s culture has been shifting for years. The nightlife scene has been evolving quietly in the background, and I had noticed it from a comfortable distance. I had mentally filed it under \u201cInteresting, but not for me,\u201d but this assignment forced me to reopen that file. The moment I arrived at the venue, I realized this was a side of the city I had never truly seen before. There was energy in the air, but not the chaotic kind. It felt intentional. Young people moved through the entrance in groups, dressed not just for fashion but for expression. Face gems reflected the last bits of daylight. Everyone looked like they belonged to a moment larger than themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside, I did my first walk around and then I positioned myself at the back of the venue to take everything in. The first thing that caught my attention was the production. I observed the stage design, the lighting rigs, and the sound system you could physically feel before a single track fully dropped. Whoever built that space understood something crucial – at a festival like this, sound and lighting are not decorations. They are part of the experience itself. I made a quick note in my phone: \u201cVenue Setup, immaculate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, the music started. What surprised me most was not the size of the crowd, but who made up the crowd. I expected a niche audience, a few hundred dedicated fans gathered around a subculture. Instead, I saw a cross-section of modern Guyana -young professionals shaking off the stress of long work weeks, university students, and people who looked like they drove in from the East Coast and East Bank just to be there. Some attendees were so committed to the aesthetic that I immediately regretted my carefully Googled outfit. But beyond the fashion, there was something else. Everyone had made a conscious decision to be there. And together, that decision created an atmosphere you could actually feel. What struck me even more was how deeply connected the crowd was to the music. When a beat shifted or a drop approached, the crowd reacted almost instinctively. People leaned forward before the moment arrived, anticipating it together. It felt less like people listening to music and more like people having a conversation with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had covered concerts before, but this was different. Eventually, the journalist in me needed a closer look. I moved toward the front. The bass felt entirely different there. Not aggressive like I expected, but physical. Almost like the sound had a heartbeat of its own and for a few hours everybody in the venue synced to it. For the first time, I understood why people describe EDM as an experience and not just a genre. The DJs understood the room completely. Watching them work was like watching strategy unfold in real time – the timing, the transitions, the ability to read thousands of emotions at once and steer them in the same direction. Honestly, it reminded me of watching skilled politicians command a crowd. It was a different setting, but the same understanding of energy and attention. <\/p>\n\n\n

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PC: Reaz Farina<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Then there was Tariq Dakhil. By that point, I had already researched BPM Guyana and understood the basic story: a young Guyanese man building an EDM movement in a country where the genre barely had infrastructure, audience or support when he started. But standing there in the middle of that crowd, the scale of what he built became real to me. BPM Guyana did not stumble into relevance. They built it piece by piece in a cultural environment that could have easily ignored them. This was years of vision, consistency and belief. And now, here they were, officially closing Guyana\u2019s Diamond Jubilee calendar. In Guyana, inclusion in the national programme signals recognition. It is the country quietly acknowledging that something has arrived. BPM Guyana arrived. At some point during the night, I stopped taking notes. Not because there was no story left, but because the story had moved beyond observation. I already had the details I needed – the production quality, the crowd, the cultural significance, and the symbolism of the festival being part of Independence celebrations. What remained was something personal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I danced, but not the polite shoulder movement people do when they want to pretend they participated. I mean genuinely danced. The kind where you completely forget you are supposed to be self-conscious. At one point I looked over and caught someone beside me doing the exact same thing. We exchanged the kind of glance people share when they both realise they surrendered to the moment without planning to. Then we kept dancing because the music had not stopped and neither had the night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Guyana celebrates 60 years of Independence, the country feels like it is stretching into a newer version of itself. You can see it in the construction, in the ambition and in the pace of change. But what the GEDM Festival added to that conversation was something that development projects and official ceremonies alone cannot deliver: joy, and not the ceremonial kind placed snugly inside official programmes and speeches. This was the kind of joy created naturally when young people feel fully present, fully free and fully themselves. That matters more than we sometimes admit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I left the venue much later than planned and sat quietly in my car for a while before driving off. There is a strange stillness that follows a loud experience like that. Not silence exactly, but a recalibration. As I sat there, I realized the story I was writing had become much bigger than an EDM festival. It became a story about a generation that is no longer waiting for permission to create the culture it wants to see. It became a story about a young Guyanese entrepreneur who looked at a genre with no roadmap and decided to build one anyway. It became a reminder that culture is not separate from national development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Culture is part of the structure itself. And because I promised honesty from the very beginning, I should end the same way. I went there expecting to observe. Instead, I participated. I thought I was covering a festival, but what I actually witnessed was a generation announcing itself to the country. BPM Guyana did not simply close Guyana\u2019s Independence celebrations. They used the moment to say something powerful. A generation is here and they built the stage themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

-by Kefa Smith To be honest, I am not the person you would normally send to an EDM festival. My usual beat is governance, national development, press conferences, infrastructure briefings…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30302,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[473,350],"tags":[488,1070,1069,370,412,405],"class_list":["post-30303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-news","tag-488","tag-bpm-guyana","tag-edm","tag-guyana","tag-ncn-guyana","tag-ncn-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30305,"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30303\/revisions\/30305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncnguyana.com\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}