Konpa’s greatest honor comes at its most uncertain moment

Konpa has never received more recognition than it is receiving today.

Within a few months, UNESCO designated Haiti’s signature musical genre as Intangible Cultural Heritage, and New York City formally recognized it as part of the city’s cultural fabric.

Yet I left a recent celebration of those milestones at BRIC in Downtown Brooklyn with an unsettling realization: Konpa is being honored at precisely the moment the ecosystem that sustained it for generations is quietly disappearing.

It had been years since I attended a gathering like this in the Haitian community.

COVID changed the way we gather. Then life carried me to Indiana for several years before bringing me back to the New York area recently. Walking into BRIC in Downtown Brooklyn felt less like attending an event than returning to a family reunion whose heartbeat remained familiar.

The room reflected that achievement. Old friends embraced. Musicians mingled with politicos, promoters and community leaders. For a few hours, the diaspora gathered around a shared memory.

Recognition and vitality are not the same thing. You can preserve a language while fewer people speak it. You can designate a historic building while no one lives inside it. Heritage, if we are not careful, can become another word for nostalgia.

That paradox should have been the evening’s central conversation. Instead, the panel never quite found its footing.

Moderated by media personality Carel Pedre, the event brought together 10 musicians, journalists and cultural figures to discuss Konpa from its founding by Nemours Jean Baptiste in 1955 to its place today. The challenge was not the moderator but the structure. With so many voices sharing the stage, the conversation drifted from one anecdote to another without finding its narrative spine. It was like listening to an orchestra tuning its instruments. Every sound was familiar, but no one brought them together into a symphony.

The story was sitting there, waiting to be told.

How did New York become the capital of Konpa outside Haiti?

How did the first Haitian bands establish themselves during the 1970s?

How did Brooklyn become the center of an entertainment industry that packed clubs nearly every day and weekend?

What did it take for promoters to build a thriving musical economy before social media, streaming and smartphones?

Those are the questions that explain how New York became Konpa’s second capital for a while. The panel included people uniquely positioned to answer them.

King Kino, a founder of Phantoms, and Alex Abellard, maestro of Zin, could have taken us behind one of Konpa’s defining rivalries during the 1990s and early 2000s. Their competition pushed bands to become more creative, more disciplined and more ambitious. Rivalries, after all, often sharpen excellence. These musicians ushered in a sound commonly known as “New Generation” and evolved the genre when Zouk was siphoning listeners away from Konpa.

Tabou Combo, deservedly celebrated throughout the evening, was treated almost as an institution rather than a living history. Few Caribbean bands have remained relevant across five decades while introducing generation after generation to the same music. Yet surprisingly little was shared about how they sustained themselves through changing audiences, technologies and tastes.

Most of the audience was old enough to have lived through these years. We danced through them. We watched clubs fill until dawn. We saw bands rise, fracture, reinvent themselves and disappear. We knew enough to recognize when entire chapters had been skipped.

The most astonishing omission, however, was silence. System Band was never mentioned.

For anyone who understands Konpa’s evolution, that omission borders on incomprehensible.

System Band forced Konpa to mature. Their heavier sound reshaped the genre, while their lyrics ventured into subjects polite Haitian society often avoided, from Vodou and lesbianism to Haiti’s deeply rooted class divisions. They inspired an entire generation of bands, including Klass, Djakout Nu Look, etc., proving that Konpa could evolve without abandoning itself.

Leaving System Band out of a conversation about Konpa’s evolution is like discussing jazz without Charlie Parker or hip hop without Public Enemy.

Many people assume Konpa declined simply because younger audiences changed their musical tastes. The reality is more complicated.

The nightclub scene that once defined Haitian weekends has largely vanished. Promoters organize far fewer bals than they once did. Many performances now take place primarily as fundraising events for community organizations rather than as commercial concerts. The economics simply no longer work.

The old model was rarely lucrative. Promoters accepted modest profits or even losses because the music itself mattered and because proximity to beloved artists carried its own rewards. That equation no longer makes sense for many younger entrepreneurs.

But Konpa’s greatest challenge lies beyond New York, Miami or Montreal.

Its greatest challenge is Haiti itself.

For generations, Carnival and fèt chanpèt, ancestral town celebrations, served as Konpa’s laboratory. Diaspora visitors returned home each year and discovered emerging bands before bringing them abroad through concerts and tours. Haiti was the well from which Konpa continually drew fresh water.

As Haiti has descended from political crisis into institutional collapse, fewer members of the diaspora travel home. Fewer promoters scout new talent. The natural circulation that once connected Haiti to its global audience has weakened.

Culture is like a river. It survives because it keeps moving. When the current slows, even the deepest river begins to lose its force.

When Haiti’s politics divide us, Konpa has often united us.

That belief eventually led The Haitian Times to create Kreyolfest. It was never meant to be just another music festival. It was an attempt to create an institution where Haitian music could be celebrated across generations.

At its peak, Kreyolfest attracted more than 15,000 people and became one of the largest Haitian cultural gatherings in the diaspora. COVIDinterrupted that momentum. Migration patterns changed. We later tried to reinvent the festival as Banboch Kreyòl at a venue along the Coney Island boardwalk, but the moment had shifted.

What never changed was the need.

Today, Rabòday has become the strongest cultural current pulling many younger Haitians. Infused with the energy of Afrobeats and driven by themes that resonate with a new generation, it reflects a changing audience rather than a disappearing one. Michael Brun’s Bayo concerts, selling out three consecutive nights in Brooklyn, prove that young Haitians still hunger for cultural experiences.

They simply gather around different rhythms.

Rather than seeing Rabòday as Konpa’s rival, perhaps we should see it as evidence that Haitian music continues to evolve, just as Konpa itself once did.

The evening at BRIC ultimately left me hopeful. Not because every question was answered. Quite the opposite.

It left me hopeful because scores of people still showed up on a summer evening simply to celebrate Konpa. They came to remember, to reconnect and, perhaps without realizing it, to reaffirm that this music still occupies a sacred place in our collective identity.

Councilmember Rita Joseph deserves enormous credit for helping make that happen. My hope is that this does not become merely another annual celebration, but the beginning of something larger. Each year could explore a different chapter of Konpa’s history: the pioneers who brought the music to New York, the rivalries that shaped an era, the promoters who built an industry, the women whose contributions have too often been overlooked, and the young artists now redefining Haitian music.

Perhaps that’s the lesson of the evening. Konpa is not something we preserve simply because it is 71 years old. We preserve it because it still has the power to bring us into the same room, remind us who we have been and help us imagine who we might yet become.

That, more than any proclamation or designation, is what keeps a culture alive.

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