This is partly because President Michel Martelly, a former compas singer who took office in 2011, did not offer concessions to parliament to pass voting legislation, thinking his personal popularity would enable him to call the shots.
He quickly established himself as a star in Haiti, gaining fame for his outlandish live performances which often included his dressing in drag or shedding his clothes onstage and earning considerable critical acclaim as an important innovator in Haitian dance music known as compas.
Included in the mizik zouk rubric were the Haitian popular music styles known as compas and cadence, beguine from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and cadence-lypso, a hybrid of Haitian cadence and Trinidadian calypso popularized in Dominica in the 1970s.
A world music star with the compas band Tabou Combo, he used to travel there many times a year to play, helping to support dozens of family members on his income.
At the entrance to St. Nicholas Hospital, an anti-cholera message, set to a festive compas beat — "There's no life without health and no health without hygiene" — blares discordantly from a loudspeaker.
The crowds came, and they still do: sipping Haitian rum, chatting in French and dancing cheek-to-cheek to the tinny rhythms of compas music.
The neighboring French islands Martinique and Guadeloupe specialize in zouk and compas music, both locally made and imported from Haiti.
It put out street rumba (Totico Y Sus Rumberos), progressive salsa verging on jazz (Batacumbele, Manny Oquendo y Su Conjunto Libre), Haitian compas (Skah Shah), salsa verging on disco (Yambú), and much else.
Get a crash course in zouk, compas and its spin-offs — like Bouyon music, born in Dominica — at Dominica's annual World Creole Music Festival in October, the only one of its kind in the region (wcmfdominica.com).
Mr. Jean's music positions him as a cultural unifier, merging pan-American sounds -- particularly hip-hop, Jamaican reggae, Haitian compas and other Caribbean rhythms -- to blend party tunes with political righteousness.
The intro is like a compas or zouk, and then the sera part — the improvisation — is pure ritmo.
