For today's Global Hit, The World's Marco Werman has been listening to a collection of Caribbean music from the 1970s. And it, too, offers a complex view of the region.

It's hard to think of disco as having social and political import.

But a CD recently came out that shows mirror balls don't just reflect strobe lights.

The collection "Calypsoul 70: Caribbean Soul and Calypso Crossover 1969-1979" offers a different kind of disco.

The mirror balls here reflect deep currents of black power in the seventies.

And the black diaspora in the Caribbean readily tapped into this pride to talk about their own concerns.

This is the 1976 hit by Trinidadian singer Lancelot Layne.

It's called "Yo Tink It Sorf?"

You tink it sorf?

Here it translates as, so you think it's soft, living in a ghetto?

Lancelot Layne was saying to Trinidadians, don't glamorize the ghetto.

We copy many things from the United States he says.

But let's not copy the ghetto.

Lancelot Layne passed away in 1990.

He was an Africanist, studied African history, and had travelled many times to Ghana.

And though Layne wrote music that emulated the black power that was shimmering across the water in the United States, he was also selective about what to copy.

He wanted his music to be mostly a product of Trinidad.

Here's another track that shows how widespread black pride was in the Caribbean of the 70s.

This is "Independent Bahamas" by the oddly named Bahamian act Biosis Now.

The song was written and recorded in 1973, the year the Bahamas gained independence from Great Britain.

Bahamian band Biosis Now with their song "Independent Bahamas."

I mean, really, can you think of another patriotic song with cop-show orchestration?

Here's a third and final tune, also with the cop-show sound.

"Freedom in Africa" was recorded by Kelvin Pope in 1980, just as the disco boom was starting to fizzle in the States and the UK.

Kelvin Pope is better known as The Mighty Duke, a name he shortened to just Duke.

He grew up in southern Trinidad in Point Fortin, an oil boom-town.

Seeing local austere country values clash with those of expatriate oil workers hardened the Duke.

And made him an outspoken singer.

On "Freedom in Africa," Duke name checks Ian Smith of former-Rhodesia and P.W. Botha in South Africa.

Duke was angry that his motherland Africa was reeling while the Caribbean seemed to be evolving, relatively speaking.

The Calypsoul 70 collection isn't all politics and social critiques.

There's plenty of party music too.

But in between those straight-ahead dance tunes, you will find rich funky slices of Caribbean history.

For The World, I'm Marco Werman.