Soca is a style of Caribbean music from Trinidad and Tobago.

Soca is said to have been created in 1963 (see 1963 in music) by Ras Shorty I's "Clock and Dagger" from calypso music. Shorty added Indian instruments, including the dholak, tabla and dhantal. A prolific musician, composer and innovator, Shorty experimented with fusing calypso and the other Indian inspired music including chutney music for nearly a decade before unleashing "the soul of calypso,"...soca music. Shorty had been in Dominica during an Exile One performance of cadence-lypso, and collaborated with Dominica's 1969 Calypso King, Lord Tokyo and two calypso lyricists, Chris Seraphine and Pat Aaron in the early 1970s, who wrote him some creole lyrics. Soon after Shorty released a song, "Ou Petit", with words like "Ou dee moin ou petit Shorty" (meaning "you told me you are small Shorty"), a combination of calypso, cadence and kwéyòl. Shorty's 1974 Endless Vibrations and Soul of Calypso brought soca to its peak of international fame.

Alison Hinds (born 1970) is a Bajan female soca artist based in the Caribbean island of Barbados. She is one of the most popular soca singers in the world and has been given the nickname the "Queen of Soca".

Alison Hinds was born in London in 1970 and grew up in Plaistow. Both of her parents were from the island of Barbados, her father a worker at Ford's Dagenham plant. When she was aged 11 her parents split up and she migrated to Barbados with her mother. She competed in the Richard Stoute teen talent contest in 1987, finishing third. She was a lead vocalist in the popular band Square One, joining in 1987 and recording several albums with the band before leaving in 2004 after her daughter Saharan was born. She won the Barbados Song Contest in 1992 with the duet with John King "Hold You in a Song", and the Road March in 1996 and 1997 and Party Monarch competition in Barbados in 1997. She is known as the "Queen of Soca".

Currently Alison Hinds lives with her family, husband Edward Walcott and daughter, on a privately owned horse farm, which her husband manages, in Barbados. She has her own band, "The Alison Hinds Show", formed in 2005, with Hinds the main singer and most of the other members of the band young dancers and musicians. After returning to music with a vocal contribution to a remix of Kevin Lyttle's "Turn Me On", she returned to the soca scene with the hit song "Roll It Gal" with a lyric about female empowerment that praising women's independence. The song was a huge hit throughout the Caribbean, and was released in the UK in 2007 to coincide with the release of her début album. She also recorded a collaboration with Machel Montano for the remix of "Roll It Gal".