|
Sean Paul has take dancehall to the charts, hearts and dancefloors
of the world. All hail the dutty conqueror
‘Shake. That. Thing. Misskanakana/Shake. That. Thing. Missannabella…’
Your hear it anywhere, you hear it everywhere and you hear it
all day. You hear it marginally less than 50 Cent’s ‘In
Da Club’, which you hear too much anyway. Your hear a voice
threading between hip hop, R&B, bashment and dancehall across
daytime radio and pirate fequencies, in passing cars, on carnival
systems, in the hiss of the iPod adjacent to your tube seat, on
MTV, BBC, Top Of The Pops and over the top of the screams of 1,500
girls at Hackney’s Ocean venue.
That was last night, but this is today. Sean Paul, 30-year-old
baritone heartthrob and global renaissance man of digital dancehall,
is everywhere. More visible, bankable and shaggable than any Busta,
Jigga, Mega, Diddy, Shaggy or Ele you care to mention, he is the
urban music everyman of the moment.
Sean Paul is from everywhere too. In his hazel eyes, neat braids,
mocha complexion and voice as rich as Guinness you can discern
Jamaican roots as well as English, Jewish, Hispanic, Creole and
Chinese blood. He has been a champion swimmer, water polo player,
banker, cordon bleu chef and a graduate of hotel management and
was born on the right side of the tracks in the Norbrook district
of Kingston to boho parents. As a teeneger he received the kind
of uptown schooling that gets you far in the world business and
finance, but gets you nowhere among the savagely adverserial market
economics of Kingston’s dancehalls and studio scene, where
the rhythm of you rhyme and the girth of your pants is what matter. ‘I’m
a uptown boy, yeah,’ he’ll tell me later, ‘I’m
not from the ghetto.’
Not that it makes any odds anyway. Sean Paul’s life is on
permanent fast-forward. Onstage, he is a man in ninth gear. In
person, he’s so relaxed that time practically reverses. He
sniffs a lot. Fiddles with a CD player. He’s wearing graffiti-cover
denims, a white do-rag and a Marley T-shirt and looks like he could
have do with an extra week in bed this morning, as he sips tea
in a London hotel room. He drives a Lexus Jeep, wears Adidas, drinks
Red Stripe and smokes weed ‘definitely’, and all of
the time, and wears a $6,000 Jacob & Co watch permanently set
to Kingston time.
Sean Paul’s ultrafresh, extra-hooky singles – the
paean to toking ‘Gimme the Light’ (Billboard No 1 In
the US, Number 5 in the UK) and ‘Get Busy’ (UK Number
4) from his sophomore ‘Dutty Rock’ set - compound fiendishly
tuff chat with ghetto glamma straight from yard, and then rolls
them in enough pop stardust to charm the global urban market.
He’s been doing this since 1993, when he schooled by day
and studio-ed by night. Now it’s paying off. ‘Timbaland‘s
been building new dancehall riddims, I’ve linked up with
him,’ he says. ‘I did a track with for Beyonce called ‘Baby
Boy’. Jay-Z came to me…’. So did Clipse, the
Neptunes, Rahzel, Kardinal Offishal, Busta Rhymes. Back in Kingston,
Sean Paul has so many platinum discs he’s lost count.
‘There’s Best Pop Song award from High Times magazine
too,’ he says. ‘They gave me a bong. That was the coolest
award. I definitely did use it, but it’s not supposed to
be used. Someone delivered some plaques the other night.
I didn’t have time to open them…’
He’s more surprised than anyone at how big he’s become.
‘Definitely! I wouldn’t say I’m shocked, but
it’s great to be able to represent on this level. It’s
a crazy: there’s no time to stop and say, wait, there’s
this thing happening. You just go with it. You think a couple of
months ago I didn’t have any of this – these plaques
on the wall. Das a lotta plaques…’
Dancehall has waited long for a moment like this and for a telegenic
star like Sean Paul. Since hip hop has become the global language
of product placement and many of it stars cartoonish parodies of
their former street-level selves, it didn’t take much
for listeners to engage dancehall’s raw-from-road attitude
(even if dancing to its endlessly evolving riddims it still, for
many people, the equivalent of playing Twister).
‘[Video Producer] Little X said to me, “Dancehall
is the next hip Hop”. I was shocked. I was like, what do
you mean.? He says, ‘when hip hop started ,m everybody used
to dance, everybody used to this and that. It’s not happening
anymore because it’s already been done. People are looking
for a new edge.’
For a long time dancehall has had at best a fractious relationship
with the mainstream. Since the early Nineties, but Jamaica has
thrown up no truly galvanising presence able chat the global language
of pop with an authentic JA inflection. Until now. And if it’s
unlikely that a few killer riddims will shake hip hop culture to
its foundation, there’s no doubt that dancehall is beginning
take on rap on at its own game.
Cleverly, Sean Paul conquered New York before he moved on to the
rest of the world. He toured the underground dancehalls and
honed his skills in the toughest of environments.
‘New York supported me,’ he nods. ‘In 2000 I
could have five shows a night. One in Queens, two in one in Manhatan,
one in New Jersey and one in Brooklyn. For real. Hip hop lives
in New York – it was born there. East Coast, West Coast,
down South, they all come to new York. Once you burst onto the
scene you can really take the rest of the international market’
In any case, for Sean Paul the distinction between a dancehall
DJ and a hip hop MC was always entirely false.
‘Growing up in Jamaica, To me there was no difference between
a Supercat and LL Cool J,’ he says. ‘In JA, there’s
no difference between a Bounty Killer and, say, 50 Cent. That’s
how it is. So we always wanted to see this happening, and it is
happening. There are so many artists that can benefit from my little
Success.
‘People say, ‘boom! Gimme The Light’ is on radio!’ But Dancehall
has been bubbling in clubs since 1990, when Supercat and Shabba
was a world phenomenon. Dancehall and hip hop was merging from
that time. A lot of people used to check dancehall at that time,
but A&R misrepresent our artists, the companies that didn’t
know how to market them. They put them in an R&B market where
they got lost. Your hear a Bennie Man song with Janet Jackson,
and people can’t understand what is dancehall and reggae.
When they pushed Shabba with Bobby Brown, we were saying, What
we want to see on the TV and on radio is ‘Trailerload Of
(A?) Girls’!’
In the midst of dancehall’s current prominence is Sean Paul,
a man who could snap knicker elastic at a hundred paces. The fact
that, as a female friend pointed out to me, he’s ‘fucking
fit’, is unlikely to hinder his or dancehall’s stratospheric
success curve. But his appela ia about much more than looks. Sean
Paul shares with Craig David much more than merely having two Christian
names: both are clean, modest, career-minded, unshowy and humbly
acknowledging of their support. Set against his contemporaries,
Sean appears ‘realer’ than Shaggy, but softer than
Shabba. You can discern his hard-fought cred among his rhymes and
riddims, but he has fewer of the rough edges of, say, Beenie Man,
Bounty Killer or Elephant man.
Meanwhile, Unlike the bachelor-for-life CD, Sean Paul is busy
putting his good looks to their rightful use: breaking hearts.
Sorry girls, he’s taken.
‘There’s a lady back in Jamaica,’ he nods, grinning
slyly. ‘but it’s a good feeling to know ladies check
you out. When I was a kid I was like, I want ALL ladies. Every
man think like that. But my life is very hectic right now. I was
trying to settle and this blew up…
Last night, at a packed Ocean in Hackney, Sean wasn’t just
onstage but all over it. When he plays live, Sean Paul pogoes,
hops, leaps, and skips across the stage in a flat cap and baggy
pinstripe suit like the Dick Van Dyke of the dancehall demographic.
It sounds daft, but looks incredible: for an hour an a half he
machine-guns out dutty bashment with one foot on the monitor as
his band pulse behind him and his brother Jason – known to
his Copper Shack soundsystem colleagues as Jigg Zagula - swerves
round stage fringes. The sound is hardcore dancehall grime that
resonates like the tectonic plates of the earth moving. It wouldn’t
stand a chance in the pop charts, but here, under the spotlights
and amid the oestrogen fog, if feels like the rawest, livest thing
Black Sabbath split up, or Gulf War II ended. ‘Blowing
up’ doesn’t begin to describe it.
Sean Paul has been in London before, and expresses a fondness
for British exports like So Solid Crew, Ms Dynamite and Heartless
Crew, whom he ran into last in a Miami strip club (like you do).
He recalls dining with Red Rat one of the capital’s noted
gastronomic locales – Piccadilly’s Kentucky Fried chicken – and
touring around the country in 1988. ‘I was on tour and went
to the Stratford Rex and Bristol,’ he says. ‘This was
the hardcore Jamaican audience coming to these shows. So I’m
like, dancehall never went anywhere – we’re keepin’ it
alive’.
But as a career and work schedule that barely lets him breath,
let alone chill, gathers pace, Sean Paul is determined that what’s
happened to many of hip hop’s principal players won’t
happen to him. Life at the top of the charts is fine; but down
in the dancehall is where he’s gonna stay.
‘When I’m at home, I put down my bag and I’m
out on the street,’ he says. ‘There are big producers,
but they don’t live in Jamaica anymore and they don’t
know what’s happening, they don’t got to dancehall.
Copper Shack and Dutty Cup Crew keep me on the street. I need that
respect from them. Music doesn’t live in radio stations or
TV station, it lived in clubs and on people CD and mixtapes.’
Everybody wants a piece of Sean Paul and dancehall right now.
Since the Diwali riddim became the urban music’s new lingua
franca, Sean’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing. It’s
perhaps only a matter of time before Madonna bandwagons into town
with some spurious ‘new dancehall direction’, but as
it stand, pop’s other beauty queen, Beyonce, has sought to
add a dash of Kingston hot pepper, teaming up with Sean Paul for ‘Baby
Boy’.
‘She said, “yo, I want you to add what you add to
these tracks’,’ Sean explains. ‘“Take it
to where I need it to be,”. I was like, aiii cool.
I went up to Miami and did what I had. In 15 minutes. When she
came in she was like, ‘wow’. I’m glad to represent!‘
The celebrities collabs come and go, but what remains is The Music.
In particular, ‘Feel Alright’, a track he produced
with the King Of Kings the day before he left Kingston for London.
He pull out a CD player and give Touch a world exclusive playback
of the new Sean Paul joint – a high-voltage, disco-paced
package of hyperspeed chat over the all-new ‘Indian Girl’ riddim.
He breaks out a broad smile, begins bouncing in his seats
and clapping along. ‘Diwali isn’t
what’s happening right now. Indian Girl is what people want
in dancehall. For me, songs like that are coming out more easy.
Party songs. Just like ‘Get Busy’. Sounds about being
in the dancehall. That’s easy enough, I’m always in
the dance.’
And that’s where he intends to remain. When the Fame, the
fortune and the fads have passed, dancehall is still dancehall.
Gimme the light and pass the joe: right now, it’s Sean Paul’s
party.
© Kevin Braddock 2003
|
