SEAN PAUL AND SHAGGY
so as per some interview i read, sean paul went and did some stuff with the neptunes and must have been as monumentally depressed as we all were when we heard
"can i have it like that", dear god! (lil missy likes it tho.) i feel for him cos we can all switch off the neps but sp's label was probably saying, sean your whole international fanbase is relying on you to create something hot from the looped n*e*r*d outtakes
skateboard wee just handed you! ugh! so sp says, oh fuck this i repped for jamaica at olympic water ping pong, i can do the same for my album!
which amounts to the trinity being like... oh hello kopa riddim, nice to see you again but i don't wanna get dangerous anymore; hello "ever blazin" from 2 and a half years ago, you belong to a different lifetime and now you're back on the 1xtra playlist (fuck daytime 1xtra at the moment); hello siren riddim and your weeee woooo ironside shit, you're wasting my time! a lot of these songs have worn me out.
fair enough it might be hot for people who don't check dancehall radio and so on but to talk up this album of mostly tried and tested local hits (as sp himself has done!) as brave? what a load of balls. you can say, hey guy this is just ragga album convention! but the difference between the trinity and tok's album is the MASSIVE MEGASTAR BUDGET and inherent pop context which allows sp to discard neptunes beats in the first place! if u have that kind of cash and status it is almost your duty to work with
shania and mutt lange in a bizarre one-drop/country-pop crossover misstep aaand believe you are saving the world by doing so! cos if not sp then who? and why not have your sound reflect the oddness of crossing over into megastardom anyway?
this perhaps applies to anyone stepping out from their localized genre but look at shaggy's recent
clothesdrop. (
clothesdrop, indeed!) it is sometimes a fairly dull record but in staking its peculiar patch of rnb-dancehall-pop territory it reflects his unique relationship to the foundation realness of all three genres: dude has reggae hits, rnb hits, pop hits, has crossed over and crossed back again 278 times. unless he decides to go punkfunk, each shaggy album will have twin foundations it must deviate from in a fresh way (simply cos it's 05 and not 01 or 94!): 1) reggae realness and 2) the more abstract ephemeral blah blah international pop fanbase. now i ain't disparaging reggae but it is not especially difficult for the well-respected veteran shaggy to satisfy the realness quotient (tho perhaps more about reassuring HIMSELF if i can enter shaggy's brain for a hot minute). he still voices the occasional strangely random riddim for the jamaican market too.
satisfying a mysterious ginormo pop audience is another matter, and tryna do that with one foot still entrenched in the realness of your genre is what can lead to this fascinating sort of grasping. it is often the sound of people searching for an ideal urban sound that will finally unite everyone who ever bought a destinys child or craig david or sean paul or 50 cent album, and in the inevitable failure to achieve this the results can become weirdly loveable and idiosyncratic. so er sean paul remains unfeeling alien and shaggy is the people's hero, OK??
(check
these two ridiculously sick
dj keyz tapes for more happy missteps!)
