The videos from Dutty Rock immortalized trends originating in Kingston dance halls, with help from Director X and perceptive choreography by Tanisha Scott. Filmed in an unfinished basement in the suburbs of Toronto, the video by Director X prominently featured kinetic dance crews performing the latest dancehall moves and captured the innovative energy of a culture in diasporic translation. 7 on the Billboard Top 100-and then “Get Busy” leap-frogged it to reach No. By the time Dutty Rock dropped, its first single “Gimme The Light” had already warmed up the clubs and streets via the Buzz riddim, a crackling, suspenseful loop that sounds like a tiny string section trapped in the digital chaos of a video game.
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By then he’d “gone international” after guesting on “Money Jane,” a posse cut by Toronto’s Baby Blue Soundcrew, which became an unexpected success on Canadian commercial radio. In 2002, Sean Paul’s second album, Dutty Rock, hit big. “A couple of songs I wrote for my demo were talking about the ghetto story-I was drawing comparisons between uptown, where I’m from, and downtown.” But it was the gyalis tunes about chasing, watching, and dancing with women, that would become his niche. “A lot of my first songs were really conscious,” Paul said.
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From its origins in the late 1970s to the present day, the music has often chronicled, “the gritty realities of Kingston’s ghettos.sharing crude truths about the conditions of Kingston’s poor, their connections to Jah (Rastafari for “God”), the medicinal and recreational benefits of smoking weed.” Paul was an uptown kid with an artist mom and an incarcerated father, who grew up playing competitive water polo. Thematically, dancehall is seeded in the thorny social morass left behind by colonialism. You could have one guy singing about a girl with a fat ass, and another person singing something more conscious-and it’s on the same riddim.” That struck such a vibe in Jamaica because it was cool to hear different perspectives. “The tape could hold a certain amount of tracks, so there’s one producer and he has many artists on. “Riddims were an economic thing,” Sean Paul told me in 2016. But its lackluster commercial performance might also be indicative of incompatible listening cultures, or: conversational, informally distributed riddims versus the individualist, heavily categorized and marketed nature of modern LP making. A majority of the music on Stage One, including now-classic tunes like “Deport Dem,” and “ Hot Gal Today,” had been floating around on riddim tracks for a couple of years before the release. His first album, Stage One, barely hit the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop 100 in 2000. Before he conquered the world, Paul’s club-ready dancehall was a kind of guide to our suburban adolescent mating rituals. Me and my friends drove around listening to flea market-sourced riddim mixtapes and hitting repeat on tracks like “ Baby Girl,” “ Infiltrate,” and “ Deport Them.” The bass made our bodies vibrate and Paul’s boy-ish chat felt less intimidating than the grown-up raunchiness of other artists we loved, like Mr.
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Audiences are more open to genre, but they also have shifting and conflicting values and are more vocal about equity issues within pop culture, such as representation and cultural appropriation.īut before all of this, in the late ’90s, Paul was a bald-shaved, baby-faced loverboy proselytizing the hollowed-out cadence and bark of dancehall OGs like Super Cat and Shabba Ranks. But now, after dancehall has once again gone mainstream, the stakes of crossing over are higher. This is the price of access to a monolithic industry. Dutty Rock fits the template of how global pop breaks today: take an indigenous sound, affix it to a pop template, and attach a legible ambassador to the project (orthodontics may be required). In order to cross over and become successful beyond the confines of dancehall, a genre then in the shadow of Bob Marley posters plastered on college dorm walls, Sean Paul would first have to go pop. The intended effect of the makeover? To align Paul with the big-budget hip-hop and R&B stars of American urban radio in the early aughts. Early in Sean Paul’s career, at the start of the millennium-nearly two decades before Cardi B rapped about aspirational dental surgery on “Bodak Yellow”-the Jamaican musician embarked on a global debut with cornrows in his hair and braces on his teeth.