"Beyonce contacted me and sent me the rhythm and I went to Miami to do it," explains Paul, who still lives in Jamaica. Keen to get her own reggae endorsement, Destiny's Child Beyonce Knowles roped him in to provide vocals on the track Baby Boy on her debut solo album, Dangerously In Love. Unsurprisingly, Paul's new label, Atlantic, is expecting even bigger things of their new reggae superstar with company co-president Craig Kallman declaring: "The time is right to step out and endorse reggae in a way that's never been done before except by Chris Blackwell at Island." This time radio came on board after the track was made a priority across Europe by MTV, on the basis that "dancehall could be the sound of the summer," in the words of station executive Hans Hagman.
Paul's next single, Get Busy, reached number 4 in the UK charts in May. "It's a party song and should be taken in that context - I'm not telling kids to go do this," says Paul of his ode to herbal enlightenment. "I hooked up with the best person in the world to produce it at that time - Little X, a little Trinidadian who knew about our culture," he says of the director whose idea was to film a riotous house party being broken up by a returning parent.Īlthough Gimme the Light was picked up by TV, radio was still reluctant to playlist a musical style considered a little to "real" for mainstream tastes, particularly when the lyrics to the song in question - "Gimme the light, pass the dro'" - would have had programme controllers spluttering into their morning coffee.
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His breakthrough came with TV exposure of the video to the Gimme the Light single last year. "Selling 75,000 copies of my first album gave an indication of what was coming," he says.
This is on top of a million-plus sales in the States where the album peaked at number 9, and the single Get Busy went to number 1.Īlthough he has had hit singles in Jamaica since 1996, Dutty Rock has allowed Paul to make the jump from domestic big fish to global star. Since its release in the UK at the end of April, Dutty Rock, Paul's second album, has sold just over 200,000 units. Then it moved to a slower tempo to rocksteady, then moved to reggae," explains Paul.Īrtists such as Yellowman, Shabba Ranks and Beenie Man have scored international hits with dancehall singles, but Sean Paul is on the verge of establishing the genre internationally in the albums market. "In the 60s, songs like My Boy Lollipop were called ska - like No Doubt now. Dancehall can be traced back to New Orleans R&B in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jamaican musicians would listen in to US radio stations and try to emulate the sounds they heard, creating ska in the process. My cool is hardcore.'"įor the past decade and a half, Jamaican bars have shaken to the energetic "riddims" of dancehall reggae - a musical hybrid that features DJs rapping over an electronic reggae backbeat. "It means, 'Yeah, we rock - or you rock, man. Paul is not suggesting his oeuvre is outré in the Aguilera sense.
"Dutty means dirty," he says in a deliciously thick Jamaican accent, explaining that the title of his latest album, Dutty Rock, "means dirty rock". If you know your patois from your patios, then you'll want to be considered "dutty", according to Sean Paul, the 30-year-old Jamaican who is poised to bring dancehall into the mainstream. C hristina Aguilera may sing that she likes to get "dirrty", but it takes more than an extra "r" to prove your bad-boy credentials in the dance halls of Jamaica.