Hot Shot: SHAGGY Stages Super Comeback - reggae rapper enjoying new success - Interview

Ebony, May, 2001 by Lynn Norment

"Although sometimes I know it seems impossible, there ain't no need in drowning in your sorrow. If things are as bad as they can be you can be sure there'll be a brighter tomorrow."

THESE lyrics from his song, "Keep'n It Real," reflect the philosophy that has sustained and fortified the recording artist known as Shaggy through the good times and the bad. He's been up and down and up again. Right now he s flying high with a hit album, Hot Shot, and his superhot single, the infectious "It Wasn't Me. Since November, the feel-good party song and CD have dominated music charts, thus staging an incredible comeback for the 32-year-old artist and songwriter. That is even more remarkable when you consider he's a reggae artist.

But life and the music industry haven't always been as carefree and rollicking as Shaggy's party music. Yet, as he advises in "Keep'n It Real," he refused to drown in his sorrow. Rather, he bounced back and over obstacles with his single-minded quest to make and deliver good music.

With a distinct vocal style that reflects his reggae and Jamaican roots, he made quite an impact on the music scene with his 1993 debut on Virgin Records, Pure Pleasure. The single, "Oh Carolina," became an international hit, topping music charts in the U.S. and all over Europe, South America and South Africa. It became one of the biggest hit singles in England's history.

That success was followed by the release of the multiplatinum Boombastic in 1995, for which he won a 1996 Grammy Award for "Best Reggae Album."

Shaggy was riding high on his success in the music industry when reality kicked in. His third album, Midnite Lover (1997), bombed. Actually, it would be more appropriate to say it was not given a chance; when the first single didn't do well, the record label pulled support from the project and it flopped.

"They dropped me, and the flavor of the month at the time was Beenie Man," he says, retorting to his fellow reggae artist who recently won a 2001 Grammy Award. "They jumped on that. I mean, he's a great artist and he's an excellent talent, but at the end of the day, I just felt like it was unfair to the other artists who were already there.

"They were just following in the footsteps of the other labels. They just figured that is how it is with reggae music, that it will be going for a while, and whenever the juice runs out, you just kinda bail out. They did it with Shabba, they did it with Steel Pulse, they did it with Maxi Priest. As soon as you have one failure, that's it. 'Okay, let's not spend any more money. Let's not build anymore. That's it. Let's find a new flavor of the month and sign it.' That's basically what happened."

Shaggy was down but not out.

He immediately was tapped by hit producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to do a song--"Luv Me, Luv Me"--for the How Stella Got Her Groove Back soundtrack. Lewis was impressed by how quickly Shaggy wrote the song with just the right lyrical content for the MCA soundtrack. In fact Lewis liked it so much he asked Janet Jackson, with whom he has had a long, successful working relationship, to do the chorus. The record became a Top 5 hit, but the politics of Shaggy's former record label came into play and Janet did not appear in the video or do promotional work for the project. "It was a big drama," Shaggy recalls. "But you can't stop a hit record."

Although he had planned to seek out a small, independent record label, he signed with powerhouse MCA because he was impressed with how its staff worked so hard to make the single a success. He immediately went to work on Hot Shot, for he already had dozens of songs written. But it didn't start out being the lighthearted party album that resulted.

"Because of my situation with the last record company, I was a little bit on the angry side," he confesses. "I remember one night actually listening to the album and realizing how angry it was. I totally scrapped a lot of those songs, and the very next song we wrote was `Keep'n It Real.' It says `no matter how you are sad and blue, there's always someone who has it worse than you; sometimes you gotta pay your dues, so don't worry, just on push on through.' That more or less was a wake-up call for me that said, `Hey, there's no need to be angry, man. You use more energy being mad, ya know. Just pick up and go on.' All of this builds character."

Shaggy has plenty of that. And personality, talent, showmanship and a flair for clever lyrics.

Shaggy was born in Jamaica in 1968 and named Orville Richard Burrell. While a teen, his friends started calling him Shaggy because "my hair was wild. Now it's tame." When he was 18, he moved with his mother, Veronica Miller, to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he attended high school and aspired to be a recording artist. The area in which they lived was rich in Jamaican and island culture in general, and he developed a talent for "toasting," rapping reggae-style. He performed whenever he could get to a mike and released two singles that both reached No. I on New York reggae charts. When he couldn't find work after high school, he joined the Marines in 1988.