The Jamaican dancehall star says Pharrell Williams proposed combining two of his signature ideas into one record. With Chad Hugo behind the production and Mýa providing the R&B counterweight, the experiment became one of Beenie Man’s defining international hits.

More than a quarter of a century after “Girls Dem Sugar” helped push dancehall deeper into the American mainstream, Beenie Man has offered a characteristically vivid account of how the record came together — and of the central role played by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, then operating as the production duo The Neptunes.

Speaking on The Real Report with Tony Yayo and Uncle Murda, in an episode released on September 28, Beenie Man revisited the studio session that transformed elements of his Jamaican breakthrough “Who Am I (Sim Simma)” into a sleek dancehall-R&B crossover featuring Mýa.

The striking part of Beenie Man’s recollection is that the concept, as he tells it, did not originate with him.

“When you hit a record with Mya. It was Pharrell Williams came up to me with the idea that I need to make Girls and Sugar and Sim Simmer in one song.”

Asked to confirm that Pharrell had approached him with the idea, Beenie Man replied:

The revelation prompted surprise in the room.

“Look at that, okay. Oh, Pharrell made them beats?”

Beenie Man answered:

“Yeah, he made them beats. That was his beat. That’s crazy.”

The story becomes more interesting when Beenie Man describes what happened next. While he identifies Pharrell as the person who conceived the idea and credits him with the beat, his account also places Chad Hugo — Pharrell’s partner in The Neptunes — directly inside the creative process.

“So I go, Okay. And Chad started to play, Chad started play, and I’m like, okay, let’s do a sim sima. Meet him another girls and shit. I sim sima the girls and the sim sima.”

The studio exercise was essentially one of recombination: take the instantly recognisable “Sim Simma” device, already associated internationally with Beenie Man, and marry it to the “Girls Dem Sugar” persona.

But the hook was not immediately finished.

“And Pharrell said, I would say the sim sima. And I said, okay, that’s better. That give me chance to breathe,” Beenie Man recalled laughing. Then the next thought was to look for a melodic element to balance his deejay delivery.

“I told him need something to melodi in the hook. There you go. Somebody said okay, we need that.”

That search ultimately opened the record to Mýa, whose smoother R&B presence supplied a counterweight to Beenie Man’s rhythmic vocal attack.

“Excuse me, baby, but I will just have to tell you this: it’s been a while since I done my.”

A Jamaican hit rebuilt for the American market

By the time “Girls Dem Sugar” emerged, “Who Am I” had already given Beenie Man an unusually portable piece of Jamaican popular culture. Released in the late 1990s, “Who Am I” became one of the records that pushed him beyond dancehall’s established markets. The UK Official Charts Company records the single reaching No. 10 in Britain in 1998.

The Neptunes did not simply discard that recognition. They repackaged it.

The resulting “Girls Dem Sugar”, credited to Beenie Man featuring Mýa and produced by The Neptunes, became part of Art and Life, Beenie Man’s 2000 album for Virgin. Contemporary and retrospective accounts identify Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo as the production team behind the recording.

Pharrell, in Beenie Man’s telling, supplied the proposition: combine “Girls Dem Sugar” with the “Sim Simma” identity. Chad then began playing as the record was being assembled.

It was a particularly Neptunes-like piece of musical economics: reuse an already valuable cultural asset without merely duplicating the old record.

“Sim Simma” functioned almost like an audio trademark. Listeners did not require an explanation. A few syllables could connect the new production to Beenie Man’s existing catalogue and identity.

The Neptunes then surrounded that recognisable dancehall language with the sparse, futuristic rhythmic architecture that was becoming increasingly important to American R&B and hip-hop around the turn of the millennium.

Mýa completed the equation.

Her presence allowed “Girls Dem Sugar” to operate simultaneously in several markets: Jamaican dancehall, American urban radio, R&B and mainstream pop. The record did not require Beenie Man to stop sounding Jamaican in order to cross over. Instead, its commercial architecture placed an unmistakably Jamaican performer inside a production framework familiar to American listeners.

“Girls Dem Sugar” peaked at No. 54 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached No. 16 on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop chart, according to chart figures reported by the Jamaica Observer. It also reached No. 8 on Rap Airplay, No. 15 on R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and No. 38 on the rhythmic chart.

Its performance in Britain was stronger still.

The Official Charts Company records “Girls Dem Sugar” entering the UK chart in March 2001 and peaking at No. 13. It spent four weeks inside the Top 40 and six weeks on the Top 100.

Those figures place the song in an important category of crossover records. It was not a US No. 1 pop blockbuster; rather, it was a record whose significance exceeded its Hot 100 peak. It expanded Beenie Man’s international profile while demonstrating the increasingly fluid commercial relationship among dancehall, hip-hop and contemporary R&B.

Billboard would later place the track at No. 84 on its staff list of the 100 greatest songs of 2000, according to the Jamaica Observer.

The song itself did not win Beenie Man a Grammy.

Rather, Art and Life, the album containing “Girls Dem Sugar”, won Best Reggae Album at the 43rd Grammy Awards in 2001. The Recording Academy lists Art And Life as the winner over albums by Wailing Souls, Dennis Brown, Pato Banton and Gregory Isaacs.

Pharrell’s instinct

Beenie Man has previously credited Pharrell with originating the idea in a BET interview. Earlier accounts of the recording quote him describing the concept as Pharrell’s and saying the producer wanted to remake the energy of “Who Am I”.

Who Am I, the original is certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association Of America for sales and streams surpassing 500,000 units.

It is Beenie Man’s only Gold single in the U.S.