Legendary dancehall superstar Shaggy is expressing his anger at music executive Murray Elias for his derogatory comments about dancehall artists emerging out of Jamaica. Shaggy, in an exclusive interview with World Music Views, criticized Elias for unfair and non-credible assessments of dancehall artists’ sales performance in the marketplace, emphasizing that Elias’ opinion should not be taken seriously as he is not relevant the the present music industry.
“Dancehall has always been and is less than 5% of the global market share, but dancehall is more known now than it was in the 90s,” Shaggy said.
Elias, who initially commented on a post by WMV, labeled dancehall artists, including Shenseea, Skillibeng, Byron Messia, and Teejay, as one-hit wonders and flops saying, “Afrobeats artists are better songwriters, better singers, better artists than anything coming out of Jamaica. And by better, I mean more commercial on an international crossover level,” Elias said.
Shaggy strongly objected to those claims and disputes Murray Elias’s revisionist history regarding the onset of the dancehall revolution in America. In refuting Elias’s assertions made in a follow-up interview, “Mr. Boombastic” highlights his own contributions to the genre since the early 1990s. He argued that Sean Paul, with whom Elias collaborated as A&R in the early 2000s, did not single-handedly initiate the dancehall revolution in the US.
“Murray made a statement that the dancehall revolution started with Sean Paul and that’s not true; that’s omitting all I did,” Shaggy said. Adding, “When we listened to a man like Murray talk like that, it really angers me. In the 2000s, we had Wayne Wonder ‘No Letting Go,’ Sean Paul, and others,” Shaggy said passionately.
“In 1993 when I was doing it, no radio station played it (dancehall), no one looked at the genre as a money-making genre. When is it that we didn’t see it at only 3% of global market share. We have never been a genre that got airplay. The first dancehall number one was ‘Oh Carolina,’ and ‘Boombastic’ was the only dancehall record to debut at No. 1 in the UK. We followed up with it again and debuted at No. 1 with ‘Angel’ and ‘It Wasn’t Me,’ no one has ever done that,” he explained.
The two-time Grammy-winning Jamaican artist, addressing Elias’s comments on Teejay being a one-hit wonder, defended the artist’s personal successes and achievements under a Warner Music Group deal.
Furthermore, Shaggy says Elias has no right to speak on dancehall or dancehall artists in the disparaging way he does as a foreigner who was welcomed into the culture, due to his organizational skills sometime ago.
“He (Elias) had an ear back then and some organizational skills,” Shaggy credited, underscoring the importance of supporting and uplifting young dancehall artists. “Teejay’s record buss pon a dance and me see Teejay eat a food and buy him house and buy him car and set up him youth them life, so for this guy (Elias) to come in a bruk the youth them vibe it is not true,” Shaggy said.
As a veteran in the music business, Shaggy, real name Orville Burrel says he stays curious and has learned from the younger artists as much as they have learned from his mentorship. “I been working with Teejay and him a teach me a new way to do this when him come with ‘Drift,’ I love the song, and him show me how him could work, so you can’t cow down the acts.”
Elias commented that Skillibeng has been dropped from his label for not being able to find a hit, and Shaggy says that is Murray spreading false information about Skillibeng.
“He spoke about Skillibeng being dropped, and Skillibeng is not dropped. He is not credible; he hasn’t been in the game for over a decade,” Shaggy said.
Checks by WMV with RCA Records executives revealed that the MOBO Award winning deejay is still signed to the label, and he appears on Teejay’s EP on the track titled “Never” set for release February 2, courtesy the record label.
“Them youth yah a inner-city youth, and them a try; this is the only thing them have, and them a try,” Shaggy said citing that Murray’s relevance in dancehall is relegated to the work he did with Sean Paul but even Sean’s global success came on the back of the path cleared by Shaggy’s Hot Shot album,
“Murray is holding on to the coattail of Sean Paul and Sean’s success, but Craig Kallman had a cap of half a million dollars and couldn’t go over it; he went to his boss and said I have a guy named Shaggy and his boss said no, it’s dancehall, dancehall never sold over a million, they lost the deal with me and I sold ten million. Craig ended up sending me a pool table congratulating me, after that they signed Sean and made him a priority,” Shaggy recalled.
“For you to discredit me and then come with things that’s not credible on top of that, he is a b*tch; It’s a negative narrative and demotivating for the artists. These young guys are the future, the Skillibeng, the Teejay, Masicka we have to elevate them; this feeds the youths. This makes them financially literate,” Shaggy concluded.
