Watch: Safaree’s “Hot Gyal Bday” Samples Harry Belafonte’s Jump In The Line

Recently, much has been said about Jamaican artists pulling on the catalogue of past hits to make their own hits. It seems Jamaican American rapper Safaree took it to heart with his latest song Hot Gyal Bday which takes from a few hits including a beat that samples fellow Jamaican American legend Harry Belafonte’s 1961 hit “Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora),” a calypso song composed by Lord Kitchener.

Safaree’s Hot Gyal Bday produced by Rah with executive production from Whitey and Zeke Don, is his usual basic vocabulary and antics.

The beat is cleverly constructed with drum patterns similar to Uncle Luke’s “Its Yah Birthday”.

Safaree is not convincingly Uncle Luke and the song is more along the lines of Shenseea and Megan The Stallion’s “Lick”. The Love And Hip Hop star interpolates lines from both Luke and Lick; “put your back into it gyal,” which is the contention of a 10 million dollar lawsuit.

In the music video Safaree is dressed like Richard Simmons “Sweating to the oldies”, only with a less contagious energy.

Other ridiculous moments in the music video comes with Safaree having his face covered in cake and another comes when he wears the Jamaica flag sitting ass-level and singing “back it up gyal back it up gyal,” a line from Beenie Man’s “Back It Up”. 

The song opens and ends with Future’s voice saying “You got the vision”.

Safaree’s attempt at interpolating and sampling classic sounds is ambitious the least. What the former hype man for Nicki Minaj lacks is the authenticity and charm of an artist who respects the art of song making.

Shaggy also sampled Harry Belafonte’s Jump In The Line recently. Mr. Boobastic was a singer under the mask at Fox’s Masked Singer TV show where he wore a “Space Bunny” suit as he performed the Harry Belafonte classic.

The Mask Singer is TV series where singers battle it out with their singing talents with their identity hidden by a mask.

At the end of the show, the celebrity’s true identity is revealed as they are unmasked on stage in a guessing game.

During the Round 3 Finals of Masked Singer on Wednesday, both Space Bunny and Queen Cobras were eliminated from the competition.

Shaggy was the first to go home after his performance of “Now That We Found Love.” Judge Robin Thicke correctly guess that he was behind the Space Bunny astronaut suit (others guessed it was Sean Kingston and Owen Wilson). In all honesty, the reggae singer told TheWrap he wasn’t too surprised that the judges were able to figure out his identity — and he actually expected it sooner.

Shaggy said about his out of the box appearance on the show, “you can’t achieve anything new if you haven’t done anything new.”

With a Jamaican flag EarPiece in his ears, Shaggy’s song choice was meant to be patriotic and send a bigger message culturally. Harry Belafonte was the first man in the world to sell 1 million units of an album with Calypso.

The judges took a while to guess who he was and he said after the show, “It took too damn long! With the exception of Jenny McCarthy, I know all of them. Nicole [Scherzinger] and I make records together. She’s been at my house in Jamaica, you know, hanging out at my parties. I mean, they should have guessed a long time ago,” he said, adding that his song choices are probably ultimately what gave him away. “In hindsight, I probably didn’t make the best choices because I was doing it more on a patriotic kind of a vibe. They were all Caribbean or Jamaican. I should have stuck with my original plan. I was gonna sing like Neil Diamond and Frank Sinatra. In fairness to the songs, they were really fun songs, got people going but it also gave me away a lot.”

Shaggy is known to sample, cover and interpolate the greats with remarkable renditions. Years ago he sampled Harry’s other chart topper Day O, making his own rendition Day Oh for his 1995 Grammy winning album Boombastic. He then did a remix of Banana with Conkarah which samples and interpolates the same song. Banana has been streamed over 1 billion times.

Jump In The Line History

Woody Herman and his Third Herd recorded Kitchener’s song in 1952 for Mars Records; Herman’s band recorded it live that same year with the title “Jump in Line.” Lord Invader released a cover of the song on the Folkways Label in 1955, titled “Labor Day (Jump in the Line)”. His rendition reached mento star Lord Flea, who in turn recorded a version based on Lord Invader’s interpretation. It was released on August 1, 1958, by Capitol Records.

Flea’s version inspired Harry Belafonte, who released his own take on November 17, 1961. It was included on the album Jump Up Calypso, and was later recorded by Lord Fly and Joseph Spence in 1958.

Perhaps its most memorable appearance is in the 1988 Tim Burton comedy horror film Beetlejuice during the movie’s end. This occurrence would later resurface in the Broadway musical stage adaptation in 2019 as the finale.

In 1998, the song was covered by American swing band the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies for the soundtrack to David Zucker‘s comedy film BASEketball. A decade later, the song was performed by Samuel E. Wright, Kevin Michael Richardson, Rob Paulsen, Jim Cummings, Alvin Chea, Oren Waters, Rick Logan and Chris Garcia in The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning. The song was sampled by Pitbull as “Shake Señora” off the 2011 album Planet Pit. That same year, a 2004 recording of the song by Karl Zero and The Wailers (released on Zero’s album, HiFi Calypso) was used in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules. The track appears in Just Dance 2 from its original artist. Jump In The Line was also featured in Uncle Dane’s return video Impractical Engineering.

It inspired the 1962 Gary U.S. Bonds hit single “Twist, Twist Senora“.

It is certified silver in the UK for selling more than 200,000 units.

Shaggy announced that his version of Jump In The Line will be out today, May 5 on all streaming platforms because his manager liked his Mask Singer rendition so much.

“My manager was like, ‘Yo, you got to drop that record because you did so good.’ So we’re dropping that. We also have an album coming out, it’s actually Frank Sinatra’s song book,” he said. “So it’s a bit crazy, but you know, that’s how I try to step out of the box and create the element of surprise.”