Post by chvrchbarrel on Aug 27, 2024 10:16:50 GMT -6
Let’s get into “It Wasn’t Me”. The chorus is American English, but you’re spitting raw Patois on the verses. I thought it was smart because most people are not gonna understand what you’re saying, so they’ll want to replay it.
It’s a balance, you know what I mean? When you have a chorus that’s so English, you have to go to dancehall to bring the authenticity back. So they might not understand it very well, but they know the flow is so dope. It only lasts for eight bars anyway. There’s different methods to how I write. If I’m doing a 12 or 16-bar verse, I’ll throw different English things in there to make them a little bit more understandable and popular. I try to make timeless records.
I watched the Vice documentary about the song and I didn’t know “It Wasn’t Me” almost didn’t make the album.
I was never surprised that the record label didn’t like anything we did. They just couldn’t understand us. They’re used to a cookie-cutter style of making records. We were coming out of left-field from a different culture. They’re not going to spend millions of dollars promoting some kid just doing dancehall. Dancehall had such a stigma: guns, violence, homophobia, all kinds of shit. So that made it hard for me to maneuver through it.
-Billboard/Shaggy
It’s a balance, you know what I mean? When you have a chorus that’s so English, you have to go to dancehall to bring the authenticity back. So they might not understand it very well, but they know the flow is so dope. It only lasts for eight bars anyway. There’s different methods to how I write. If I’m doing a 12 or 16-bar verse, I’ll throw different English things in there to make them a little bit more understandable and popular. I try to make timeless records.
I watched the Vice documentary about the song and I didn’t know “It Wasn’t Me” almost didn’t make the album.
I was never surprised that the record label didn’t like anything we did. They just couldn’t understand us. They’re used to a cookie-cutter style of making records. We were coming out of left-field from a different culture. They’re not going to spend millions of dollars promoting some kid just doing dancehall. Dancehall had such a stigma: guns, violence, homophobia, all kinds of shit. So that made it hard for me to maneuver through it.
-Billboard/Shaggy
vs
By 1998, Gregg Alexander had already been signed and dropped twice—first by A&M, then by Epic—after failing to make a splash with his first two albums. At that point, he was “used to making records that never got heard,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2014, and decided to stop trying to make music that might be successful. Instead, he said, he “ripped up [the] few rules that applied to my first two records” and produced an album almost entirely on his own: Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too.
Almost overnight, the album’s lead single, “You Get What You Give,” rocketed onto the Billboard Top 40, peaking at #36. To Alexander, the fact that the song succeeded at all came as a surprise, he told the Hollywood Reporter:
“My favorite writers and artists had a human-politics aspect to their work, and that was something that drove me as well. I felt—perhaps too early on—that it was going to be a challenge to get even a portion of that sentiment across.”
-VICE
Almost overnight, the album’s lead single, “You Get What You Give,” rocketed onto the Billboard Top 40, peaking at #36. To Alexander, the fact that the song succeeded at all came as a surprise, he told the Hollywood Reporter:
“My favorite writers and artists had a human-politics aspect to their work, and that was something that drove me as well. I felt—perhaps too early on—that it was going to be a challenge to get even a portion of that sentiment across.”
-VICE
