The wife defends Sean Paul: “But I like dancehall!” before shouting Sean Paul’s signature phrase “Dutty Ye” in a ridiculously over the top impersonation of patois, as if she is speaking another language. The husband protests, “This is rubbish, I don’t listen to dancehall.” They both speak in the notorious Upper Saint Andrew’s accent, the infamous nasal housewife drawl in which wealthy Kingstonians mix local dialect patois with English. In the track “Uptowners Skit” from his Stage One album, a ritzy couple get into a car after dinner and the wife changes the radio station to Sean Paul. The genre is both loved and scorned by the upper class elite. In his first album, Sean Paul perhaps unintentionally gets into the social dynamics of dancehall in Jamaica.
#Background music get busy sean paul skin
Even though his father was a drug dealer, he still had the upper class upbringing, private school education, and light skin to qualify him as “uptown”: the small elite that run the island. He stuck to “gyalis” tunes about seducing women and generally stayed away from the other main category of dancehall: gunman tunes. But as he evolved, he became more pop.įrom the start, his ganja-puffing and cornrow-touting style fit the anti-authority attitude that is the foundation of the genre. Young SP was likened to legendary toaster Super Cat, framing him within a lineage of dancehall which he clearly fit into as the next chapter. Sean Paul’s songs like “Infiltrate” and “Deport Them,” from his first album Stage One, prompted many a Jamaican to lift their trigger fingers skyward as a sign of respect to the artistry. The ultimate sign of appreciation of a song is the gun finger salute - the equivalent of gold star from a teacher - and it is no easy feat to earn. Jamaicans are an actively hostile audience - if a song displeases us at a party we will stand immobile in protest, noses turned up, and death glares lasered at the selector. To understand the story of Sean Paul, the first thing to grasp is just how difficult it is to please a Jamaican listener. “But I love it.” We loved him because he represented Jamaica - he was a real dancehall artist that by his second album, had also figured out the tricky act of also appealing to a global market. “I have no idea what he is saying,” they told us. My cousin’s foriegn friends bounced along too. As I followed around my cooler older cousins, there he was on car rides, the shopping mall, trips to the supermarket. His second album Dutty Rock had just blown up when I spent the summer with family in Ireland, and there he was willy bouncing on MTV all day long.
In my bedroom in Jamaica, I slept with a poster of him above my bed, until my mother took it down deeming it inappropriate for an 11 year old.
It was impossible to be alive in the 2000s and not be shaped by his music.
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