to them because it paved the road for me and did that work in terms of you know, people would say watered down but I say bridge the gap. It’s what I’ve done in recent years where Dance music became huge and to keep my audience, which is not just my base audience but a new audience of people listening to popular music. When Dance became popular, I had to start doing songs with people like David Guetta, Stargate, Clean Bandit, in the past few years. So I had to blend my music as well in the long run, now I think it’s going back to a time where I think that I wanna put hardcore Dancehall out with this album, ‘Live N Livin’’. There’s also a new sound in Dancehall, so the traditional sound is on the album, but also a little bit of the new sound where I work with the younger artists like Intence, Skillibeng, Masika; they’re on the album as well. The riddim tracks kinda reflect the new sound so I’m in a place of balance right now. I’ve had to pay homage and do music that my base audience will love throughout the years, which is the same hardcore stuff, but I’ve also had to kinda paint a new picture with words such as with Clean Bandit and doing songs with Dua Lipa and Becky G because the generation’s changed, time’s changed. Things happen and for me to balance all these different kinds of fans was an important thing for me. You never alienate people that way, I was thinking about the way you introduced us to new Jamaican artists with ‘Dutty Rock’, like Sasha and Ce’cile. Yeah for sure, Chico was on that album as well, with a song called ‘Ganja Breed’ and all the production was
“Those first years were very hardcore Dancehall for me” mainly from Jamaica. We had some from people like The Neptunes and Mark Ronson as you said. But yeah to bridge the gap is important for sure, a lot of people ask me, ‘how do you stay relevant this long’? And that’s part of the reason for sure, to listen to the fans. So first of all those hardcore fans and giving them what they want, then these people kinda like this or that, let me put Busta Rhymes on it, switch it up a little bit, and those things started to work. Now I’ve got these two platforms, it’s still Dancehall music but something that’s important to me is the balance, to keep people interested. You also have two songs in Spanish, and the Spanishlanguage music industry is very important today, but you realised that two decades ago. Why was that? I was going to places like New York City, the promoters dabbled with Dancehall a bit in that whole Latin world, they liked it a lot and those promoters would have five nights a week in clubs. So when it was Memorial weekend, in one night I would do two clubs in Jersey,
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which were like Guyanese clubs, more Caribbean orientated. Then I would do a club in Jersey that same night that was more Puerto Rican kids, then I would go to Brooklyn where there was a hardcore Jamaican crowd, and then I would finish up the night in a club in Manhattan which was everything, you know a mixture of everybody. With that being said, it was a great city to give me an indication of who was really logging on to my stuff and I wanted to bridge the gap, as I keep saying, and reach out to my Latino fans. I still have a very great affection for Latina ladies and so that was something for me that was important back in the day just so they could understand the song. A lot of people saw me and were like, ‘I love that song but what are you saying’? So I tried to do a song that would help reach out to them. We were doing work recently with J Balvin and with Anitta from Brazil, I’ve been talking with people like Rosalía and Sofía Reyes from Mexico so we’re doing work in that direction still, I have these kinda bridges that I need to keep up to date. That’s the beauty of Jamaica, you can appeal to so many surrounding countries, not just the Caribbean. The Jamaican music industry has done so much historically, the country’s contributed so many artists. I think of it as one of the three most important places for music, along with the UK and US. How has it been so influential? Our diverse history, our diverse gene pool, just the right size of island I guess. It’s big but it’s small as well, so all those characteristics of Jamaican people and the island itself, kinda lend itself to be. You can either be a very knowledgeable person of what the world is like, or not. I was one of those people who, due to my parents and my schooling and stuff like that, the experiences I had, I used to swim for Jamaica and go to these different countries and I used to see the similarities and the differences. So people like me come about and there’s a whole heap more of us, there’s people who understand diversity in their knowledge of the world. So like I say, the small land space with all these different types of people interacting, at first we were owned by the Spanish, then taken over by the British, and all of that for 400 years or so comes into a very spicy kind of people. Here you can find the biggest things down to the smallest things, the fastest things to the slowest things, the greatest things to the worst things - as with everywhere - but with the landmass it’s easier to kinda understand or get a grasp of what’s up in the world; we’re not locked off from the world to say the least. Music feels less selfish in Jamaica too, like the idea of the Riddim and how one instrumental can be used by 20 artists for 20 great songs, and it’s not considered stealing like it would be in British music, it’s for the betterment or sound. Do you agree music is more of a shared thing in Jamaica? I agree with you, even nowadays or before I used to do mixtapes with a lot of songs, we would have 70 songs and then put 25 on the album, but then the rest of them I would just do mixtapes and give out. Because one, competition is creative competition, like you want it to be heard and two, just the mood of the island is more relaxed in the context we play music out loud, everyone hears it, everyone gets to know songs from a distance. Even if you don’t have a radio, you hear songs playing next door or down the road and you get to know them so it’s one of our biggest pastimes as well, to know music even if we don’t play it, we kinda know music. You’d be surprised that people like AirSupply come to Jamaica for like a Jazz festival with a huge crowd of all types. So many
