Shaggy sits down with The FADER to speak on his new album and how he got started in the game. Check out the excerpt below…
Your new album is called Summer in Kingston. Do you live in Jamaica full-time? I live in Kingston. When I tell people I live in Kingston, they start fearing for my life. People ask me if I have internet in Jamaica. Like, seriously? So my thing was just to make a really feel-good record with feel-good videos and show the Jamaica that I live in. My favorite time in Kingston is actually Christmas, but summer is great. I like being on Maiden Cay and Lime Cay. Hellshire has a fishing festival. But I’m not a fan of the countryside. I’ll go for three days, then I get bored and that’s it. There’s only so much beaches, sun and laying out I can do. I want to be in the midst of the madness that’s going on. Kingston is pretty small. It’s a ten minute drive to everywhere and everything. In New York, anything you want, you can get it. Jamaica’s kind of the same way—I’m going to go by the bar, then get some tracks and records, some food, watch a game. There’s something happening every night. Jamaica’s a very rich country, as far as music and street dances are concerned.
Was recording culture in Jamaica different when you were getting started? Actually I started recording mainly in New York, which has a huge dancehall community. I was with the Rough Entry crew—me, Red Fox, Screechy Dan. We were running the place. After we blew up with “Boombastic,” we started going back down to Jamaica and opened Big Yard studio with my former manager, Robert Livingston. Big Yard was like a complex that people were invited to. If you got drums to lay, need some bass, Sly and Robbie come around and deal with it. Dean Fraser was the greatest saxophone player out of Jamaica. You could call him up like, Yo! Dean! I need that sax on this! That’s Kingston. Boom boom boom, get it done.
Mr. Kartel has been making the rounds lately, in promotion of both his new album and upcoming book, among other things. The people over at The FADER & New York Times have seemed to take notice of his hustle.
He graces the cover of the latest FADER issue, their annual Summer Music Special, and is featured in a recent NYT article covering his various branding efforts. Both are good reads.
Check out The FADER‘s accompanying podcast below…
In Brooklyn, the West Indian Day Parade goes straight down Eastern Parkway. It’s as much a summertime celebration as it is a competition to see who has the biggest truck with the loudest speakers. Most of what gets played is, of course, West Indian music, but the city’s summer bombast shouldn’t be exclusive to soca, calypso and reggae. Sometimes you just want to hear an acoustic guitar played fulled blast out of an 18-wheeler. We’ve rounded up our favorite jams from our Summer Music Issue and prepared a proper soundtrack for your big truck or beachside iPod speakers. Six years into his career, Soulja Boy is still welcome at our barbecue, and so are FADER #74 stars Vybz Kartel, Woods, DJ Harvey, Jhene Aiko, Clams Casino, Pure X, Grimes, Little Dragon, Fat Trel and Shabazz Palaces. It’s hot out out there, and it should be.
For their annual Icon Issue, the folks at The FADER wisely chose to honor a figure who status is undisputed: The Notorious B.I.G.
See a few words from the staff on the new issue below…
Every year, FADER makes an Icon issue. We have featured artists like Aaliyah, Shabba Ranks, Nina Simone and David Byrne, musicians whose impact feels so large it’s almost unknowable. We’ve always tried to parse their influence by speaking with friends, family and fans to create a portrait of their lives both in and outside of music. However, with an artist like Notorious BIG, the subject of this year’s issue, much of that work has already been done because Big was so beloved. We’re not trying to compete with Notorious (shout to Gravy, though), but we set about painting a portrait of Big both as a rapper and as a regular dude. In our issue you’ll read accounts from the intern who witnessed Big and Tupac’s first encounter, you’ll hear what Puff thinks about when he listens to Biggie’s music today. You’ll see new photos of prominent places in Big’s life, from the tunnel he drives through backwards in the “Hypnotize” video, to the block where he performed his infamous teenage freestyle. And you don’t even have to wait for our issue’s release on May 3rd to read Andrew Noz’ essay about Biggie’s musical legacy, that’s on TheFADER.com right here, right now. There’s a whole lot more to come and we can’t wait for you to see it.
Lady Saw is, of course, legendary—you don’t win the title of the queen of dancehall for being a slouch—but we were nonetheless struck by how remarkable and charismatic she is when she came through FADER TV HQ for a chat. But then, as we learned, this is a woman who’s been through so much—poverty, abuse and more—that she can’t help but be a force of strength, detailing her history and her presence with warmth and openness and ending our interview with a sincere hug. Lady Saw’s seventh studio album, My Way, is out now on her own new imprint, Diva Records. She’s earned the monikers.
Fader’s Ghetto Palms normally features Dancehall but in the latest installment this mix is all about kreyol. It mainly features a Haitian-born Montreal rapper Mr. OK. Props to the Fader for always mixing it up.
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Following up on my post a couple of weeks back, check out The FADER‘s Shabba-themed podcast, that accompanies their recent Shabba cover, below…
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Yes, that Shabba; the ranking one. I am gonna have to keep this column dumb-short just to make room for the dumb-long tracklisting, still only a narrow core-sample of Shabba’s deep and broad 45-ography. I tried to drill through a good cross-section of his work with different producers from different eras, mostly avoiding the video joints and trying to include a few later/leftfield gems that are not necessarily part of the dancehall canon, either. And then I added a few associated jams and tributary Panamanian and Punjabi riddims to provide some context, give an idea of dude’s impact globally (you can even find samples of Shabba’s trademark ugh! On Egyptian pop records from the early ’90s) and make it a proper Ghetto Palms mix.
The FADER trips back to a time when Shabba ruled the tube and radio with their latest issue. Check out the details on their Icon Issue, which it also features rocker Siouxsie Sioux, below…
Around the same time in the early ’90s, MTV’s 120 Minutes replayed the macabre clip for Siouxsie & the Banshees’ “Cities in Dust” while Shabba Ranks’ “Mr. Loverman” entered heavy rotation. The latter featured Ranks riding king-like on a raft across a Jamaican waterway among a gaggle of girls. In an era when MTV had musical impact, these two ruled the airwaves as unlikely royalty: Siouxsie Sioux the smoldering goddess of the underworld, Shabba cutting a stoic figure across maniacal crossover dancehall. Each brought their own explosive styles to a culture that had never seen anything quite like them—the dark dynamics of stately post-punk and a groundbreaking entry to global airwaves by Jamaica’s newest sound.
Siouxsie Sioux and Shabba Ranks, besides individually upheaving the musical landscapes of their time, can both be heard in copious new music we love right now. So, rather than pretending we weren’t equally passionate for both, for the first time ever, we chose two cover icons. To properly honor each of them, we printed four covers and split them fifty-fifty. And while the duo might initially seem like opposing forces, you just have to look at the artists featured throughout this issue to see how perfectly they intersect: from Santigold to Ikonika, RZA to Dave Sitek, Dum Dum Girls to Cassette Playa, Vybz Kartel to Tego Calderon, while tracing their legacies we found exactly how fiercely today’s musical and cultural climate reflects the dovetailing forces of the king of dancehall and the queen post-punk.
The nomination matured to an induction earlier this year, and the folks at FADER TV took the time to discuss the distinction and his career on the whole.
In Living Color’s “Hey Mon” parody of the stereotype that all Jamaicans have more than one job takes on a whole new meaning when you look at Jimmy Cliff’s résumé: He’s a roots reggae icon, actor in the Jamaican epic The Harder They Come, a doctorate recipient by the University of the West Indies and a newly inducted member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He rolled through the FADER offices to discuss his monumental career. Get schooled on the rude boy Rihanna overlooked.
