The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2020 - Issue 27

bite music celeb the TV exposure of the music video for ‘Gimme the Light’ that his crossover to the mainstream was so successful. “I hooked up with the best person in the world to produce it at the time - Little X, a little Trinidadian who knew about our culture,” he explained. Starting as a DJ playing in tiny clubs in Kingston, Jamaica, Sean Paul first honed his skills after he received a keyboard at the age of 13 and performed at local barbeques. It wasn’t un- til he released his single ‘Baby Girl’ produced by Beenie Man collaborator, Jeremy Harding, ten years later that he got his breakthrough. At the time, he described his music as “a sort of reggae and rap and hip hop” in which the latter was a huge influence growing up. “It was the first music that spoke to me. They were expressing something like how I would express myself,” he revealed. “DJs in Jamaica like me got into hip hop where kids tell you about their street life, and it brought the generation gap closer to- gether. My flow sometimes follows what’s going on in hip hop even though I’m speaking Jamaican patois.” When it came to the advent of dancehall, it aimed to appeal to a younger audi- ence in need of something edgy while keeping the older reggae fans happy. Following Sean Paul’s earlier hits, artists lined up to work with him including Beyoncé who asked him to provide vocals on her track ‘Baby Boy’. “Beyoncé contacted me and sent me the rhythm and I went to Miami to do it,” he told the interviewer. “It was a great experience to meet her but I was very surprised she picked me - it shows dancehall music is getting bigger.” However, this didn’t stop crazy rumours surfacing in 2003 that the nature of their relationship was more romantic than pro- fessional. Talking about the false reports that he was feuding with Jay-Z, Beyoncé’s then-boyfriend who was said to be jealous over his close working relationship with the singer, the dancehall artist said, “The song became number one for nine odd weeks or something like that and the controversy - it was a crazy time in my career. So up to now, I still [perform] the song, it’s a huge song for me and her [Beyoncé] and I just thank her for having me.” Although the two artists shot separate scenes for the music video, Jay-Z, allegedly, banned Sean Paul from performing with Beyoncé at the 2003 MTV VMAs (Video Music Awards). “The whole direction of the video was sold to me as, “You’re in a dream world,” he said when he appeared on RapFix Live in September 2012. “It was not a big deal to me, but it really blew up into crazy stuff.” The artist apparently denied he had been banned from performing and said he knew Jay-Z before he worked with Beyoncé. However, before this in 2005, he is said to have admitted his confusion for not performing on stage at the MTV VMAs. “I was sitting in the crowd and I was like, ‘damn what’s that all about?’ Paris Hilton and her sister were sitting behind me like, ‘why aren’t you up there?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I was embar- rassed and I was also upset. It did blow out of proportion as to all the rumours about Jay-Z and the jealousy and all that. I don’t know the reason for me not being on that stage while she was doing that song.” Perhaps it was because in one video when he and Beyoncé performed together on stage, Jay-Z was not pleased especially when Beyoncé twerked on the dancehall singer. Or the rumour that said while the couple was having dinner with friends, weeks before Halloween, someone suggested Jay-Z went as a dancehall reggae singer and Beyoncé agreed and joked, “Yea baby, get a Sean Paul mask and go as him.” Whatever the rea- son was, the dancehall singer said nothing romantic happened between him and Beyoncé. Other collaborations with artists have included Blu Cantrell on ‘Breathe’ (Sean Paul’s first #1 before he worked with Beyon- cé on ‘Baby Boy’), Busta Rhymes on ‘Make It Clap’, Beenie Man on ‘Bossman’, the amazing Santana on ‘Cry Baby Cry’, Rihanna on ‘Break It Off ’, and the ever-impressive Sia on ‘CheapThrills’ (a song she wrote that was rejected by Rihanna) and was a sur- prise hit for the dancehall artist as well as another #1 hit for Sia, knocking Drake’s ‘One Dance’ off the top. Always one to be unconventional and different, Sean Paul went for a change in hairstyle during 2010 and swapped his infamous cornrows for a mohawk. It was perhaps his way of ushering in a new era in his music career and experiencing with different genres of music while keeping dancehall mu-