Shaggy has declared that Dancehall, unlike Hip Hop which has created billionaires throughout its mainstream age, is long overdue for the same. “Hip Hop is the only genre that has created 7 billionaires in 20 years,” he said in his opening remarks at the Island Music Conference (IMC), which is currently happening in Kingston, Jamaica.
“Hip Hop is about 50 years old and if we are talking about hip hop being mainstream it has only been mainstream for about only 20 years and it’s within that time when you saw those billionaires which is a record number,” the Angel singer noted.
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In his opening remarks at the Island Music Conference (IMC), he mentioned, “The future is not Shaggy and Sean Paul, they (new artists) are the future but they should be armed with the knowledge and the know how…”
He added, “By coming to these things and by tapping into their devices…everything you do requires due diligence. There are tutorials on YouTube teaching these things. Information is easy. There is nothing that artists need now that they can’t get. There are so many things to learn that are readily available online.”
Shaggy continued by saying that dancehall artists must appreciate themselves, “What we have to start doing is realizing our value and create a movement… Shaggy and Sean are not the future, I’m sorry, it is these young artists,” He restated.
He brought attention to the genre’s distinct “cool factor,” which musicians from other genres continue to mine and capitalize on. Shaggy’s debut album, Pure Pleasure, reached 30 last year. To succeed, he advised Dancehall musicians to take advantage of this and be prepared to venture outside of their comfort zones.
“If you’re smart and have the work ethic and willing to take chances, those billionaires all made it doing this. We are the genre that has the cool factor and continues to have that cool factor and I tell you this because I have been doing this for 35 years and I go in all these rooms all over the world and I’m telling you when you go into a room, they want to be like you,” Shaggy.
He also argued that for Jamaican artists to take advantage of the chances that may lead to billionaire wealth, they must be prepared to put up with suffering.
“We need to recognize what we have and really put our best foot forward in trying to capitalize on it and trying to make it bigger and do not be scared of actually stepping out because you cannot achieve greatness without being uncomfortable. You only find your best when you are outside of your comfort zone, and you need to be uncomfortable to make that happen, I say it over and over every day, you do not want to be the hamster on the wheel,” the international sensation who rose the stardom with the hit song “Oh Carolina” remarked.
He further noted, “If you’re the smartest guy in the room then you are in the wrong room, always be around people who are smarter than you, who have achieved more than you who can teach you something and you can learn from them because no matter what room you are in and I have been in a couple of room with billionaires, sometimes every day and there is one thing they don’t have and that is the cool factor and that’s what we have in abundance here. If we can take the cool factor and the talent we have here and merge it with some work ethics then we will be unstoppable.”
Shaggy also aimed at banks and other investors for their reluctance to put money into Dancehall, a move that has prevented the genre from producing millionaires.
“Some of these financial institutions and investors are slow to think, they are slow to trigger to think that they would come in and be a part of that because they may think that the music is not tangible but it’s very tangible, culture is tangible. There is nothing that is sold without culture,” he explained.
“In Hip Hop when we see what Kanye is doing, a lot of that is culture and there is no bigger culture than this culture, so what we want is for financial institutions to stop looking at the music like it’s not tangible. There are catalogs these days…the catalogs itself is tangible. We need a lot more of our financial institutions to get involved in the culture,” he noted.
Orville Richard Burrell, better known by his stage name “Shaggy,” emphasized the significance of surrounding an artist with the correct crew to support them on their musical path once more.
“No matter how good you are as an artist, no matter if you are at your peak, if the people around you are not sharing the same vision, you naw go mek it .it impossible. Everybody, the person who is your manager, the person who is your agent, the person who is your social media manager, they have to be pro. That means if the interview starts at 8, you haffi deh deh from 6 because we are dancehall, we do not have the privileges of every other genre,” he shared.
His reasoning went on to say that Dancehall needs a celebrity to effect a paradigm change because the genre currently holds such a small portion of the market.
“Our genre is like 2 % and number 10 in listenership. We have a small piece of the pie, you definitely can’t have bargaining power with that unless you have a superstar that has superhero like talent, charisma, charm, work ethic, all a that inna one. Being a superstar is hard inno, you haffi remember that it is so hard to get to that level, they put groups together,” he argued.
“Stars represent culture, superstars shift culture and there is always a culture shift, and it just takes a superstar,” he expresses.
“To find an artist that possesses all of these things, charisma, charm, work ethic, all a dem inna one and talent and can sing and can dance and can conduct interview and can take over a conversation and full up a room inna one person, that’s a hard find, they put groups together to do that so to ask one artist to do that is very tough,” He concluded.
