Me and my friends drove around listening to flea market-sourced riddim mixtapes and hitting repeat on tracks like “ Baby Girl,” “ Infiltrate,” and “ Deport Them.” The bass made our bodies vibrate and Paul’s boy-ish chat felt less intimidating than the grown-up raunchiness of other artists we loved, like Mr. Audiences are more open to genre, but they also have shifting and conflicting values and are more vocal about equity issues within pop culture, such as representation and cultural appropriation.īut before all of this, in the late ’90s, Paul was a bald-shaved, baby-faced loverboy proselytizing the hollowed-out cadence and bark of dancehall OGs like Super Cat and Shabba Ranks. But now, after dancehall has once again gone mainstream, the stakes of crossing over are higher. This is the price of access to a monolithic industry. Dutty Rock fits the template of how global pop breaks today: take an indigenous sound, affix it to a pop template, and attach a legible ambassador to the project (orthodontics may be required). In order to cross over and become successful beyond the confines of dancehall, a genre then in the shadow of Bob Marley posters plastered on college dorm walls, Sean Paul would first have to go pop. The intended effect of the makeover? To align Paul with the big-budget hip-hop and R&B stars of American urban radio in the early aughts. Early in Sean Paul’s career, at the start of the millennium-nearly two decades before Cardi B rapped about aspirational dental surgery on “Bodak Yellow”-the Jamaican musician embarked on a global debut with cornrows in his hair and braces on his teeth.
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