I watched on Vice a short documentary on the history of the song, “It wasn’t me” by Shaggy and Rikrok.
The most important song of the century nearly never made it out here and would have died, one of those studio songs that never get released. Reason: The top guys at MCA thought the song was crap and the whole Hotshot album was underwhelming and it nearly killed Shaggy with depression. They never even tried to promote the album.
I was a teenager when the song came out and I remember my bro Gisiora Banyarebanyare Inpector bringing the tape and CD home, and boy, did we molest it. The song took over the world and you know the song had become a cultural phenomenal when it gives new words and phrases that we use and become commonplace. Nowadays the song gets played in the early hours of the night as part of the American hip hop/ pop songs, so that fossils like me can leave the club for younger kids to enjoy their youth. Isn’t it funny how we grow old and relegated from fancy clubs to dingy spots to listen to Rumba?
Music composition is one of the unique divine gifts if mankind. Often, a producer plays a beat he has just made and the artist figures out what needs to be done. Shaggy had achieved stardom with his 1995 album Bombastic and was looking to match the success or top it in 2000. Enter a young Rikrok, a young songwriter(he sung the song as an afterthought.) You gotta appreciate Shaggy’s genius. He is the one who said one should hook in a listened with a crazy opening lining. Because as song introductions go, “honey came and caught me red handed banging naked on the bathroom floor,” is on top there among the best. You immediately want to listen to the story. Earlier in 1998, Bill Clinton had told us, “I’d did not have sexual relations with that woman…”. Shaggy picked the line “It wasn’t me” from an Eddie Murphy stand up routine. We all tend to forget that Eddie Murphy was once a great standup comedian.
More to the point. Song is done. Some marketer heard it in the studio by mistake, as it played just randomly as he waited for Shaggy and the producer to come back from lunch. He goes to MCA(the record label) and the big guys there are not interested in this ragga madness.
So album is out and the song is not even included, or got included as an afterthought.
There is zero radio play. Clubs in the American East Coast are not interested and Shaggy tries to perform but it is mostly a few guys, tens of people in the crowd. Not at all interested. Two things happen simultaneously. A radio DJ in Hawaii wants to be the best guy in the game and is looking for new music. He searches the internet and sees a bootlegged copy of the hotshot album and seeing it is Shaggy’s new stuff, he downloads the album(illegal) and plays the song on radio and his phone lines go crazy, as people want to know who the hell did such a fantastic song. Before long the song is a phenomenon in Hawaii and it is getting attention across the States. Meanwhile, Shaggy with minimal help from the record label is moving westwards in America trying to perform and he gets to Nevada, the song has become a cultural phenomenal. And just like that, Shaggy and Sean Paul (who had just released Dirty Rock) are about to sweep the world with ragga pop madness. The song becomes a no.1 across the world, selling 10 million copies, with zero marketing or help from the record label.
Shaggy said that 11 people in his crew bought houses from the song and that makes him happy to date. And that album is one of my favourite. Two songs stand out from the album: Leave it to me(best lovemaking song) and Keeping it real(best motivational song, if you going through a hard time). Shaggy is a great song writer. No doubt.
This story rattles me, but also reminds me how accidental life is. Mario Puzo wrote the Godfather as a desperate effort to make money for his young family. Unwittingly he unleashed one of the greatest books that spawned an even greater movie.
And there are so many things that nearly never got out here, or were nearly killed by gatekeepers or came out at the wrong time.
One such story that fascinates me is the history of two books:The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald and Animal Farm by George Orwell.
When Fitzgerald finished his third novel, he now hoped to play in the big league. The book received lukewarm reviews, in 1925 and sold only a few copies. He did write one more novel before dying young(44) considering himself a failure. But during the second world war, his friend, critic Edmund Wilson helped in the reprinting of the book and it was given to young soldiers and became a high school curriculum book, and the book became a phenomenonal success. And what a book! The density and deeply personal pen of Fitzgerald makes him a far greater writer than the mostly dry as steel prose of Ernest Hemingway, his contemporary. If not Wilson, the book may never have become The Great American Novel it is to date.
Animal Farm’s story was tragic as well. Never understood how it became a setbook in Kenya, when Moi was the president when dictators still to date hate the book. Orwell wrote the book during the Second World War as a satire attacking Russia. Russia played a complex role in Second World War and no big publisher on either side of the Atlantic wanted to touch it. It was spurned by poet T.S Eliot, then an editor at a top publishing house, who thought it wasn’t a good time to attack Stalin. This is according to Christopher Hitchens writing on the book’s accidental history. Orwell self-published the book with a small publishing farm and that was it. Nothing much happened. Until some Ukrainian prisoners came across the book, requested Orwell to translate it. And then American soldiers, still in their dalliance with Communist Russia, rounded all copies and handed them to the Red Army to be burnt. When the book was taken to Random House to be published the boss was a communist sympathiser and refused. But a man from a small publisher got the book in a bookshop on Cambridge, UK, and took it to America. Again Edmund Wilson reviewed the book in the New Yorker, and the Book of the Month Club selected it and instantly it became a phenomenon in 1950 just before Orwell died.
The same can be said of the movie Citizen Kane. Constantly ranked as one of the greatest movies. The movie is believed to be a story of William Randolph Hearst, a media mogul who at one point owned nearly all newspapers in America, the first part of the 20th century. Knowing the movie was about him, all his media outlets refused to review it. And for several years, nobody knew about the movie. Until he died, did the movie undergo an unlikely Renaissance.
Same can be said of Harry Potter books.
So, every day, you enjoy your favourite book, movie, song, or work of art, know that it may have died at one stage of production or after it’s release. Or that the owner may not have been interested in it that much. Know that some people thought that it was crap at the time of production and we should thank our stars for the men who open doors, men who trust their instincts and let these things out.
Happy Sunday fam.
The Deal 