Interview

		Biography
		Life Story

Where did you born?

I was born in 1973, January 9^th, in Kingston Jamaica.

Where did you grow up?

Right them side there, you see like uptown, Saint Andrew, like Linford. I’m from here, from the hillside.

Were you raised by your parents?

Definitely. My mums was a artist, my father is a businessman. She’s a artist, she paints.

Is she a famous artist?

In Jamaica, yes. She basically had her work being out there, but she didn’t go to school for art, she’s just been doing it from she was nine, making little crafts and started to paint, and basically she paints a lot of acrylic and watercolours. Her name is Frances Henriques, she goes by the name of Fran Henriques. My father is a businessman. Basically when I was younger, he went to prison, from I was thirteen til I was nineteen, unfortunate circumstances, for six years, so when I was nineteen he came out and it’s all good. That was just a time where I had to be the man around the house and grow up on my own without a father’s guidance, but my mums was there being the father and the mother, the provider and everything else.

What was life like for you growing up in this area? Did you grow up in Barbican, or..?

It’s basically a place called Norbrook, it’s a little further from Barbican. It’s not like it was very posh, but it’s better than what I saw in the ghetto. I was very appreciative of that. I was always provided for, I was sent to a school, a good school. That kind of situation, a real suburban, middle-class lifestyle.

What were school days like?

School days, my whole family was a swimming family, my mother and my father used to swim in the ‘60s for Jamaica, and they used to go on tours to Mexico and all over the place, so when I was a kid I used to hear their stories and look up to them and want to do that too, from the age of like 12 or 13 when my father just went in, I kind of hung on to something, so from that time I went to swim, or swim a lot more, ‘cause I could swim from I was a kid, but swim for a team now and then start to go away on teams to Trinidad, that was my first trip. I went to Puerto Rico, I went to Mexico myself, I went to Barbados, I went to Orlando for events, so I was travelling once or twice every year for swimming, from the time I was like 14, 15. the last even I went on with in 1994, where I was playing water polo for Jamaica, and my whole school was mainly sports orientated. I wasn’t a great student in terms of all rounder student, but I liked biology. I studied biology, but I didn’t like maths, I didn’t pay attention, you know, just an average kid.

How and when did you get involved in music?

I always love music, my mums was always playing music in the house, she especially used to listen to like Beatles and crazy songs like that. Also, growing up in Jamaica I hear reggae music all over the place, everywhere I go, so it was influential for me. Plus dancehall music and hip hop style started to get into my soul at that time, about the age of 13, 12, especially Super Cat, because to me, Super Cat is a bad man, but him turn him life around. He was in the 1980 war in Jamaica, where him used to pick up gun, and shoot for people, and shoot people. And him turn him life around and start to MC and become a deejay, what we call in Jamaica a deejay, same thing as an MC what them say, and you know someone who talks on the rhythms, someone who bless up the dance and tells you about his life and about the experiences. I love the style that him was portraying too, so Super Cat. I looked up to Shabba Ranks from before Shabba became big big in the United States. He was out here busting up the place from a long time before. I looked up to people like Major Worries, him style was incredible, different to me. Bob Marley taught me a lot of things just by listening to him. I was about 17 was when I started to really check out Bob Marley’s stuff a lot more than just what I heard on the radio. I knew one of his kids from school, Damien Marley, ‘Junior Gong’ used to go to school with my brother, so we knew him from young young ages, and it was a thing for me at that time. I didn’t really realize how big his father was, and how influential, and what his music capacity was, until about the age of 17.

When did you get more concretely involved in making music?

Around 1994 I started to write a lot of songs. In school I could always do it, like we were in school, deejaying to each other, like ‘Yo, this is re-re-re,’ we just start, but it wasn’t more than four lines at the time, so I didn’t expect that I would even have the intent to sit down and build a whole song, I just started, it was just something I could do for fun. I was always rhyming. When I was just out of school and I was like part time at a marketing firm, like sorting papers for them and I was starting to read the Gleaner a lot, and a conscious effect started to hit me, like ‘Why is my country like this? Why is everybody killing everyone?’ Social issues, so I started to write a lot of songs about social issues, different things like that. I did demo tapes in ’94 with those songs. My father heard them and said ‘Yeah, that’s good, let me give them to Cat Coore, I know him from we are kids, let me give him the tape.’ He got the tape and he said ‘Yeah, I like the tape, who is it?’ He said ‘My son,’ and he said ‘Wait, bring him come to the studio’, so Cat Coore from Third World was the first guy to take me to the studio, a small studio that Third World was working out of, way up in Stony Hill. One of those who is now a member of Third World, he wasn’t then, he was a person who used to write songs for them and he used to use their studio, his name is Rupert Bent, he was the one, it was his studio that I used to go and put some demos down with Cat and them. After a while, I went to other studios to try and get voiced on these popular rhythms that was having down here, that all these hit deejays were on. That’s the route that I thought I should go. I linked up with Jeremy Harding about ’95, I decided to do dub plates for sound systems, my brother’s sound system called Copper Shot, Renaissance sound system…

When did your brother set that sound up?

It first form in high school, so that was probably about 1991, him and his friends started buying a lot of records, his friend got two turntables, they started to go to studios and hang out and get dub plates from Elephant Man, Elephant Man used to back them up and say ‘Yeah, take two tunes, rude boy’, so it turned into a thing like his sound started to build up, and so around ’95 as I said I started to do dubs for him, and dubs for Renaissance sound system. Renaissance sound system was closely linked at the time to Stone Love, they were playing out at every party together because they were the two hype sounds, so then I started to do dubs for Stone Love too, and that kind of broke my career as an artist in dub plate style. 1996, everybody was trying to get dubs from me from one or two little dubs that I had.

On those dub plates, would you do freestyle, head top? Or you had lyrics already?

I had the lyrics written up, but there was a lot of freestyle in between. Like I if I listen to them, I would be like ‘Where did I get that from?’ just things that came to the head for real. By the end of ’96 now, Jeremy Harding was ready to put out his first rhythm, said ‘Sure, come on,’ so I went on it, did ‘Baby Girl No Cry No More’, that was my first song, it came out around December, so it didn’t really hit until January the next year. Being played all of the Christmas, people were hearing it, it started to hit, and it was my first hit but it was underground, in terms of it’s never been on an album, a lot of people don’t really know that. Coming through, I did another song called ‘Infiltrate’, that really really blew up, that was on the ‘Playground’ rhythm, ‘Zim Zimmer’ was one of the biggest songs on that rhythm, which basically took that rhythm and the rest of the people on it were being mentioned, which I was one of them. It was a song called ‘Infiltrate’, it took me into the world, and that was where I first got a lot of international exposure, because ‘Zim Zimmer’ got big and just sold a lot of records, so I was playing alongside in some of the clubs, and we did something special with that song where on the back of the record, we only put my vocal alone, so a lot of cats was remixing it, and that was where I got heard a lot more too, so that was a good strategic thing to get me out there. After that it was history. I did songs like ‘Nah Get No Bly’, ‘Deport Them’ for Tony Kelly, I did a song for Steelie and Cleavie with Mr Vegas called ‘Chi La La La’, and this was like ’98, by ’99 I was putting my album together and by the year 2000 my first album came out called Stage One, which contained all of these hits, plus some exclusive songs done between me and my brother, and me and Jeremy Harding, so that’s what was different about the album. The album was also different in that it was strictly dancehall, and at the time a lot of people were trying to do hip-hop stuff, and still are trying to do right now, and I was just saying ‘Yo, I want to do strictly dancehall’. It was an exclusive, it wasn’t just a compilation album, it had five hits on it, bona-fide hits, but it had 25 tracks, which was only 17 musical tracks with 5 skits. It also had a video on the CD, it was an enhanced CD, so I think it really crossed the board because it was a well put together package, and since then I’ve been travelling around, working on my stage show, working on my new album which is called Dutty Rock, and it just came out the last two days, big big thing on Atlantic. ‘Gimme The Light’ is my biggest song, something I didn’t really expect to get that big. It’s the biggest song of my career so far, I just give thanks for that. I was just doing another song called ‘Deport Them’, and it just turned out to be the biggest thing.

If we go back to when you came with ‘Infiltrate’, is that just like a gal song?

Yeah.

How did you develop your style? Would you say there was anyone else who had a similar style at that time?

At the time there was a lot of people who started to do something called ‘sing-jay’. Buccaneer had a style in which he would sing out songs and then deejay, and also Beenie Man started to do that too. They were like some of the top deejays in the country, so at the time people start following them. When I started to do that I found that it really brought a lot more out of me in terms of my writing and not just rhyming anymore, I was singing. Basically me and Vegas became known as the new dudes, the sing-jays, so that’s how that name did stick pon me. ‘Infiltrate’ was one of the first ones where I was singing out. Before, my dub plates was more like ‘Bust the black back with the red pon the top,’ more chatting. Then my new stuff was like (sings): ‘Woman no want no bait…’ I would stretch the notes for a little longer, but I was rhyming at the same time so that’s where I feel it’s a little different. The concepts of my tunes too were a little different where ‘Baby Girl Don’t Cry No More’ was the first song about ‘Girl, don’t let the man beat you, if him beat you, come to me,’ and I didn’t think that a lot of the dancehall kids had something like that before, different concepts like ‘Gal out of date so deport them’, I was saying if the girl ain’t up to my standards, she can get out of here, and then I was like ‘Me nah get no bly’, I was saying to the girl ‘Yo, I’m crying, I want you, I need you’, so it was different concepts and I think that’s what hooked the younger audience. I know that’s different.

When you collaborate with Mr. Vegas it makes a strong combination.

We tried to make that universal in terms of, ‘Let’s do a song together…a jump-up, jump-up? No…we talk for a minute and then we say ‘Yo, we could do a song like we’re fighting over a girl…cool, competition’, and then we say we want to make it like back and forth, not just my part and then your part, I want it to be interaction. That’s how we kind of hooked up together. He was around for a while in our circle and our group, because Don Yute, who was basically the first what you call uptown deejay, the first kid to come from this area to actually make a record and people actually listened to it, it played in the dancehall and him forward, so Don Yute used to spar with Vegas and Vegas used to open for him on occasion and sing, so we knew Vegas from a time before, and then he started to come to us more, so we started to do that collaboration just by being two youths in the business that needed something to happen, ‘cause we knew that we had it in us, and we knew that it was ready to bust, so it was just a good thing. I did get offers from a lot of other deejays, ‘Come do a song with me’, like Beenie Man, and at the time Beenie Man was very much in a war with Bounty Killer and I didn’t want to be classed as this or that, so I didn’t go with any top deejay at the time.

Vegas ended up getting dissed by Bounty Killer too. I don’t know if it’s that kind of association, or what.

I don’t know, but I wanted to avoid all that, and I wanted to make it by my own steam, I didn’t want anybody to say I was riding on Beenie Man’s steam or I was riding on Killer’s steam, or Buccaneer or whoever else. I wanted to do it and have people say ‘Yo, these two new kids, they’re doing songs and they’re doing songs together’ and that was just the whole vibe. I just wanted to prove it, even to my own self, that yo, you can do it, you don’t have to ride off the steam of nobody.

With this new album, the skit at the beginning, it’s like what you said before, that you just want to do dancehall, no hip-hop, crossover thing.

This skit is a pun on the name, Dutty Rock, because everybody’s like, ‘What that mean? Why you call it Dutty Rock? It’s dancehall’, and yeah, but I’m trying to show that Dutty, my music rock too. Me name Sean, Dutty Rock. I rock. And I even went to the extent of making it funny on the CD, so I’m also hoping to cross white kids who never heard my first songs before. They know ‘Gimme The Light’ now because of MTV, when they hear that they’re like ‘Where did that come from? That’s his first album’, and it sounds good in rock music too, and it’s the same ‘Woman No Want No Beg’, ‘Chi La La La’ and ‘gal no up to date so deport them’, so it’s like ‘Where’s that from?’ ‘It’s on my first album, go check it out. It sounds good in your way too, listen to this. And it made it funny by saying ‘What is this band all about? I don’t need this band, I want dancehall, strictly,’ so it was just funny, and it was a pun on the name, get people hooked on.

‘Gimme The Light’ is like a weed thing.

‘Gimme The Light’ is a party tune, it’s about weed and drinking and going out, spend money, and I’m not a kid that always does that, I’m not someone that lives my life oriented around party vibes, that was when I was a teenager, but you get up and you remember every now and then, ‘I want to go out and party’, so that’s what the song is about: ‘Just gimme the light and pass the Dro, bust another bottle of Mo. Gal them inna my sight and I got to know which one is gonna catch my flow, I’m inna the vibes and I got my dough.’ It’s a party, a party song, and it involve weed and whatever else too, but it’s a party vibe essentially.

Most of the other tracks on the album are mostly oriented towards gals.

About five of these tracks on this album is more party vibes. I have a song that says ‘Like Glue’, which is like ‘I’m sticking to my girls, that’s what I like’. I have also a song called ‘Get Busy’, I’m saying ‘Get busy, just shake that booty non-stop when the beat drops just keep swinging it, get jiggy, get cumped up, herculate’, I’m using unfamiliar words too. I’ve got songs such as ‘…’cause you physique concrete, can’t delete you fat because you buff up complete, 24 hours 7 days of the week I want you listen to the talk…’ so I’m saying like ‘Move pon your feet,’ so it’s party, let’s do this, let’s rock.

Does this mean that at the moment you’re neglecting your reality lyrics?

Well, I did songs that didn’t even reach on the album last year, a song called ‘Gun No More’, it’s like people overlook it because they don’t see me as a kid to be talking reality to people. I did it on my first album with two tracks, one named ‘Next Generation’ which was saying ‘If everyday the same thing happen, what’s going to happen?’ I was always told as a kid, we’re going to be the future, now I’m the future, I have to speak out about it. Now I am here, so I have to give that back to the kids and say ‘If everyday the same thing go on, you have to be conscious about yourself, or you won’t last. What’s going to happen to the next generation and the next one and the smaller kids?’ The next song I did with that vibe on that album was called ‘You Must Lose’, which was a song produced by my brother. You must be able to defend yourself in life, life is hectic out there, but you cannot live by the gun. If you do live by the gun, you will lose. This album now, I had another song named ‘Guns No More’ which was saying ‘Every day I read the paper and see another ghetto youth get killed, for what? It’s time to put down the gun,’ and it didn’t reach on the album because I done so much work over the past two years, there’s quite a few songs that didn’t reach on this album. I did three songs on the ‘Liquid’ rhythm, and only one of them got on the album which was the song with me and Ce’cile. Basically it’s not me alone, it’s the companies and people that’s saying re-re. I’m not neglecting that, lately I did more of a conscious vibe where, not conscious, not saying to people about social issues, just about my own consciousness, about me, in a song called ‘Time After Time’ which is just starting to play on the radio. It’s not on my album, so it should be on the next one. I want to big up the people who voted for me on 106, who voted for my video, saying thanks for that and you know, there’s been a lot of critics over the years, trying to hold me down, but I’m giving thanks to you who supported me. That’s what dancehall is all about, it’s not just party, it’s about giving respect back to those who have supported me. And I think that’s conscious too.

In terms of others who write lyrics, who else do you admire?

I like No Doubt as a rock group from a long time. ‘Don’t Speak’, that’s a crazy song, and she put her own emotions into it. I like those lyrics. I like certain type of rock music like that. I’ve been listening to Starspy (?) the other day, talking about his past and that kind of stuff, I like when people do that, but people who have influenced me with their writing, I would say the writing style, probably not what they’re saying, but the style, Wu-Tang, Method Man.

What do you like about that style?

Just the rawness, ‘ooh, I get ill like a piece of roast…’ it’s just like ‘Yo, I’m hardcore and I’m rhyming to you in every which way that you can feel it’. He’s talking about himself in a different way. Some people not understanding it. Busta Rhymes also, I like the way he attacks on the track from a long time, from the Leaders of the New School, I used to look up to those things. Back in the days he did songs with Buju Banton that came on Buju’s album in 1994, a lot of people don’t know that, so as a kid I was looking for that, as a youngster. LL Cool J always talk to the girls, always told them how his heart felt, and he wasn’t afraid to do that, so I think I always follow in that pattern sometimes, when I’m saying things like ‘Me nah get no bly’ and things like ‘Calling Out My Name’, a new song on this album, which is like I’m crying to the girl, I’m saying I have myself to blame, I’m a fool, that kind of vibes.

Which musicians do you think are exceptional?

Bunny Wailer, to me, I don’t think he gets enough recognition, for someone who wrote a lot of the music back in the day. I really respect Bob Marley, his whole energy and what he had to say. I myself, I’m not a full musician. I play music by ear, it’s not always the right thing, a little keyboard. That’s the easiest thing for me and it’s the most natural thing. I try the guitar now and then, but keyboard, I can find the keys and I can learn with the next hand and say, ‘This is supposed to be what the bass sound like’ and start doing it, and within a couple of minutes, I’m playing something. I cannot do that with a guitar.

Is Jeremy Harding the producer that guided you the most?

Yes, he’s very meticulous when you’re voicing, and he made me able to produce myself with other producers, like I’ve been to a producing session where it’s taken me long to write the song, to finish the song, and Dudus fall asleep, the engineer, so I have to wake him up and say ‘Yo, take back this part, it don’t sound right’, he was like ‘No, it sound right to me,’ but no, because of going through this training with him, I’ve voiced songs for him like four times, and I say ‘No, go back and do it again’, like the full-length song, the whole song, and maybe he saw that I needed more work or whatever, but a lot of artists have said, working with him, he’s just paying attention to a lot of your vocals, so definitely, I’ve voiced songs that came out, everybody’s like ‘Yeah, I love that’, and there’s something to me, I could have done better, and that’s what I’ve gotten from Jeremy.

Outside of music, what else interests you?

Music kind of took over my life, but I’m a sports oriented kid. As I said, I used to swim before, so I like to try and keep fit, I play basketball when I can, if I can’t, when I’m in foreign I go and run, or I always try and do some push-ups. I try keep fit, and that’s what it’s all about, anything else is just cheese. I like to feel good. Sometimes when you don’t exercise you don’t feel good, and that’s what I like, I like to feel good about myself and feel fit, and if I’m not that, then whatever, but when I’m fit, anything else that comes, it’s just living life. If I have to be on a bus or a train or I could be on a plane, or I could be driving in Jamaica, once I’m fit and I feel good about myself, everything else would just be…I’m not thinking about buying rims for my car, I’m not thinking about none of that, I’m just thinking about the next day.

Do you read books?

I hardly read books.

Movies?

I used to watch a lot of movies until I just started to fall asleep in every movie now. For the past two years, I’m falling asleep in every movie, Spiderman, just every movie. Mostly I like documentaries, and I like series, like I’ve been watching the Sopranos, I watch the whole series from the first one, I buy the compilation, the first one, the second one, the third one, and now I’m watching the fourth one on HBO, and that’s what I watch, documentaries like the Discovery channel, and I check out like Animal Planet, that’s more interesting to me than a movie. ‘cause I’ve been on sets, doing videos or movies or ads, so when I’m seeing the scene now, I’m seeing the director saying ‘Do this in this way’, and it’s not real to me any more. That’s probably why.

How did your deal with Atlantic come about?

Well, after the single ‘Gimme The Light’ there was a lot of people saying ‘Yo, come to my office, we’ll do the deal tomorrow,’ and even on my first record, there were big heads saying to me ‘I could sell more than that record for you,’ there was interest there, no one really concrete but people were saying to me…so this year, especially since ‘Gimme The Light’ blew up, everybody was coming and offering and saying, so basically Atlantic came up with the best deal for VP records, and that’s how it happened. I’m glad to be on a label that has been in music for a long time, that also produced a couple reggae hits such as ‘No No No’ by Dawn Penn and some different songs, like Garnett Silk was once signed to them, Inner Circle is signed to them, so they’ve done certain things for reggae music over the past ten years and more, so I’m proud to be there and I’m talking about videos to them and getting reaction back right away, ‘Yeah, this next video should be here and there’, now it’s a lot more organized, even though I would say it’s very hectic.

Have you collaborated with hip-hop people?

Definitely. My first collaboration with hip-hop artists was DMX and Vegas for the movie Belly, I’m on the soundtrack, it’s a song called ‘Here Comes The Boo’, which was me, DMX and Mr Vegas.

What was it like working with DMX?

DMX was coming down here to shoot the movie and basically at that time, we never spent much time together. We were going to shoot a video for that song, and we spent like a whole day on the beach, chilling out, smoking and just relaxing, but the vibes started to get a bit hectic for him at that point, so I didn’t really get to do any other work with hip hop artists until just the other day. We did the remix with Busta Rhymes, he did the remix for my own, I did the remix for his own. I work with Tony Touch on that album…

You did the remix for Busta Rhymes’ album?

Yeah, for ‘Make It Clap’, we’re going to shoot the video next week. There’s also a song that I did with Mya, with is r and b, it’s coming out on her album soon, it’s called ‘Things Change.’ I did a song with Blue Cantrelle (?), which we’re shooting the video for tomorrow, I’m going to LA, Blue Cantrelle (?), she has a song called ‘Breathe’, and it’s basically the remix, but they liked the remix so much that they’re shooting a video for it now. They said that it needed something and that was it, when they added me there. I did something for De La Soul, I did a hook for them, and they’re putting out the album soon, so it’s a lot of little works. I worked with the Clips, which is the group produced by the Neptunes, which they have the new song called ‘When Is The Last Time’, they had the first song called ‘Grinding’, I’m on the ‘Grinding’ remix. I did work one time for Salaam Remi who’s a hip-hop producer, but he produced a hip-hop track with me and Pras, Spragga Benz and Roundhead, this was like two years ago and it got some minimal play, but it didn’t make an album or get anywhere, he just puts it out, it gets play.

If you never got involved in music, what do you think you’d be doing right now?

I was working in a bank before, counting other people’s money, I was a teller. I went to school, hotel management, for two years, so maybe I would have been doing that, but who could tell, because I live life day to day. I don’t really plan that ‘This is going to happen’, but now there’s a lot more planning, ‘cause companies are involved and they want to shoot videos here and there, but I just live my life day to day. When I left school, all my friends were like ‘Oh, I’m going here to do so and so,’ ‘I’m going away to school’ or ‘I’m going to university in America’, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so for a year, I wasn’t doing nothing, I was in a part time job at a marketing place because I wanted to do marketing, but when I didn’t get into school to do marketing, so I got into hotel management and it was just day to day, so who could say what I would be doing.

How long have you been staying in New York?

I’ve been in New York a long time. In the year 2000, the first album, I had ‘Deport Them’ and I had ‘Hot Gal Today’, which was both on the Billboard charts, they were both played on commercial radio, on the playlists, and so I had popularity in New York. I had a Spanish-speaking Latino audience, Dominican Republic people…

You did a Spanish language version of one of your hits.

Yeah, to kind of give love to them, ‘cause it’s them that did support me for these two years, I’ve been going to a lot of shows for them in Miami, and over there too and New York, so since about March this year, ‘Gimme The Light’ kind of blew, it just became like every two weeks I was in New York for something else, so I’m in New York a lot more now.

But you’re still based in Jamaica?

Yeah, based in Jamaica, my home is here, I have a car here, my family is here, my mother, my father, my brother, my brother is a lot on trips with me ‘cause he’s a deejay, he spins for me. Now I’m putting this band together, so he’ll be doing a lot more producing at home, and this is where my life is. I intend to, it’s very hectic to keep going back and forth, but I don’t want to live anywhere else but here right now.

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