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• Shaggy's official site
• "Shaggy Gets Intoxicated"
• "Shaggy Teams With Akon, Sizzla On VP Debut"

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Singer tells about performing for the troops and Condoleezza Rice dancing to his music. (1:45)
 

Tavis: Reggae and dance hall superstar Shaggy helped put reggae back on the map in the early 1990s. A few years later, his CD "Hot Shot" sold more than 10 million copies alone. His latest disc is called "Intoxication," which hit stores yesterday. From the new disc, here is some of the video for "Bona-Fide Girl."

[Clip]

Tavis: See, I'm looking into homes all across America right now, and everybody's bobbing their head and tapping their feet. You can't help it, can you? It just kind of happens like that, it kind of happens like that. What's up, Shaggy?

Shaggy: Oh, pleasure, Tavis, pleasure.

Tavis: Good to see you, man.

Shaggy: Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, man.

Tavis: Everybody loves Shaggy. (Laughter) Bouncing your head and tapping your foot, it just - reggae kind of makes you do that, doesn't it?

Shaggy: Yeah, it's that kind of music.

Tavis: Before you know it, you just kind of find yourself -

Shaggy: Yeah, it's that kind of music. It's feel-good music.

Tavis: Yeah.

Shaggy: Definitely feel-good music, and it goes through stages, now, because it can also be revolutionary music, you know what I mean? But it can be fun. But dance hall is a more flamboyant vibe of reggae, it's like a (unintelligible) child of the authentic reggae, you know what I mean? And it's certainly a more younger music, and a more harder feel.

Tavis: We'll talk more about that in just a second, and how you took that reality and made it - not reality, how you took that notion and made it a reality for all the fans of your music. I want to come back to that in a second. Since I just got through talking to Colonel Twitty from Mosul -

Shaggy: I was seeing that, yeah.

Tavis: You saw that? Yeah. You were in the Marines.

Shaggy: I was in the Marines.

Tavis: So before you started doing the dance hall thing, you were -

Shaggy: Yeah. Actually, while I was -

Tavis: Exactly.

Shaggy: Yeah, while I was there.

Tavis: I read this one time. You would actually leave - you were stationed in North Carolina.

Shaggy: Yeah.

Tavis: You would actually run up to New York to DJ parties and get back to the base by the time you had to be back.

Shaggy: Exactly. And that was illegal, actually. (Laughter)

Tavis: That's why we said it now.

Shaggy: So yeah, keep it down. (Laughter) Yeah, I would get with -

Tavis: I hope you weren't doing in your uniform.

Shaggy: Yes, actually, I did.

Tavis: Come on, dude.

Shaggy: Actually.

Tavis: You were doing parties in your uniform?

Shaggy: Well, that's the only way you would speed on the highway, get pulled over, and not get a ticket. (Laughter) Half them troopers are ex-military and ex-Marines. I'd be speeding; they'd pull me over, (unintelligible) pull up to me, they see me in the whole uniform, it's like, (unintelligible) circle, huh? (Laughter) Semper fi. Be safe.

Tavis: So the uniform saved the day.

Shaggy: Oh, yeah, we used to do that all the time, man.

Tavis: So you'd zip to New York, DJ some parties in your uniform -

Shaggy: In my uniform.

Tavis: - and back to the base.

Shaggy: Matter of fact, I recorded "Oh, Carolina" in my uniform. I was actually in a studio in New York. I was in uniform when I did that for the first time.

Tavis: Wow. How did you find yourself in the military? How'd that happen for you?

Shaggy: Just in Brooklyn, I was in the Flatbush (unintelligible), come from Jamaica. And at that time in the early - well, late eighties at that time, early nineties, you get into trouble, you know what I mean? It was a troubled area. In Flatbush, you hang with the wrong crowd, doing the wrong thing, and at some point I got a wake-up call.

And when you start seeing your friends going to jail left, right, and center, you be like, "Let me do something else." And I just got out of town. I walked up to - funny enough, I walked up to the junction of Flatbush, and I walked right into a recruiting office, and I didn't know what I was doing. I just looked at about three or four different posters.

There was the Army, the Navy, and the Marines; and I looked at them and the Navy had these bellbottom things and it just looked -

Tavis: That didn't work for you.

Shaggy: Yeah, it didn't work. And the Air Force had - their shirt was kind of like a blouse. But the Marine uniform just looked clean, dapper. It looked like - and my thinking, at that time, at that age, it's all about chicks. And I'm like, yeah, I could get some wearing this. (Laughter)

Tavis: I'm laughing, but I'm wondering how many guys have joined the Marines because the uniform -

Shaggy: Had I known that was the smallest and the most elite, and I would be doing more work? (Laughter) And as soon as a war pop out, the first people to go? It would have been a whole different scenario, son. (Laughter)

Tavis: That's how they trick you, with that uniform.

Shaggy: Yeah, that uniform was hot, though. I still got it, too.

Tavis: And you served in the first Gulf War.

Shaggy: First Gulf War.

Tavis: You actually served over there.

Shaggy: Yeah.

Tavis: So what do you make, the, of these men and women who are in Iraq, even as we speak?

Shaggy: Stay out the bushes.

Tavis: Yeah, yeah. (Laughter) I hear you, I hear you, yeah.

Shaggy: Oh, man, I'm telling you, you know what I mean? War is an ugly thing. I think it should be the last resort, and in this situation, I just didn't think it was, you know what I mean? It was a mistake then, and it's a mistake now, and somebody needs to really 'fess up and say, “Yo, my bad.” (Laughs)

Tavis: I was going to say, do you know how tough it is? Of course you know how tough it is. It's got to be tough, and again, when I say -

Shaggy: It's harder now.

Tavis: Yeah, but when I said to the colonel these interviews are always hard for me to do, because you know there's just certain things they can't say, certain questions you can ask all day long, they're not going to really go there because they can't, they're not supposed to, they're in uniform. But I know there are a bunch of folk -

Shaggy: But I can.

Tavis: Yeah, you can. (Laughter) You can because you're out now.

Shaggy: Yeah.

Tavis: But I wonder how difficult it is for some of them to be on this mission, and they feel the same way you do, but they can't say that. They've got to serve the country.

Shaggy: And it's rough. I do some work (unintelligible) Wayne Newton. He's head of the USO now, and he's hit me up on a couple of occasions and we've done a couple of USO shows here and there. And one particular one I did was in Germany. And in Germany, we did, like, we played for the troops, and there were wounded troops coming from Iraq, and it was kind of a bittersweet situation, because one, yeah, you were performing for them, they're enjoying themself. The sad part is, a lot of them didn't have limbs, you know what I mean?

And they were there, they were trying to enjoy themself and singing every song to it, and it just hits you at that point. It's like homeboy's in a wheelchair, he ain't got legs. But he knows some Shaggy songs, and that's the best you could do at this point, you know what I mean? And we still try and do that, but it's tough.

Tavis: Well, you know who does have legs and does know some Shaggy songs, and got caught on video dancing to Shaggy. What did you make of that Condoleezza Rice video tape? (Laughter) She helped put him over there in Iraq, and here she got lets - that video cracked me up of Condi Rice, secretary of state, got caught getting down to Shaggy. What did you make of that?

Shaggy: It was hilarious, but you never could tell about Condi. She's probably a music freak, you know what I mean?

Tavis: Well, she does play.

Shaggy: Yeah, I know she plays, and she does classical, and she reads music and all that. So, you never could tell, man. These people got, got class things going on there, you know what I mean? She might going to the (unintelligible) person a part of the (unintelligible), be like hell, yeah. (Laughter)

Tavis: Yeah, there may be a whole nother side to Condi Rice that we just don't know.

Shaggy: Yeah, you never know, yeah, Condi, you know what I mean? Because I watched, and I was like, it looked like she was moving her mouth? She singing? (Laughter) Just sing the chorus, son. And that whole situation, we were asked by the Jamaican government to come over there and do a concert, and just present a couple of Jamaican acts.

And I still do a lot of work. I just came back from Geneva where I did a convention on copyright laws for Jamaica, and patents. And it's funny, in Jamaica, despite it's such a musically rich country with all that culture, we just had a copyright law implemented in 1993, so it's pretty young and -

Tavis: (Unintelligible)

Shaggy: Yeah. So, and it's sad, you look at a lot of artists who are my heroes and my mentors who have not gotten what they deserve throughout music. Some of them mess it up themselves, but just out of publishing and owning their own music and all of that, it's kind of a rough situation, just to see them. So if we could change it from this point on, it's great.

Tavis: Let's get back to the music, then, since we're heading in that direction. Before we talk about the new CD, back to the point you made earlier about how the dance hall reggae stuff you do is a little different than the authentic reggae, you called it - some of the Bob Marley stuff, and others. Tell me about your style, and why you think it's connected with so many people.

Shaggy: Well, I think in everything, you have to have a strategy. And I think what we have done over the years is nothing different from what, for instance, Bob Marley did back in the sixties - late sixties, early seventies. When Bob Marley came with the original Wailers music, Chris Blackwell, who was the head of Island Records at that time, hired session musicians to actually overdub rock songs on a lot of Bob Marley's music, so they could get played on mainstream radio, rock radio, at that time.

And that was a strategy that wasn't probably not as welcomed by authentic Jamaican or purists, so to speak, and he was criticized for it, for making sell-out music, White music, (unintelligible). But he was smart; he was ahead of the game. He knew what he had to do to survive the game, and now it's so ironic that those same recordings that were done with session musicians happened to be the blueprint of what reggae music is today, you know what I mean?

So we did pretty much the same thing. When we walked in with, for instance, a "Bombastic" in its authentic stage or we brought it to radio stations, they was, like, well, it doesn't really fit our format, it's reggae." (Laughter) So we pretty much had to improvise. And so we took Marvin Gaye, the original "Let's Get It On," and remixed the beat under it, and they get the same record, it's like "Oh, well, we could work with this, yeah."

So we had to do that. We did "Mungo Jerry," "In the Summertime" for Europe, got a number two with it. We had for Booker T and the MGs, we sampled all these little things. For instance, we took "The Joker," Steve Miller, and put it with "Angel in the Morning" and create "Angel," and we got through, you know what I mean?

At that time, when we were doing dance hall, dance hall wasn't the movement it was today. It was hard for a dance hall artist to really fit within that mainstream format.

Tavis: What happens to your career when you have a hit as big as "It Wasn't Me?"

Shaggy: It's a bittersweet situation. Good for the fact that now we're proven that we're a force to be reckoned with, now we've proven that we can sell records. Bad in the sense that now you're not cool with the streets anymore. And that comes with success.

Tavis: You done crossed over.

Shaggy: Yeah, you done crossed over. (Laughter) So you have to now reinvent yourself with the mainstream, and that becomes a task. And especially when - and it's not too bad of a task, because I've never actually left the dance hall. I've been very connected with our company, Big Yard Music, put out some of the top dance hall records in Jamaica. But it's hard when you're with a major company that when you give them "Angel" and "It Wasn't Me" and it sells 12, 15 million, to come back with something and say, “Okay, I'm going to hit the streets right now with an album that's geared towards getting the street back in,” they'll be like -

Tavis: I don't think so.

Shaggy: - I don't see that. (Laughter) And then you might have the right to do that so you use your veto power. You put that out, but then when they cut that funding, that's a different ballgame.

Tavis: So tell me about "Intoxication," the new CD.

Shaggy: "Intoxication" happens to be the album is taking me to the direction that I'm talking about. I did a song called "Wild Tonight" first at Geffen, when I was in Geffen, and we got a number one in the dance hall, number one in the Caribbean, and as soon as I start to cross over, they kind of pulled the plug. (Laughs) So I knew that I couldn't do it on the major, and I got a release in October, and I went into the studio in November, and I came out with "Church Heathen," which was a massive hit within the Caribbean, 17 weeks at number one, huge record in England, huge record in Europe, set the pace, set the ground for the direction of the album.

And it's a very hard, street-type album, but at the same time have a lot of commercial appeal to it.

Tavis: I'm out of time, but you couldn't be more timely with "Church Heathen," either, because a whole lot of heathens in the church about to be investigated by Congress.

Shaggy: (Unintelligible)

Tavis: And it's about time. Church, say amen. The new CD from Shaggy is called "Intoxication." Add it to your collection. Shaggy, I'm proud of you, man. Good to see you.

Shaggy: Pleasure again, man.

Tavis: Glad to have you here.