Shaggy Talks Rihanna Collaboration, Friendship With Sean Paul And Creative Differences With Popcaan

World renowned Reggae/Dancehall artiste Shaggy (Orville Burrell) continues to deny that he intended to slight Rihanna, when he turned down the opportunity to work on her upcoming dancehall album.

He recently sat down with Australia’s MusicFeeds, as he’s on the continent touring with Sean Paul, to talk about the controversy and his relationship with his friendly rival Sean Paul. He said the entire debacle was caused by scheduling issues and not because he felt he was too big to be on the project.

He said: “I know a couple of people that have collaborated on this new dancehall album she’s doing. I was asked to collaborate on it; I haven’t gotten around to it. I know her A&R very well. But there’s a lot of things that I’m doing at the same time. When the situation presents itself the right way, then I probably will do it. But I know a lot of people who are collaborating on that album and they’re stellar people; people who I know are really great songwriters and great musicians in the dancehall field and I think they’re gonna do it incredibly well.”

He also gave Rihanna thumbs up and threw his support behind the R&B superstar’s highly anticipated reggae album.

“It’s gonna be good; it’s really great… Demarco [who remixed Rihanna’s ‘Rude Boy’] is one of those artists that’s on it. He’s one of the top dancehall producers and a songwriter and he has a couple of songs on there. There are a couple of people who I know that are really, really strong people that are on there.”

These statements are very different from the ones that have been circulating for the last few weeks. In fact Shaggy is quoted as telling UK tabloid Daily Star: “There’s a lot of great people involved but for me I didn’t need to audition to be on the record, I’ll leave that to younger guys.” Later on he said that was approached to submit ideas but that’s just not how he works. So it seems the entire incident may have been caused by miscommunication between both teams.

Shaggy also spoke about his relationship with Sean Paul, who many in Dancehall believe modeled his career off of Shaggy. There’s no animosity between the two and Shaggy and they often keep in contact with each other.

“I mean, hey, we cool. We both live in Jamaica and we don’t live very far from each other. We have a very cordial relationship, him and I. I’m not gonna say that we hang out and make music together, but there’s times that he might call me… I called him on the birth of his son and had a conversation. He might call me… I remember I did an interview on [the US morning radio show] The Breakfast Club and it got really personal about a bunch of stuff and he kinda called me on that. It was like, “Yo, dude, I watched that – it was mad deep” and stuff like that.”

He went on to say that even though they communicate with each other, they’ve never really thought about collaborating.

“Yeah, we do correspond and stuff like that. We’ve just never gotten to this whole thing where we’re gonna work together – ’cause he was like my rival and I was like his rival to a lot of people, so there’s always a bit of a friendly competition there. But just him and me together, we’ve always been good. And, yes, coming on this tour is gonna be really, really cool – it’s all linking up. There’s people in his band that are friends of mine and people in my band that are friends of his. Jamaica’s really small, man (laughs). So we’re all cool!”

The duo will be putting on a series of concerts in Australia starting on Wednesday 29th January, 2020 until Sunday 2nd February, 2020. Shaggy, who is a big supporter of rapper Cardi B, also shared about his experience meeting her at the Grammys and recording with her and Popcaan. A project he said would have gone a long way if not for some creative disagreements between Cardi B and Popcaan.

“I saw her at the Grammys recently and we stopped and chatted for a bit. I’m cool with her. But, when she came to me, she was brought to me by a friend of mine; he brought her in. She had not had ‘Bodak Yellow’ or anything like that. But she was on [the reality show] Love & Hip Hop [New York] at the time and just had crazy bars, just the way she spit was dope, her personality was wild – you know, you meet her and she just fills the room up. And those are the things that I look for. I was like, “Yo, I wanna do a record with her” and actually did the record with her and Popcaan. I put Popcaan on it and it was a big vibe. But then the thing kinda went south in a way because Popcaan didn’t like some of the content that she’d said – and it just got really bad. So I just put the record out there and then hell hit. It was crazy. I mean, I wanted to go as far as doing a video and all that, but it got a little toxic afterwards – on no part of hers; it was just Popcaan had some issues.”