Kanye West’s ‘Mercy,’ Which Has One Of The Best Dancehall Intros Of All Time, Certified 7X Platinum In The US
Super Beagle’s 1986 track Dust a Sound Boy and Reggie Stepper’s 1991 track Cu-Oonuh were heavily sampled in Mercy, a 2012 hit by Kanye West and his GOOD Music-affiliated rappers who spat verses about their life and careers under Hip-Hop’s “champion sound.”
According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the song, which featured Big Sean, Pusha T and 2 Chainz, was certified 7X Platinum in the United States on Friday (April 14) after it reached the sales and streaming equivalent of over 7,000,000 units sold in the country.
Ye had also rightly credited Super Beagle, whose real name is Denzie Beagle, Reggie Stepper, whose real name is Reginald Williams, and the late Winston Riley, producer of the Stalag Riddim, on which both Dust A Sound Bwoy and Cu-Oonuh were laid, as writers on the track.
However, it was actually the voice of the late Fuzzy Jones, who was heard in the samples referencing Matthew 13:42 from the Dust A Sound Boy intro, and chanting “Believe! Believe!” from the Cu-Oonuh intro.
“Fuzzy Jones carved a unique space for himself within Jamaican music as a song intro specialist, setting up soundsystem dubplates and hardcore dancehall cuts with esoteric rants like the ones that start Dust A Sound Boy and Cu-Oonuh,” noted Red Bull Music Academy in a 2018 feature on the “Intro Boss”.
“Soundsystems were willing to pay extra for a dubplate with an intro from Jones because it virtually guaranteed success when they played it in a soundclash.”
Mercy, which went Platinum three months after its release on April 3, 2012, was widely acknowledged as one of the best songs of 2012, with several publications – Rolling Stone, XXL, and The Huffington Post, among others – ranking it high on their year-end lists.
It peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, and at No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot Rap Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts for five weeks. In 2013, the song was nominated for Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards.
Mercy is also currently certified Gold in the United Kingdom, after selling over 400,000 units in the country.
Because of its prominence, disputes arose as to who deserved the majority of the song’s credit, with some even claiming that Fuzzy Jones deserved the lion’s share of the profits. In 2012, Super Beagle moved to clear up those misconceptions.
“People who are in the business are very ignorant about the business and just follow what people say by talking nonsense,” Beagle had told the STAR.
“They don’t know about copyright. They make it sound as if it’s Fuzzy Jones’ song. Fuzzy Jones was featured on my song, and the song was released two years before Fuzzy Jones was added to it. Yuh can have a song and somebody put an intro on it but that does not make them the owner.”
At the time, Beagle noted that even though he had not yet received payment for the sample, there was a significant boost in royalties from Dust A Sound Boy.
“Because mi tune get sample, mi get some money but it’s not exactly from Mercy,” he explained. “It’s because of the popularity of Mercy that make a lot of people start purchase the original ‘Dust a Sound Boy’ record again. So, I am seeing a lot of improvements in my copyright royalties.”
Winston Riley died in January 2012 in Kingston at age 68, after he was shot, according to the NYTimes.
Fuzzy Jones died in an accident in 1998.
Since the release of Mercy in 2012, several artists have sampled Dust A Sound Boy, including Tommy Lee Sparta and TeeJay on Brawling (2022), Freddie Gibbs and Madlib on Half Manne Half Cocaine (2019), IDK and Swizz Beatz on Maryland Ass Ni–a (2017), and JID on Hoodbooger (2017).
Meanwhile, Cu-Oonuh has since been sampled by Lil Wayne and Drake on Believe Me (2014), Logic and Big Sean on Wassup (2018), and Gyptian and Angela Hunte on Vixen (2013), among others.
Mercy wasn’t the only time that Kanye West sampled Reggae and Dancehall music.
On Jay-Z’s The Black Album (2003), he produced two songs: Lucifer , which sampled Max Romeo’s Chase the Devil (1976), and Encore , which sampled John Holt’s I Will (1973).
In his own catalog, Ye sampled Sister Nancy‘s Bam Bam (1982), another song based in part on the Stalag Riddim, in Famous (2016), which is certified 2X Platinum in the US.
Capleton‘s Forward Inna Dem Clothes (2001) was sampled in his song I Am A God (2013).
Beenie Man‘s Memories (1996) was sampled in Ye’s Send It Up (2013), as were Super Cat‘s Nuff Man A Dead (1992) in Good Night (2007) with Mos Def; and Barrington Levy‘s Under Mi Sensi (1985) in I Don’t Like (2013) with Chief Keef, Pusha T, Jadakiss, and Big Sean; and others.