Pop Gets Its Groove Back

Amid the unrelenting hype generated by such bubblegum-and-pimples-set acts as Destiny's Child and the Backstreet Boys, the record business has been slow to notice that the year's most dramatic run up the charts belongs not to a girl group or boy band but to a solitary reggae singer and Gulf War veteran named Shaggy.

Last summer Shaggy released Hotshot, a sleek confection of R.-and-B.-tinged reggae, to scant attention. But he has since pulled off a coup that few reggae artists have ever achieved. Steadily pushing his way up the pop chart, he has knocked off one blockbuster after another: Limp Bizkit, Nelly, Creed, even the Beatles. Finally, this week he passed Jennifer Lopez, making him the first reggae artist ever to top the pop charts since Shabba Ranks in 1991. His accomplishment is all the more remarkable because it's the sort of breakout that has attracted buyers from 12-year-old Backstreet fans to 35-year-old Madonna diehards.

It wasn't an overnight success. At 18, Orville Richard Burrell (his oft untamed mane earned him the nickname Shaggy) left Kingston, Jamaica, for Brooklyn, N.Y., to launch a singing career. When he couldn't make ends meet, he joined the Marines. A year later, he found himself in Iraq with an artillery battery weaving through minefields. "It was wild--the atmosphere was kind of like Three Kings," he says, referring to the 1999 movie. During the long stretches of downtime, he started writing songs and, when he was discharged two years later, decided to make another run at recording.

In 1992 his first hit, Oh Carolina, produced on a small indie label, won him a contract with Virgin Records. But after five years he was pink-slipped. "I fell in the cracks there," says Shaggy, now 32. "They saw me as a guy bringing them a couple of hits, not somebody building a career." It wasn't that he was slacking; his 1995 album, Boombastic--filled with thudding hip-hop style grooves--sold well and won the Grammy for Best Reggae Album. But when his follow-up, the saccharine Midnite Lover, flopped, Shaggy went label-less for nearly three years until MCA signed him after he scored with the hit single Luv Me Luv Me for the How Stella Got Her Groove Back sound track.

For Hotshot, Shaggy dispenses with the balladry and the hip-hop influences of his previous albums and instead keeps things upbeat, danceable and carefully attuned to the tastes of American pop ears. "My album might be disputed by purists as not reggae enough, but I wanted it to be eclectic and crossover," he explains. "To hell with categories." Maybe so, but Shaggy's triumph could help recapture some of the diversity pop lost after the reggae and ska waves of the 1990s faded. So when you hear Madonna and Britney Spears singing to a reggae beat a year from now, remember, it all started with Shaggy.