Lady Saw: All Hail the Queen
It isn't easy being a woman in dancehall. Just ask its empress. Lady Saw remembers playing a show at Bounty Killer's birthday and trying to get her protégées Queen Paul and Macka Diamond on the mic. "Some fellow entertainers was so mad," she says. "They got like an ugly face all of a sudden. I knew that they didn't want them there. Everybody just crowd the mic and I couldn't get another word out!"
But Marion "Lady Saw" Hall is a survivor in one of the most macho music scenes in the world. She's taken the guys on at their own game, proving time and again with X-rated tracks like "Stab Up the Meat" and "Life Without Dick" that she can get dutty with the best of them. Pop rockers No Doubt recognized Lady Saw's talents and tapped her to guest on their 2001 hit "Underneath It All," making Lady Saw the first dancehall diva to take home a Grammy.
Today, Lady Saw is in Ocho Rios representing for Tempo, the new video channel dedicated to Caribbean music. After a long day of interviews, she takes off her high heels and sits down to talk about everything from groupies and sexually explicit content, to how she went from sweeping the floor of her wooden shack with a coconut to building her own mansion.
You're all dressed up today. Are you a big clothes shopper?
Oh, my God! I love spending money on clothes, but I don't like spending mine. I like spending a man's money on clothes. And the men have no problem giving me the money.
So you max out their credit card and then hand it back to them?
I don't use credit, I'm all about cash, so I usually get a pile of money to go spend on myself. Then men will buy me stuff like a Rolex, some Louis Vuitton, or some Coach. If I go to Paris, France I'll use my own money to buy that because the men I know are nowhere near there.
Paris is a long way from the Jamaican countryside where you grew up.
Listen, I'm from [the parish of] St. Mary. I went to Kingston and I built one house. Then I built another, a beautiful house like a mansion way up in the hills. But I still missed the country. So you know what I did? I came down here [to Ocho Rios]. I bought an empty lot, and then I bought another lot right next to it. Now I'm building a huge mansion right there. The name of it is called Tranquility Villa. It will be open soon to tourists.
Did you sit down with the architect and talk to him about what you want the place to be like?
I buy a lot of books at the airport when I travel. I remember looking at Venus Williams. She was sitting beside some great big columns. I love columns; so I told the man who drew the house, "Give me a lot of columns. Make this look like a mansion." A lot of people pass by my house in Ocho Rios like it's an attraction. Every Sunday people keep taking pictures.
How does your mansion compare to the house you grew up in?
The house that I grew up in was made of wood. They put cement on the floor and got a polish that gets the floor all red. I remember I used a coconut brush to scrub the floor so it will have the shine everyday. Then we moved away from there to a hotel called Trade Winds. Somehow my dad got a couple of rooms in there and we were living there. We grew up poor, but my dad was a hard worker. He used to do painting, fishing, and farming, and my mom would work in a hotel and clean. They weren't educated people, but they weren't dumb.
Did you always have your heart set on getting into the music business?
When I first went to Kingston, it wasn't about the music. My mom moved away from St. Mary and went to Kingston. I was scared as hell about Kingston because I was at a tender age and seeing all the sort of things in the ghettos wasn't nice. But when I went back to the country I stayed there until I was big enough, and that's when I realized I had this talent.
How did you discover your musical side?
Ya know, I could make up a song just walking. Say my dad sent me to the store to get something; I would make songs up in the brains. I didn't write down anything, and I could remember the song next week. So I'm like, "Oh, I can be a singer." When I left the country I told my friend, "I'm going to Kingston and I'll never come back until I'm a big star." And I didn't.
How'd you get your first big break?
When I got to Kingston I did odd jobs like working at the Free Zone to trim things or sew the buttons on. I didn't like the job, so as soon as I got my first paycheck I left. I went to the studio and had no problem. As soon as I introduced myself, my producer said, "Let me hear what you got." I end up doing three songs in one night because he was so in love with what I was doing.
You're famous for your raw material. Has there ever been a song that shocked you to hear?
Even though it's my song, "Stab Up the Meat" shocked me a lot. Sometimes I don't like listening to it because it's so raw. But it was another way of expressing myself about sex and how aggressive I like it. And I couldn't say the F word, so I say, "Stab up the meat," meaning a very aggressive way of doing it. That's what it takes to please a woman like me sometimes. Even though that song shocks me sometimes, I usually understand everything everyone says. The only thing that shocks me is when some people sing some dumb song and I'm like, "What's wrong with these people? Where are the writers? If you know you're talented and you cannot write, can you please get a writer?" I hate when people sing about "1, 2, 3." We're not dumb. Please go above that, man. Show me you have some talent.
Here's a slightly different question; Do you have groupies?
Lord have mercy! I get groupies but they don't stay around long because my man is around me most of the time. But when I'm by myself, a lot of them start telling me a lot of sh*t. I intimidate a lot of them because I talk a lot of hard talk. Sometimes men come around and tremble. They will blush because they don't know what to say to me so they usually end up saying the wrong thing. They don't know that onstage I'm doing a job, and off stage I'm just Marion. So if you say that wrong thing to me, you end up getting some saliva. You know what I'm sayin'? You approach me with respect!
If you could spend one night with any man on the planet, who would it be?
I wouldn't want it to be with anybody else than the man I've been with for 13 years. But I'd love to be in the company of certain men. Singers like R Kelly fascinate me. He's a talented brother. I think he's hot, but I'm not a groupie. I like bad asses, too. 50 Cent is a badass. Jay-Z got a lot of money; I'd love to be up in his company definitely. I met Puff Daddy already and he's cool. But I'm good 'cause my man pays me full attention. I tell men sometimes when they try to get with me, "I'm overworked or over-loved already." So I wouldn't want to be with nobody but my man.
What do you think Tempo is going to do for dancehall in the United States?
Tempo is definitely going to give us a major push. A lot of people are going to get familiar with artists they're not familiar with. A lot of people know me already, but I know this is a chance to really get that push I've been waiting for.
When people think about Jamaica, they think about the music and the beaches. What do you want them to know about Jamaica?
That Jamaica is beautiful. A lot of times people will do a documentary on Jamaica and they'll show the ghettos, but we got suburbs, baby. We got the hills with all these big rich fancy houses. I'm so mad that whenever people do a video, they go in the ghetto to show the bad side of Jamaica. Listen, we rich down here just like anybody else. You should come see how I'm living. Everywhere you'll always find the ghetto, so forget that. Down here is a part of heaven.
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