Any artist choosing Musiq as their stage name has to have a lot of guts-and enough skills to live up to the name. Well, over his last three albums, Musiq has shown he has both. Carving out a niche as one of Philadelphia's finest contemporary R&B singers and songwriters, he's helped keep the neo soul movement fresh and relevant. He's also getting behind a new movement called Tempo, the new channel dedicated to Caribbean music and culture. During his conversation with us, Musiq shares with us the importance of jerk chicken, Bob Marley and Super Cat are to his life.
Do you have any Caribbean roots?
The closest Caribbean roots I have is my brother-well, he's my manger but I call him my brother. He's from Trinidad. I've never been to Trinidad, but somebody needs to hook it up where I can make it there. I'm not gonna name any names but we definitely gonna make it out there though. [Laughs]
Have you been anywhere at all in the Caribbean?
I've been to St. Thomas before. Everything is different there than how things are in the States. Everything is laid back and there's water, trees and greenery everywhere. It's way different from LA and New York and all of that craziness, traffic and people. [Sighs] It was really relaxing.
Can you remember your first encounter with Jamaican music?
I would have had to have been like 12 or 13 when I first heard a Bob Marley record. It was remade so many times that when I finally heard the original, I was like, "There's something about this that's touching me right now and I can't explain it." Then, when I was around 16 or 17 in the early 1990's, reggae and dancehall just exploded in Philadelphia.
Who in the dancehall field initially blew you away?
Super Cat and Buju Banton was kinda cool, but Maxi Priest caught my attention 'cause he was a singer. Dancehall reminds me of the evolution of hip-hop. It started from a real raw grassroots foundation, but then it spun off to where everybody was doing it. I started getting into just the different rhythms, how they jump from dancehall to grassroots to the R&B flavor.
If you could have one Jamaican meal right now, what would it be?
I'd want some jerk chicken, rice and peas and some kalalu!
dragged out Jamaica's other dancehall titan, Buju Banton, for a medley that included Buju's current hit "Motorbike." Some Jamaican audience members fire handguns in the air when they're taken with a certain tune; here, they applauded Buju's work by chanting back "buck buck," imitating the sound of appreciative gunshots.
This exclamation may have been hard to follow, but Elephant Man - his hair dyed red and orange - took the crowd to the next level. The relentless rapper climbed on top of a speaker stack for "Callin' Out," commanded the 1500-strong audience to wave their cell phones in the air, and finished with an a cappella version of "We Are the World."
Although The Game didn't emerge on stage until well after two in the morning, he got a hysterical welcome and quickly bonded with the crowd. "Put them umbrellas down, I'm getting wet, too," he said, spending the rest of the wee hours perched on the lip of the stage, taking requests and explaining why he calls his nemesis 50 Cent's crew "G U-Not."
The bare-chested MC showed off the fruit of an afternoon spent in Elephant Man's company, barking "Dreams" over the dub beat of Damien Marley's "Welcome to Jamrock." Earlier, deejay Wayne Marshall paid his own respects to hip-hop with a hyped rendition of Kanye West's "Gold Digger."
The rest of the bill presented Jamaican music in all its complexity. The choreography of dancehall trio Voice Mail would have impressed 'N Sync. Deejay Vybz Kartel spat rhymes out over Harold Faltermeyer's "Axel F" theme. And the ladies went as wild when they were invited to "wine" against Leftside & Esco's bamboo sticks as they did for the lovers rock of Morgan Heritage's "Your Best Friend."
"If we find out one thing tonight," Wayne Marshall had joked earlier, "we'll find out who loves water." But as the Caribbean rapidly reclaimed the sands of James Bond Beach, Tempo's launch and its hardy celebrants also showed that Jamaica's current music is as exciting as that of any other country in the world.
Tempo will begin airing in the Caribbean on November 21 and in the U.S. in 2006.
