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Uganda: Uganda's Mr. Lover-Lover!
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The Weekly Observer (Kampala)
7 August 2008
Posted to the web 7 August 2008
Kisakye Frank
A decade after Shaggy's maiden Ugandan concert in January 1998 at the Nile gardens - now Serena hotel - Mr. Bombastic will be back for the record fourth time in ten years on August 9 at Lugogo Cricket Oval.
He will be officiating at the Pilsner Passa Passa dance hall fest. The dancehall and reggae king seems to love Uganda so much, he will jet in as early as August 5.
Born Orville Richard Burrell in Kingston Jamaica in 1968, 18-year-old Shaggy joined his mother in Brooklyn - New York.
Shaggy's rise to become one of dancehall's commercially potent artistes has been no easy road. Raised single handedly by his mother, Shaggy lived a ghetto child's life. He is your typical bad boy gone good.
"It was a fad to go to school with guns, get into fights and sell drugs. That was a regular thing to do. It might sound crazy here but in New York that was a regular thing to do," he said in an interview with the New Vision in 1998.
And to shake off that kind of life style; he joined the US marine corps in 1988. Little did he know that operation desert storm would come so soon in 1991.
"War is bad, some people do twenty years and never see war, I did four and saw a lot of it, just my luck," he said.
Things were to get better on his return as he ventured into a music genre that hardly amassed any public appeal from the highly hip-hopitised American audience.
Oh Carolina, his first hit - a dancehall remake of the classic hit by the Folkes brothers - was released in 1993 and soared into top position on the UK billboards.
Bombastic followed 2 years later and the following year he released worldwide number one singles It Wasn't Me and Angel.
Bombastic won him the 1996 Grammy award for best reggae album.
So good the album was that it broke the musical genre boundaries almost making it to the RnB top ten and the reggae album billboard for a full year.
Hot shot in 2000 topped the US and UK charts and sold over six million copies in the US alone - unheard of in the reggae release.
At the end of 2002 he released Lucky Day, a tribute to women. In 2005 he released Clothes Drop though it never matched the earlier successes.
"My influences range from ska, dancehall and rock steady to soka and RnB," he says.
In March 2007 he composed the official song of the ICC cricket world cup that was staged in his homeland, with the theme "the Game of Love and Unity".
He also composed the official anthem "Feel the Rush" at the just concluded Euro 2008.
Shaggy has done duets ranging from Natasha Watkins (Ultimatum), Brian and Tony Gold (Hey Sexy Lady), Samantha Cole (Luv me, Luv me), Nicole Scherzinger (Don't Ask Her That), to Olivia (Wild 2nite) and now Akon.
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That is the talent set to explode at the Cricket Oval this weekend, if you manage to secure a tickets from Shell Petrol Stations at Shs 25,000 and 50,000.
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