‘Intoxication’ is Shaggy’s eighth studio album and his first for dancehall label VP Records. It also heralds a return to heavy dancehall and ragga that featured on his earlier material. Guest collaborations come from Rik Rok, Rayvon and Akon which it turn give the album a more commercial pop leaning with that famous sub baritone voice booming throughout. Features the singles ‘Church Heathen’ and ‘What’s Love’
Track Listing for Intoxication
1. Can’t Hold Me
2. Bonafide Girl featuring Rik Rok & Tony Gold
3. Intoxication
4. Those Days featuring Nasha
5. More Woman
6. Woman Scorn featuring Nasha
7. Mad Mad World featuring Sizzla Kalonji & Collie Buddz
8. Out Of Control featuring Rayvon
9. Church Heathen
10. Wear Di Crown featuring Mischieve
11. Criteria
12. Body A Shake
13. What’s Love featuring Akon
14. Holla At You
15. All About Love
16. Reggae Vibes (Bonus Track)
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Unsigned Jamaican musicians and singers with their own material will get a shot at stardom when the BBC World Service and BBC World Television bring their global talent search to Jamaica.
Titled ‘The Next Big Thing 2007′, the talent search requires all bands and artistes to meet the Next Big Thing team and to hand over a CD or DVD of their music at the Ashanti Oasis Restaurant at Hope Gardens in Kingston between 10:00 am and 6:00 pm.
“This is not an audition, and there will be no performances, but there is a chance to be interviewed for the BBC,” a news release from the BBC said. “We are scouring the world looking for exciting new music, bands and performers who will shape the future.”
In addition to tomorrow’s event, musicians can also enter online at www.bbcworldservice.com/nextbigthing2007, the BBC said, adding that The Next Big Thing 2007 in Jamaica, being held in association with Radio Jamaica and Television Jamaica, “is completely free and unmediated”.
Said the BBC: “Forget the big labels and mainstream music business, we’re looking for boldness and brilliance - musical pioneers who really deserve attention.”
The BBC said that last year the talent search received entries from thousands of musicians from over 40 countries. The winner, Silva, went on to have a number one hit in her home country, Armenia, and played the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
The BBC World Service is easily the biggest international broadcaster in the world with an audience of 183 million listeners in 33 languages.
For this year’s talent search, the BBC World Service will be joined by BBC World Television “to expose the new and establish a platform for musicians to create and perform original music,” the news release said.
“We are very glad to have been asked by the BBC to be a part of this,” the release quoted Geoff Travis, founder of Rough Trade who signed The Smiths, Travis, The Strokes and many more. “We are astonished at the standard of the entries, we are very very pleasantly surprised.”
The BBC have selected a panel of international music experts, including Caspar Llewellyn-Smith, editor of the Observer Music Monthly; Will Hodgkinson, music journalist for Mojo and the Guardian; and Paul Stokes, features editor, NME to help choose five finalists.
Entries close on November 18, 2007, and finalists will perform for an all-star jury in London in December. One act will be crowned The Next Big Thing 2007 and perform to a live audience of 3,000 people at London’s O2 stadium to celebrate the BBC World Service’s 75th Anniversary in December, alongside some of the most exciting names in music, the news release said.
Popularity: 3% [?]
PAYjr is an innovative online allowance and Chore program for kids and teens. PAYjr helps parents to reward their children for completing chores and other such good behavior. Allowances can be loaded directly, electronically, and automatically to a free, reloadable and reusable card which is safer than cash, Plus with PAYjr new partnership with well known store chain Target means a great place for children to go to reward themselves. Children will also be able to learn valuable lessons about money management, budgeting and saving towards a goal.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Thousands of fans bade an emotional farewell on Sunday to South Africa’s top reggae star Lucky Dube, whose murder in an apparent botched carjacking stunned even a nation hardened to violent crime.
Rastafarians and members of the African Shembe Christian church to which Dube belonged were prominent in the crowds who thronged to his rural home for his funeral.
Local musicians and fans from across Africa sang hymns and paid tribute to South Africa’s biggest-selling reggae singer and one of the country’s most successful artistes.
His wife Zanele and children broke down in tears as one of Dube’s best-known songs played over the loudspeaker at the public ceremony on his farm near the remote village of Ingogo, about 250 km (160 miles) southeast of Johannesburg.
The internationally acclaimed singer, who recorded 22 albums in English, Zulu and Afrikaans and won more than 20 awards in a 25-year entertainment career, was then buried in his garden in a private family ceremony.
The 43-year-old was shot dead in front of his children in a Johannesburg suburb on October 18. Five men have been arrested.
The high-profile killing prompted new calls for a crackdown on violent crime in South Africa, which has one of the highest crime rates in the world.
Police figures show there were nearly 20,000 murders in the year to the end of March, 2.4 percent up on the year before. The number of rapes, carjackings and assaults also remained high.
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Having sold more than 20 million records worldwide, Shaggy doesn’t exactly fit the mold of the struggling artist. Yet with a smile and a big sigh of relief, the Jamaican-born, New York-raised singer says that only now does he feel that the struggle is mostly behind him, thanks in large part to the expiration of his last major-label contract.
Due November 13, Shaggy’s first album since parting ways with Geffen last year, “Intoxication,” is being issued through a 50/50 joint-venture, one-album deal between his own Big Yard label and the Queens, N.Y.-based VP Records. Per similar deals, Shaggy owns the recording and licenses the final product to the reggae label, which has previously issued various 12-inch singles from the singer and several Big Yard releases.
In a word, he said, this disc is all about “freedom”: “For the first time, I’m in my own driver’s seat,” he said.
If Shaggy is perhaps the only dancehall singer to reach the upper echelons of the Billboard charts repeatedly during the past decade, he insists — with pride — that it’s a hard-earned track record. He cut the massive “Hot Shot,” released in 2000 and featuring such hits as “It Wasn’t Me” and “Angel,” in his basement studio after Virgin dropped him. The album has sold 6.8 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. [...]
Popularity: 3% [?]
