Quotes from Shaggy

I want to build a fanbase. I want people to like my albums even more so than singles.

I did a record with Janet Jackson, and it went to the top of the charts, and we had all of these complications, and she couldn't be in the video and couldn't do anything for the record. I went through something similar with Pitbull. I think it works really well for a lot of other artists, but for me, it just doesn't work that well.

Gays and lesbians should have the same rights as anybody else, and when they're in Jamaica, they do have the same rights.

When you see a Jamaica video, it's always the hood. Everybody in the video's got guns, and the world looks at it like that's what Jamaica's about. And it affects the economics of the music.

I live in Kingston. When I tell people I live in Kingston, they start fearing for my life. People ask me if I have Internet in Jamaica. Like, seriously?

I don't make as many records as other people do because I prefer the live side of it - and my records are so big that they keep me touring for years upon years and years.

We don't have all this gay-bashing crime. You don't see that. It's not there. That is not really happening in Jamaica. But because a few artists basically sing it and put records out and the media runs with it, then the stigma becomes big, and now we're trapped with that whole thing. It's really sad.

The Irish want to smile, and they want to have fun.

I think that anybody, once we leave Jamaica, automatically, any citizen becomes an ambassador for the flag, for Jamiaca. It's a country that's so rich in culture. We even have a bobsled team, and we ain't even got snow. We do everything in extreme.

You might be like, 'I want really big hits.' But when you get really big hits, and your label is making $150 million, they are people who are now interested in what you do. They are going to begin to tell you what to do, and so you become important. So your creative freedom - you're not going to have that again.

The mainstream is very fickle. If you're hot, they'll mess with you. If you're not, it's out of there.

Even my mom is calling me Shaggy now, which is weird, because Shaggy is more like a character that I play. Shaggy is flamboyant; he's cocky. And I can't live that twenty-four hours a day - hell, no.

The pop market is a very fickle market, and that's why for me to go into the teeny-pop, 'TRL' mode, it's not really for me.

I'm from a single-parent family. My mom is like my mom and dad. She's my world.

A lot of people do records, and they get hit records, but we were blessed with a lot of monsters. 'Oh Carolina' was a very monstrous record in 1993; so was 'Boombastic,' 'Angel' and 'It Wasn't Me.'

'Lucky Day' is what I would call the Shaggy roller-coaster ride. It takes you to different moods. I listen to music in moods.

I'm not the guy to get big record company budgets. My budget is Britney Spears' catering money.

I think the reason I got into the music business was basically for the live aspect of it.

I just think, as a people in general, we should always look at ourselves as the underdog, so we should always go harder than the next person.

When I was doing dancehalls, nobody was doing well in dancehalls. Dancehalls was not mainstream music that was blazing charts and knocking down barriers. This was an underground phenom.

I used to do three or four songs a day, just write them - boom, boom, boom, and done - because of how spontaneous I was.

'Shaggy' was a nickname before it was ever a stage name. I have no problem with it.

My thing is to get people out of the stigma of what a reggae artist should be like.

When we do reggae, it's normally a one-chord or a two-chord, or whatever it is. With Sting, there'll be chord changes, key changes.