It Almost Wasn’t Shaggy! Wayne Wonder, Tanto Metro And Devonte Were Given The Hit Song
Dancehall megastar Shaggy has revealed that he had given his platinum-selling song, It Wasn’t Me, to artists like Wayne Wonder and the duo Tanto Metro and Devonte, after his management and record label initially rejected the track as ‘crap’ and refused to let him release it.
The timeless hit song has now been interpolated into a one-minute Cheetos advertisement featuring Shaggy and Hollywood couple Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher. The commercial will be aired this Sunday in full on CBS during the NFL Super Bowl LV face-off in Tampa, Florida.
Last July, a documentary released by VICE to mark the 20th anniversary of Shaggy’s Hot Shot album, and the release of his remake Hot Shot 2020, chronicled how the song, which had been disregarded by MCA Records as ‘trash,’ made Hot Shot rise to be the Rae Town native’s biggest selling album.
However, the events leading to Shaggy offering the song to his Dancehall colleagues were not factored in the documentary.
But a few days ago, Shaggy, while promoting the Cheetos Super Bowl commercial, told The Inside Edition in an interview that: “There’s a group called Tanto Metro and Devonte. I gave it to them when my manager didn’t want me to do it. And they recorded it.”
The duo of deejay Tanto Metro and singer Devonte are known for hits such as Everyone Falls in Love, Give It To Her, and Say Wooee.
Shaggy also said he also asked Notch from the Born Jamericans and even No Letting Go artist Wayne Wonder to voice the now mega platinum-selling track, more than 20 years ago.
“I believed in it that much, that I was trying to give it to somebody. It ended up coming right back to me when [director of the record label A&R] Hans [Haedelt] [heard it] and said, ‘Hey, I think this is a hit.’ And I’m like, ‘Man, this is what we’ve been trying to tell him,” he noted.
Last year’s VICE documentary noted that when Shaggy recorded his Hot Shot album, which contained It Wasn’t Me and Angel, the label dismissed it as a throw-away album with “no hits.”
It was Hans Haedelt, a former MCA Records senior director, who accidentally heard the demo tape, and declared that the song would be a hit. And, although Shaggy’s then-manager Robert Livingston, had ordered it pulled from the album as he disliked it, Hans recommended that the three men complete the song and add it to the list.
“It Wasn’t Me wasn’t even released as a single,” VICE said. “But a series of happy accidents, some illegal downloading, and sheer determination, propelled ‘It Wasn’t Me’ to become one of the first viral crossover hits.”
Executives at MCA Records had come in for a barrage of criticisms, in the documentary, for not being able to recognize a hit song. According to Hans “when the label heard the finished proposed album, the senior executives thought the album was a pile a junk; there was not a song on there that they could release to radio; and I should be thankful that I still had a job”.
“Nobody at MCA records lifted a finger – until it became unstoppable,” he stated.
As fate was to have it, a radio disc jockey, Pablo Sato from Hawaii, snatched an online copy of the album from Napster, after his request for a copy was declined by MCA. It was then that the track skyrocketed to global popularity, as radio stations all over the US bombarded the airwaves with the song.
The album began amassing sales of 500,000 hard copies weekly, and it topped the charts in every country in which it was available for sale. Dancehall history was made.