Olympian Maurice ‘DecaJams’ Smith Says His Dancehall Foray Is No Fluke
Three-time Olympian decathlete, Maurice Smith, says his foray into Dancehall and Reggae music as an artist is no fluke, neither is it a hobby.
The 2007 World Championship silver medalist, who goes by the stage name DecaJams, just released a track titled Olympians, which pays tribute to athletes and Olympians across the world, but says that this is only an indication of what he has in store. The track was released to coincide with the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, which kicked off on Friday.
“Music is the journey right now fi me, so I will dropping a lot of songs coming, because mi catalogue deep enuh. A jut people nuh hear it yet,” Smith told Dionne Jackson Miller during an interview on radio Jamaica’s Beyond the headlines on Friday evening.
As for his new track, it comes three years after the Calabar High School old boy made his musical debut with a song titled Jamrock Hotta, an anti-violence song, which was spurred by the infamous viral video of young men who were involved in crime, from Montego Bay bragging about how they would “kill and collect, smoke and forget” and engage in human trafficking.
Since then the 2008 Jamaican Olympic team captain has released songs such as Gun Play, Small Flame and Revolution.
Smith, who competed for Jamaica in the decathlon at the Athens and Beijing Olympic Games, currently holds the national record for the men’s decathlon with 8,644 points.
According to the St. Catherine native, the release of Olympians was a strategic decision made by himself and his team, and was paying off, as he was getting good feedback and airplay.
“I couldn’t wait on it to happen because it’s been a lifetime thing for me. You know, the music was always a part of my preparation for competition as well. And now that I am not in competition, it is the perfect time for me to really go full-fledged, establishing myself as a Reggae/Dancehall artiste,” he told Jackson Miller.
The Auburn University graduate explained that his love for Reggae and Dancehall music goes back to his music boyhood days.
“I used to make my own CDs from even Boys Champs back in the days – cassette days, mi used to tape my songs dem offa di radio. And songs that I really, really liked I would tape them, because I wanted to play them over and over, because I wanted to know the words from start to finish. And I wanted to sing it exactly like how the artiste sing it with the same melody,” he said.
“It is almost like I used to do mi own practice from I was young. And mi used to listen to everybody. So now that I have the time to put into it, now that I really master the craft, the track Olympian is something that I definitely did for the Olympians around the world,” Smith added.
Smith had told The Jamaica Observer in an interview a few days ago, that he conceptualized the song following a conversation with his former track manager Juliet Campbell about his music.
During which she suggested that, as an Olympian and artiste, he “should try to get on to the Puma entertainment package in Tokyo”.
Campbell had, according to Smith, promised that she would have contacted the entertainment department at Puma on his behalf. His agent, Brandon Simpson, had also encouraged him to pen an Olympic song as it would be needed if he made the Puma entertainment roster.
Smith and Usain Bolt are the first two Olympians to make inroads from track and field into Dancehall, with Bolt serving as music producer under his A-Team label.