Sean Paul thinks Shenseea went pop a bit too early in her career but praised her pen game.
ShenYeng dropped her debut album Alpha in March, but the album was not well-received by fans who wanted more of dancehall Shenseea rather than pop.
Dancehall/ reggae music veteran Sean Paul who was a guest on the Breakfast Club Show to talk about his upcoming album ‘Scorcher’ dropping on May 27, 2022, was asked about his thoughts on the criticisms that Shenseea recently faced for her pop-sounding album.
Shenseea and Sean Paul collaborated on “Lying If I call It Love” on her album. According to him, Shenseea had approached him for advice on navigating the pop space, and he had advised her to continue to produce the same kind of music that brought her career to the top. However, he said he wasn’t aware that the album was mainly pop which he felt was too early for her career.
“She asked me that and she was about to drop and I said keep doing what you doing but I didn’t hear the whole of the album and I heard my song with her that’s on there and that’s more reggae oriented. I think that it’s a little early in her career to be like ah this all of a sudden pop, people could do it, we’ve had people in our genre do this and pop off like Kung Fu fighting dude, it wasn’t our genre but he’s from our country and he had nothing to do virtually with the songs that are being produced or played there. He came and he did disco,” Sean Paul says.
Sean Paul explained that singers like OMI, who is a Jamaican, is also a pop star, but unlike then, who strictly started in pop, Shenseea was liked especially for her dancehall music which is vastly different from pop music.
“My thing with Shen is she came dancehall, she spitting dancehall, people love her for what she did on that crocodile teeth [freestyle]..they were hungry for that, I mean you can always diversify but for me, it was a likkle disappointing in that respect,” he said.
Sean Paul, however, went on to give Shenseea her props, noting that she is a skilled artist and her penmanship was powerful, but his comment seemed to suggest that Shenseea was doing too much too soon.
“I love Shenseea, I think that from the first time I seen her do her thing, it was basically Instagram and I was like yow who is this girl and it was basically in the studio I got to know her and while in the studio I’ve written with her, she has a potent pen, she’s dope that way so I mean it’s right now she’s going hard and sometimes you want people to notice your talent but they don’t have the aptitude to take all that in yet, you affi gi them piece by piece, butter the bread likkle bit and feed it to the people before you put the peanut butter and jelly over it,” he reasoned.
To add to the conversation, Charlamagne Tha God noted that artists of this generation wanted to do everything all at once.
Shenseea has, in past months, addressed criticisms about her pop-sounding music, noting that she had made a plan to dedicate five years of her life to dancehall music, and she then wanted to shoot for an international career which was what she wanted for her debut album.
