As Café Rouge sells a France without the French, and Richard Curtis sells a London fit for the Americans, so Shaggy turns up every once in a while, wearing a vest and peddling a Jamaica that isn't, shall we say, too Jamaican.
He rolls his 'r's; he makes a heavy beat; he claps his hands for amorphous Caribbean flava. But largely, Jamaica seems to mean diluting slick backing vox with incoherent mumbling. It may well vibrate to the sounds of the shanty town, but Shaggy still sounds like he’s mocking a stroke victim, and that’s not nice.
Wild 2nite will, no doubt, be a hit in wine bars and playgrounds about the land. Shaggy has, after all, included that contemporary text-speak in the title. And while reggae can, as we know, be rather rude, he never really fleshes out what the word 'wild' might mean. It's fit for the under-12s; it doesn't stray too far from the melodic land of Girls Aloud. But the suspicion remains: maybe there's a better place to find solace in a hard and deceitful world than this.
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