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Reggae Grammy Nominee
By Rickey Wright
Special to MSN Music
"This album was such a departure for me," says Heavy D. "At the same time as I'm making it, I'm going, 'Well, I know there's gonna be some people who aren't gonna be too pleased.' But how do you reinvent yourself if you just keep making lateral moves? And I was not interested in doing what I've done already."
The Overweight Lover is no more. For one thing, the guy's lost a lot of weight. But Heavy D, who enjoyed a long hip-hop career in the '80s and '90s with two gold and three platinum albums, is back. Now he's a purveyor of lovers rock, the smooth sound that has not only seen him changing up his style, but has also earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Reggae Album. "Vibes" has been slowly winning accolades from the likes of USA Today, Vibe and the Beat, not to mention some dropped jaws.
It's an interesting twist for an artist who has been around long enough to remember when the Recording Academy treated rap as something of a fad that it had to recognize but not necessarily respect. "I remember that there was a year when we all decided to boycott," says Heavy D. Grammy had relegated hip-hop to a preshow award giveaway. It might as well have been polka. Now ...
"The culture forced their hand, if you will," he says. "What can you do? It's the dominant -- hip-hop culture is the culture. There's no way around it. It's involved in everything from rock to even country. So what can you do? You can't be the guy standin' in the rain."
Heavy D has shed the label system and is making an end run for self-financed glory with the release of "Vibes" on his own Stride Entertainment. He'll appear at an acoustic Grammy showcase the day before the awards themselves, then do three songs at the pre-telecast awards gala. His embrace of reggae after 12 years away from recording is a natural move, he points out. He grew up in a Jamaican-American family in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on the edge of the Bronx.
And hip-hop owes a great deal to Jamaica, not only because of the country's vibrant sound-system culture, but also because of pioneer DJ and Kingston native Kool Herc, who brought turntables to parties in the Bronx and paved the way for the new style.
"I just remember being -- I would even say infected. It was like a disease, a great disease that never went away from me," recalls Heavy D.
Even before that, though, the former Dwight Myers was exposed to reggae and even country music at home. ("Charley Pride, you name it -- Johnny Cash," he recalls of his father's Nashville favorites.) Today, he's paying tribute to something he never really abandoned.
"When I went into this project, it was the byproduct of me working on a Heavy D traditional hip-hop album," he says. "Normally I would always try to put a reggae record on there. Out of my six or seven albums -- whatever -- at least five of them had a reggae record, just paying homage to my roots. The record company would never really let me do an entire reggae album, because it didn't make sense for them monetarily: 'You're not gonna make money doing that.'"
Heavy D says that another hip-hop album today "would be disrespectful to the culture, first and foremost -- to just come out and make an album where, 'OK, this is what people expect.' The fans, I tell 'em when they ask me, 'Trust me. You're romanticizing. If I came out with a record that you thought you wanted me to come out with, you'd be like, "Eh, he could've just not done that."' I'm never gonna live up to what I've done; I've been out of the game 10 years because I could not find my place. And it was because I kept looking in the same place."
He figures that "even in the beginning, [Heavy D and the Boyz] used to get chastised because we were so melody-driven. We had bridges in our records, full-on chord structures. People used to say, 'Aw, they sellin' out.' I remember when I made 'Now That We Found Love.' I made 'Now That We Found Love' because Third World made it."
"Go back and listen to some of the voices," Heavy D counsels, "like Alton Ellis. Dennis Brown. There's a guy named Frankie Paul. Beres Hammond -- Jesus. Barrington Levy's voice. Remember, Jamaica back then was far from modern ... I love the fact that they made it work with whatever they had. That is what it should be. That is really what art is."
Today, he says, "I wanna make something that people can have fun with, and that I can have fun again. I really feel like I'm at the starting gate. And that's probably, for me, the best feeling. I'm doin' shows -- where I used to be in front of 20, 30 thousand people -- I'm doin' shows in front of 150 [or] 200 people."
Reggae abides, finding new audiences as the years pass. Heavy D says some of the greatest interest in his new work at magazines such as Essence has been among the intern staffs. "I just went to see Barrington Levy at the Key Club, and I'm looking in the audience, and they're all, like, 22-year-olds," he says. "And they're singing all his songs, lyric for lyric. And all white! And Barrington Levy's been around -- I looked up to him."
It's worth mentioning where Heavy D has been while off music's radar: acting, with a long list of credits on the Internet Movie Database. Encouraged by his friend Laurence Fishburne, he has been a regular on screen and stage. He's planning a new production of Sam Shepard's "True West," and expects another collaboration with Fishburne. He'll fit the work in around his new music. Reggae.
By Rickey Wright
Special to MSN Music
"This album was such a departure for me," says Heavy D. "At the same time as I'm making it, I'm going, 'Well, I know there's gonna be some people who aren't gonna be too pleased.' But how do you reinvent yourself if you just keep making lateral moves? And I was not interested in doing what I've done already."
The Overweight Lover is no more. For one thing, the guy's lost a lot of weight. But Heavy D, who enjoyed a long hip-hop career in the '80s and '90s with two gold and three platinum albums, is back. Now he's a purveyor of lovers rock, the smooth sound that has not only seen him changing up his style, but has also earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Reggae Album. "Vibes" has been slowly winning accolades from the likes of USA Today, Vibe and the Beat, not to mention some dropped jaws.
It's an interesting twist for an artist who has been around long enough to remember when the Recording Academy treated rap as something of a fad that it had to recognize but not necessarily respect. "I remember that there was a year when we all decided to boycott," says Heavy D. Grammy had relegated hip-hop to a preshow award giveaway. It might as well have been polka. Now ...
"The culture forced their hand, if you will," he says. "What can you do? It's the dominant -- hip-hop culture is the culture. There's no way around it. It's involved in everything from rock to even country. So what can you do? You can't be the guy standin' in the rain."
Heavy D has shed the label system and is making an end run for self-financed glory with the release of "Vibes" on his own Stride Entertainment. He'll appear at an acoustic Grammy showcase the day before the awards themselves, then do three songs at the pre-telecast awards gala. His embrace of reggae after 12 years away from recording is a natural move, he points out. He grew up in a Jamaican-American family in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on the edge of the Bronx.
And hip-hop owes a great deal to Jamaica, not only because of the country's vibrant sound-system culture, but also because of pioneer DJ and Kingston native Kool Herc, who brought turntables to parties in the Bronx and paved the way for the new style.
"I just remember being -- I would even say infected. It was like a disease, a great disease that never went away from me," recalls Heavy D.
Even before that, though, the former Dwight Myers was exposed to reggae and even country music at home. ("Charley Pride, you name it -- Johnny Cash," he recalls of his father's Nashville favorites.) Today, he's paying tribute to something he never really abandoned.
"When I went into this project, it was the byproduct of me working on a Heavy D traditional hip-hop album," he says. "Normally I would always try to put a reggae record on there. Out of my six or seven albums -- whatever -- at least five of them had a reggae record, just paying homage to my roots. The record company would never really let me do an entire reggae album, because it didn't make sense for them monetarily: 'You're not gonna make money doing that.'"
Heavy D says that another hip-hop album today "would be disrespectful to the culture, first and foremost -- to just come out and make an album where, 'OK, this is what people expect.' The fans, I tell 'em when they ask me, 'Trust me. You're romanticizing. If I came out with a record that you thought you wanted me to come out with, you'd be like, "Eh, he could've just not done that."' I'm never gonna live up to what I've done; I've been out of the game 10 years because I could not find my place. And it was because I kept looking in the same place."
He figures that "even in the beginning, [Heavy D and the Boyz] used to get chastised because we were so melody-driven. We had bridges in our records, full-on chord structures. People used to say, 'Aw, they sellin' out.' I remember when I made 'Now That We Found Love.' I made 'Now That We Found Love' because Third World made it."
"Go back and listen to some of the voices," Heavy D counsels, "like Alton Ellis. Dennis Brown. There's a guy named Frankie Paul. Beres Hammond -- Jesus. Barrington Levy's voice. Remember, Jamaica back then was far from modern ... I love the fact that they made it work with whatever they had. That is what it should be. That is really what art is."
Today, he says, "I wanna make something that people can have fun with, and that I can have fun again. I really feel like I'm at the starting gate. And that's probably, for me, the best feeling. I'm doin' shows -- where I used to be in front of 20, 30 thousand people -- I'm doin' shows in front of 150 [or] 200 people."
Reggae abides, finding new audiences as the years pass. Heavy D says some of the greatest interest in his new work at magazines such as Essence has been among the intern staffs. "I just went to see Barrington Levy at the Key Club, and I'm looking in the audience, and they're all, like, 22-year-olds," he says. "And they're singing all his songs, lyric for lyric. And all white! And Barrington Levy's been around -- I looked up to him."
It's worth mentioning where Heavy D has been while off music's radar: acting, with a long list of credits on the Internet Movie Database. Encouraged by his friend Laurence Fishburne, he has been a regular on screen and stage. He's planning a new production of Sam Shepard's "True West," and expects another collaboration with Fishburne. He'll fit the work in around his new music. Reggae.
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