Sean Paul and Beyoncé topped the charts with their smash hit “Baby Boy” just over two decades ago, but the pair actually connected many years before that.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter about working with Will Smith for the new Bad Boys 4 soundtrack, the dancehall legend reflected on some of his other big-name collabs over the years, which of course included the 2003 smash.
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“She opened on a show here in Jamaica with [Destiny’s Child],” he recalled in the conversation published on Friday (June 14). “They only had one song and I was on that same show, so that’s where we all met. And knowing that she called me back a couple of years later for her first other project was awesome. I was writing my part of the song in the back of my house underneath a mango tree.
“And while I’m writing my verse, a mango falls out the tree and falls straight through the window [of my car] into my lap. And I was like, ‘That must mean that this song is a sweet song.’ And one thing that I do recall about that time was being very proud that she used a dancehall-oriented track.”
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He continued: “Because at the time, people were hollering at me to do collabs — I was [working] with Busta Rhymes, I was doing stuff with Clipse and I was doing stuff with Blu Cantrell — and all of those stuff was very dope but they were more Hip Hop oriented, and this was such a big artist and she was stepping out on her own.
“So it really made me feel that dancehall-style was coming into its own and that my music or my genre was being accepted by a lot of people,” he adds. “Coming from Texas, I know she’s heard a lot of dancehall growing up and [was] familiar with that whole vibe, so it made sense to me and it made history for both of us.”
Back in 2022, Sean Paul addressed the whirlwind of rumors that came with their collab that insinuated he and Beyoncé had hooked up during the studio sessions.
“We had to have a speak about it,” Sean Paul said. He noted that the rumors caused them to perform the song together a mere three times. The two of them were on tour together in 2003 for the Rock The Mic Tour, but Paul noted that strange things started happening when he would hit the stage with Bey.
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“Strange things started to happen at the performances, which was weird,” he said. “We went to L.A. and I did my show and then she was performing, and they told me to stick around because we’ll do ‘Baby Boy.’ We do it and I run out there and the crowd goes wild, but after a while it seems like I lost their energy.”
He continued, “And it’s weird because I was going wild out there. When the song finished, I came backstage and my own band was all pissed off, like ‘Man, that’s fucked up. You heard yourself? We couldn’t hear you in the crowd. Your mic was off.’ I was like, ‘How the fuck did that happen?’”
