A Quote by Shaggy

When I was doing dancehalls, nobody was doing well in dancehalls. Dancehalls was not mainstream music that was blazing charts and knocking down barriers. This was an underground phenom.
I was in several bands, and we just started off doing the clubs and dancehalls in the valleys - and eventually moved on to the colleges and universities.
The music I make is very underground-sounding, it doesn't sound like it goes into the charts. It doesn't sound like it's trying to fit into today's style. So I think I have already a vibrating tool to an art form that isn't the mainstream. I'm very outside of the mainstream in my taste of music.
I don't really look at the charts at all. If anything, I try to out-do what I've done before. I try to make music that I like and I trust my own judgement with what will work with a wider audience. If you compare yourself to the charts, you lose perspective on what you're doing and why you're doing it.
I see that happening with hip hop purists now. Where you have an artist like a Kendrick [Lamar] or a Drake, who are really trying different things emotionally, different things musically, and on a mainstream level. And you have underground hip hop fans dissing it, for the simple fact that it's mainstream - not because what they're doing is whack, or what they're doing is not sincere.
All the people who were on WSX Season 1 are the life blood of the alternative wrestling business, and now the mainstream wrestling business as well. That is what Lucha Underground is doing.
In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. But now, mainstream culture isn’t complacent, it’s stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That’s not wimpy—it’s powerful and productive.
There's always going to be a fight between mainstream and underground because the mainstream is a very small bubble, and the underground scene is a very small bubble, and they both see themselves as secret societies. But I never saw it that way. I always thought music was open to all things.
I love A Day to Remember. They really had that style down of doing heavy songs mixed with pop songs when nobody was doing that style of music.
I been doing the same things as in my younger days, when I was coming up, and now here I am, an old man, up there in the charts. And I say, well, what happened? Have they just thought up the real John Lee Hooker, is that it? And I think, well, I won't tell nobody else! I can't help but wonder what happened.
You gotta look beyond the mainstream... the mainstream'll drown you, you know? There's always a pulse in the underground that I love. And the pulse in the underground is what keeps heavy metal alive.
I feel like I'm doing something in Atlanta that nobody ever did as far as rap. If it happens to end up on the top 40 or the pop charts, it doesn't mean I meant to go pop. It's just where the music took me. It started at the bottom, and it rises.
I like doing the mainstream, right-down-the-pike broad comedies as much as I like doing the kind of unorthodox different stuff.
Whether these were liberal publications or conservative publications, whether they were mainstream or slightly to the side of the mainstream; out of the mainstream, they all believed that they had the right to tell you how to stylize yourself. And from the New York Times to the much more left-winged nation. And The Voice said, no, whatever you want to. You drew whatever you want to, we'll publish it. Nobody was doing that. Nobody does it today. The Voice is no longer that paper, and editorializing is now in the hands of editors, with few exceptions.
You don't make this kind of music expecting to have to do TV press and stuff like that. I don't mind doing it, but it's a fairly underground type of music. You do it for the love of the music more than being a star or anything.
It'd be negligent to say that I don't want to be at the top of the charts. Of course I do, it's proof that your song is being heard. But I think it's more about the work for me and being proud of what I'm doing in music than what people think about my music. I want to like my music before you like it. I don't want to sell anything that I don't really like. I don't want to sell myself short just to get to the top of the charts. It doesn't feel that great. Feeling proud of your work feels greater than being at the top of the charts.
That is why we have the polio vaccine. People are blazing their own trial. That is what seems to be important. I don't care to follow and to do what the mass is doing. That is not doing anything, to be doing what everyone else is doing. Everybody is unique. The funny thing about people now is that people don't really understand or really appreciate how unique each individual on earth is.
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