Tim: Wait, what? How? Just…whuh?
Tom: If you’d like to know how this incredibly unlikely-sounding collaboration happened, Rolling Stone has the details. But to sum up: they met at a studio in LA, they’ve made a full LP, and this – the first single – is described by Shaggy as “something that hundreds of women would get pregnant to”.
Tim: Oh God.
Tom: Okay, so good news first: Sting, at no point, attempts anything even close to a Jamaican accent, which I think we can all agree is for the best.
Tim: Yes, yes. In fact, he turns in a really rather good performance, which I’m pleasantly surprised about.
Tom: The most surprising thing to me — apart from the fact that it exists at all — is just how good the two stars’ styles work together. This is a good track. It’ll struggle to find airplay, because there’s too much Shaggy for Radio 2 and too much Sting for… er, anywhere that’d play Shaggy.
Tim: Thing is, it reminds me a lot of what Shaggy always used to do: take a featured artist, get them to do most of the singing, and throw in a few words here and there of his own. And it works as well as it always did.
Tom: You’re right. Now I come to think of it, he rarely sang the hooks. Still, I get the feeling that reviews are somewhat irrelevant here. They’ve made an LP. They like the LP enough to release it. Given that they’re both doing pretty well for themselves, I suspect that — as long as someone out there likes it — they’ll be just fine.