Jamaican Surfing on a Summer Hit
Don’t call OMI a reggae artist. The little- known Jamaican singer, who hit the top of the Billboard singles chart in July with a German dance remix of his song “Cheerleader,” an ode to monogamy originally released in 2012, knows the risks of such a narrow categorization.
“I am not a dancehall artist, and I am not a reggae artist,” said OMI, 28, referring to his home country’s signature musical genres. “I’ve never hidden the fact that I’m Jamaican; I will never disown my roots or influences,” he added.
OMI ( pronounced oh-mee), born Omar Samuel Pasley in rural Clarendon, Jamaica, knows his history. It’s been nearly a decade since a Jamaican artist topped the Billboard Hot 100 — Sean Paul did it with “Temperature” in 2006 — and longer since the American record industry last talked up reggae or dancehall, reggae’s faster, more hardcore rhyth- mic cousin, as a commercial force in urban music.
More often, Caribbean dance music has been a summer fling — onetime hits by largely anonymous acts that, for a time, fill playlists for barbecues and boom from cars but rarely result in sustainable careers in the United States.
“Cheerleader ( Felix Jaehn Remix)” is nothing if not recognizable — the song has topped the worldwide charts of iTunes ( Number 1 in 55 markets), Shazam (11.3 million identifications) and Spotify (300 million plays), and has more than 230 million combined views on YouTube.
OMI has no album to his name; his path to fame has been dependent entirely on a single song that wound its way through Europe before reaching the United States, giving his preferred genre classification — world music — more weight. He released the original, reggae-tinged version of “Cheerleader” in 2012 on Oufah, an independent label in Kingston, after being discovered by the dancehall impresario Clifton Dillon (known as Specialist).
Along with a low-budget, high- concept video shot in Oregon — OMI’s first trip to the United States — the song was a modest hit in Jamaica and percolated in Hawaii.
The track got a second life when it was discovered the next year by Patrick Moxey, the president of Ultra Music, a dance label partly owned by Sony Music. In early 2014, Ultra commissioned two remixes, including an airy tropical house version by Felix Jaehn, a 20-year- old German
A little-noticed song gets a new life as a hot German remix.
producer. That reworking became a hit in Sweden, then France and Italy, and went platinum in the United Kingdom. The “Cheerleader” remix was given a sleeker music video set, fittingly, at the beach.
While OMI does not deny Mr. Jaehn’s magic touch — for one, he sped up the beat, making it more danceable — the singer said: “It’s always been a good song. If there was no song, there would be no remix.” (Despite their world-beating collaboration, the two men have yet to meet.)
OMI is also looking toward life after “Cheerleader,” although he insist- ed that he is not impatient to release a new single, tentatively scheduled for this month. Sticking around beyond one huge hit will be “98 percent business, 2 percent talent,” he said, invoking Specialist, who is credited with bringing Jamaican stars like Shabba Ranks to America. “The timing has to be right.”
“A lot of people have come with 100 songs and never had the impact that I have with one, and I’m well aware of that,” OMI said.
He added: “I’m just trying to hold out and breathe properly to cross that finish line.”