Shaggy and Sting’s joint album is a baffling joy
For the first minute of “44/876,” the new collaborative album from Shaggy and Sting that is hotly anticipated if only for its ’WTF’ novelty, it sounds like the two musicians may just pull this thing off. “44/876” opens with its title track, beginning with a sunny verse from Shaggy celebrating his island roots over tropical-pop beats, hinting that the joining of forces between the English rocker and the Jamaican dance hall star may not be a total bust. Then, Sting starts singing. “It shakes me to my soul with a positive vibration, I start dreaming of Jamaica, the Caribbean nation,” he begins, the clunkiest possible introduction to the album’s ‘Sting does reggae!’ concept, which only gets more amusing when he invokes “the ghost of Bob Marley that haunts me to this day” with all the nuance of a clueless tourist getting his hair cornrowed on an island holiday.
It’s a hilariously unfortunate introduction to an album that certainly has its bright spots. “Morning is Coming,” the album’s second track, is a better introduction to Sting’s relative talents on “44/876,” his lilting vocals a better match for the song’s gentle roots reggae. Of course, Sting is no rookie when it comes to the sounds of Jamaica, drawing from reggae and ska during his career with the Police and in his solo works.
His pairing with Shaggy, best known for his 2000s run of singles including the Steve Miller-interpolating hit “Angel” and the novelty classic “It Wasn’t Me,” works best when both singers meet halfway between their respective comfort zones, rather than stepping into one another’s worlds. That works both ways, as heard on Shaggy’s clunky attempts to match Sting’s cadences on “Gotta Get Back My Baby.”
The album’s lighthearted songwriting verges on treacly at points, mostly when Sting goes on storytelling tangents, jauntily quoting Lewis Carroll on “Just One Lifetime” — “The time has come, Shaggy said, to talk of many things” — and role-playing a prisoner in front of Shaggy’s judge on “Crooked Tree,” before singing about “making the sweetest love” to a woman he nicknames “Sad Trombone” on the song of the same name.
He also seems quite keen to make his political opinions known, dedicating his first verse on “44/876” to complaining about how the “politics of this country is getting to me.”
Save for Sting’s more meandering moments, the album is mostly enjoyable, from its pleasant lead single “Don’t Make Me Wait” to “Dreaming in the U.S.A,” the two singers’ Springsteen-in-Jamaica ode to the American dream. “44/876” may get its name from the phone country codes for the artists’ two home countries, England and Jamaica, but there’s something distinctly American-feeling about the album, which sees both its creators as ex-pats, with Shaggy pining for his island home and Sting unimpressed with the politics of Britain today.
Plus, only in America could this gonzo pairing of two stars at various levels of old geezer-dom, truly make sense. And while the world wasn’t exactly clamouring for this album, it is more lucid than expected. “44/876” is proof Shaggy and Sting can keep evolving into the later era of their careers, while maintaining a sense of humour in the process.