Sean Paul (Featuring Blu Cantrell)

Music is essential to the livelihood of the Cabo Verdean people. One saying goes that everybody in the islands is a singer or musician of some kind. Morna, the national folkloric genre, is the pride of Cabo Verde, with Cesária Évora (died 2011) as its most internationally renowned purveyor. Morna shares certain elements with Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco, and Brazilian choro and is typically always played in a minor key and sung in the Kriolu language. Also popular are the faster-paced styles of coladeira and funaná, the latter being typical of the more Senegambian-influenced (West African) subculture of the Badius who make up the majority of Santiago Island’s population. Music from other countries is popular in Cabo Verde as well, including contemporary American R&B, reggae, and, for some unknown reason, even easy listening such as Michael Bolton.

In 2011, one of my two American bosses at the Cabo Verde Fast Ferry company was a man named Johnny. Johnny was the son of Cape Verdean immigrants who had settled in Rhode Island in the 1960s, not long before he was born.

Johnny’s career as a soldier in the U.S. Army had brought him both around the world and to various states of the U.S., but he finally made it to his ancestral homeland when he was in his late 30s and back in civilian life.

Because he had grown up hearing and understanding Kriolu, Johnny quickly became functionally fluent in the language as he networked throughout both the archipelago and the far-flung Cape Verdean diaspora. He would need it; he was in hot pursuit of his most ambitious business venture to date: linking all the islands of Cabo Verde with regular ferryboat service. Amazingly, this had never been attempted before. What had started out as an idealistic dream would eventually become the public-private partnership known as Cabo Verde Fast Ferry.

When I started working for Johnny and his business partner and friend Will in the summer of 2011, Fast Ferry had only been running their high-speed catamaran, the Kriola, for six months among the southern islands of Santiago, Fogo, and Brava. My job was to promote the company to both locals and tourists alike as a safe, affordable, and reliable way to travel.

Pretty much by day one, I came to understand that Johnny was not only a born entrepreneur, but also a man of many interests and appetites. He had been a paratrooper in the U.S. Army and, as he told me while we rode together on the ferry between Santiago and Fogo one late afternoon, was in general an adrenaline junkie. “All the beach stuff,” he said of his deepest passions. “Surfing, sailing, diving, fishing, dune buggies. All that shit. I love it.” He had scars up and down his arms from when he had crashed his motorcycle in Florida a few years earlier. He laughed raucously when he told me about when he was a teenager and worked in a jellybean factory in Rhode Island. He and his buddies would dump all types of unmentionable objects and substances into the huge mixing vats of candy batter, just for kicks. But despite his wild side Johnny was also calm and cool, not a big talker, the kind of person who, with a glint of mischief in his eye, takes full assessment of a situation before making a move. At times I found myself rambling on and on like a drunk teenager in his presence if he asked me a simple question — I was, at first, more than a little intimidated by him. Instead of dignifying my word salad with a response, though, he’d simply nod or grunt — not unfriendly but otherwise inscrutable. Next to him I was a twitchy little greenhorn from the suburbs. Nevertheless, Johnny was always kind and fair to me.

One morning in July, not long after I had started working for him as one of two marketing associates at the company, Johnny strolled into the office in his detached, regal fashion and told me about his latest big idea. “I met this promoter last night at the club,” he announced. “He’s coming by later. You know Sean Paul, the dancehall guy? They’re bringing him over to CV for a big show. We’re gonna have Fast Ferry be a sponsor.”

“Oh. Very cool,” I said, just trying to keep up. This kind of bold side-venture of Johnny’s was quickly becoming my new normal, even after only a month. But why Sean Paul?

It was 2011 and Kingston, Jamaica’s Sean Paul hadn’t released a full-length album since 2009’s Imperial Blaze, which had failed to produce a hit single. “Breathe,” his wildly popular 2003 collaboration with American R&B siren Blu Cantrell, was coming up on its eighth anniversary. But, I was soon to learn, I was also wholly ignorant of the fact that for the past several years the singer had been touring extensively throughout the world and was still riding the wave of chart-topping singles from 2002’s Dutty Rock and 2005’s The Trinity. I digress: The man and his hits are still popular to this day, more than 15 years after his international debut. You’ll almost certainly hear him played at any nightclub with a DJ in virtually every major city in the world. That an internationally renowned recording artist was even tentatively planning on coming to little Praia (population 130,271) was a big deal, second only in hype, it seemed, to the Akon show that had happened there a few months earlier.

A few days later, Johnny brought the show’s main promoter into the office to meet us. His name was Fred, of the hilariously named FredEx Productions. Fred was born in Cape Verde, in Tarrafal, the lazy little beach town on Santiago’s north coast. But he had been raised in the diaspora, mostly in France. For the last few years he had been living in London, where he began a career promoting auto shows and then, by the time he was 30, pop and R&B concerts.

After only a few weeks of knowing each other after the sponsorship deal was struck, Fred and Will, my other American boss, had developed an endearing rapport. They were both big, tall guys and they often played basketball together and then talked shit to each other about it the next day. I liked Fred, too. He was slow-moving and friendly and when he spoke English he had a fun accent that was an interesting mishmash of both French and Cockney English. And he was always tickled when he heard me, a white boy from America, speaking Kriolu.

The week leading up to the big show was a blur. There was much to be done on our part as the principal sponsor and Fred was rarely to be found while he networked around town and back in the UK. It therefore fell to me to supervise things like the placement of security checkpoints and concession stands in addition to matters more directly related to marketing like radio, TV, print, and online promotional spots for the show.

At this same time, Johnny brought over two of his old Army buddies from the States, Bill and Tommy, to run security detail. They were both in their forties and mostly worked in high-end hotels and clubs in Las Vegas, from what I could gather. I also got the impression that they probably had done civilian contractor (read: “mercenary”) work in combat zones after their enlisted tours of duty.

Tommy was an Italian from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the most Italian place a person can be from and still technically live in the United States. I’ve known a few guys like him before in my life, including one my cousin was married to for about five years. Not to over-generalize, but even as a person of partial Italian descent myself, to me this East Coast Italian-American subculture is, let’s say, an acquired taste. Lots of really intense handshakes and sustained eye contact, the tip of the iceberg of a culture steeped in excessive machismo that nowadays we refer to by the shorthand of “Jersey Shore.”

It was pretty clear from the start that Tommy thought that I was a bit weird, that I didn’t act like he thought I should based on the way that I looked. Without me saying anything, he had quickly, I assume, guessed that I had Italian roots based on my complexion and hair. But he didn’t think that I acted Italian enough. “You look like you’ve got something stuck in your craw,” he said to me at one point, about what specifically I have no idea. Also: “You need to come spend some time in the old neighborhood. Eat some of Nonna’s meatballs.” Right. (My own grandmother’s meatball recipe is perfection, for the record.)

Bill, on the other hand, was maybe one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He was so grateful of everything and everyone, as if he was amazed that he had even made it this far. He was much more Middle America than Tommy, but I can’t remember where exactly he came from. Clearly he had seen shit in his military career that I could hardly even imagine. He was likely suffering from some PTSD but seemed to be channeling his world-weariness into an extremely affable approach to everyone he met. Even though he didn’t share more than a few words of common language with the hired Cape Verdean security guards that made up his team, Bill shook all of their hands and learned all of their names during the few days of prep before the show. I was his interpreter whenever he needed to talk to them and found him to be considerate and even fascinated by the Cape Verdean culture while he was in country. Tommy didn’t seem interested whatsoever and did the usual American thing of just tuning out anything he couldn’t immediately comprehend.

Thursday, the night that Sean Paul and his entourage were scheduled to arrive, Bill, Tommy, and their team of about twenty guards subcontracted from another company held a briefing to discuss the logistics of picking everyone up at the airport.

“Okay, Rob,” Tommy asked me suddenly, “Give me the straight dope. What kind of contingencies should we prepare for? Any fanatics out here? Paparazzi?” He was dead serious.

“You mean like fans of Sean Paul?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I mean, people here like him and they’ll most likely show up the night of the show. But I don’t think we have to worry about getting swarmed at the airport. There isn’t really any paparazzi here, either.”

He pondered this for a moment while Bill chimed in: “Okay, so maybe like just a few hardcore fans will turn up? We’ll be ready for that.”

“Honestly,” I said, “I don’t know how anybody outside of us here would even know much less care about when his flight was coming in.”

“Gotcha,” Tommy said, as in: [Wink wink] Message received, compadre. I’ll bring a side-arm just in case.

At this point I kind of wished that I had a more dramatic report for these old pros, they were so prepared for a battle. They had flown across an ocean to be here, after all. But in retrospect I’m laughing out loud to myself right now trying to imagine a massive throng of crazed Cape Verdean Sean Paul fans clamoring for a mere peek at their beloved idol at the Praia airport at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night. No disrespect to anybody; it just would never happen.

So in a motorcade fit for a head of state, we all arrived at the airport a few hours later. We quickly got the word that the entourage’s flight on TAP, Portugal’s flagship airline, was late. As in several hours late. We waited. Finally, at around two in the morning, the big Boeing finally dropped in. As predicted, there was nobody else there waiting for them besides us and a few sleepy cabbies. The real issue, though, was that all of the entourage’s luggage had been misplaced en route from London to the layover in Lisbon.

After we finally got everyone settled in their rooms at one of the nicer hotels in Praia, I sleepily made my exit at around four AM. We told Mr. Paul and company that we’d do what we could about their lost luggage, but really it was in TAP’s hands; their agent said that everything should arrive the next day at the latest. I was expecting a barrage of complaints about this. Considering he’s easily the most famous of all international dancehall-reggae superstars, Sean Paul probably could’ve gotten away with being a bit of a prima donna about not having a clean pair of undies to wake up to. But he and his crew were surprisingly cool and understanding about it. “These things happen,” they said. “We just want to go to sleep.”

I got home and fell headlong onto my bed.

The following day, Friday, the day before the show, we came back at around noon to check on everyone at the hotel. Most of the entourage had slept in to beat their jet lag. Sean Paul’s press conference was to take place at one thirty PM and we were asked to give him some quiet time beforehand. My job was to keep any of the local press away from him while he ate lunch and then took a dip in the pool.

I stood near the edge of the pool and only had to fend off a couple of mild-mannered Cape Verdean journalists while Sean Paul swam. I hadn’t been introduced to him directly and I’m not sure if he knew who I was with, but I figured I’d just say something to make my presence known. (It was also really boring just standing there doing nothing. I don’t know how bodyguards do it.)

“How’s the water?” I asked Sean Paul casually as he hoisted himself up and climbed out of the pool.

He looked at me askance for a moment.

“Salty,” he replied in his punchy Jamaican accent as he grabbed a towel and headed back to his hotel room. Cabo Verde is so drought-prone that instead of wasting precious freshwater, they fill hotel pools straight from the ocean.

About two years later I was frantically finishing a Masters degree in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. A friend had invited me to a party at another friend’s converted-factory loft on the toney east side of Providence. Being in the throes of my capstone project of translating a brutally tell-all memoir about life as a white female Portuguese colonist in 1960s and ’70s Mozambique, I almost turned down the invite. But I was also desperately in need of some socializing and a couple of beers.

With a nice little buzz going about an hour in, I was enjoying myself. But I also needed to get some sleep. I was sorry to tell my two friends there that I had to go when, just then, like a tsunami, our host’s neighbor entered. It was Blu Cantrell.

Through the rumor mill of my small group of friends in Providence I had heard that Blu lived across the hall from our party host, but it seemed too outlandish to be true. Yet there she was, long bottle-blonde hair, hoop earrings and all, flanked by a couple of unsavory-looking young guys who clearly had just done multiple lines of coke. As if she knew that I was exhausted and on my way home, the singer of “Hit ’Em Up Style” gravitated directly over to me, leaving her escorts by the wayside. Our host introduced us.

“Hi, I’m Rob.”

“Hi, Rob. You probably know who I am already…”

I’ll summarize: The entire conversation was one wacky whirlwind of outrageous statements, none of which I was in any mental shape to handle whatsoever. “I’m still really big in Europe,” she said at first, apropos of nothing. She then quickly segued to explain how she was a second cousin of Princes William and Harry, though they never talked to her, “Because I’m black!” she faux-pouted.

Blu kept talking and talking, with little room for me to even respond. It was entertaining. But it was also clear that she wasn’t well or, at least, wasn’t at that moment sober. And I began to fear that I would never make it out the door if I didn’t find a way to excuse myself soon. There was a real, growing chance, it seemed, of my becoming unsavory male consort #3 if I didn’t do something drastic.

Just then, I thought of something that I was legitimately curious about, at least to get a word in edgewise: the smash hit “Breathe” that she had recorded with Sean Paul. What was it like being a part of that? Had they met before? What was the recording process like? Since I had met Sean Paul, sort of, this seemed like a slightly more grounded topic of conversation than healing crystals or wiretapping or whatever it was that she was going on about.

“Hey, didn’t you…” I started to ask. But at that very moment she was distracted by one of her two surly dudes complaining that he was bored and wanted to leave.

“Hey!” she snapped. “I told you that we had to stop by and see my neighbor! We’ll leave when I’m ready!”

This was my cue. I excused myself, said goodbye, and went home.

In an attempt to figure out whether what I’d just experienced had really happened and wasn’t a fatigue-induced hallucination, right before going to bed I pulled up Blu’s Wikipedia page. I learned that she, birth name Tiffany Cobb, was indeed born, raised, and still resides in Providence. What’s more: She happens to be Cape Verdean on her father’s side. No mention of any relation to royalty, though.

“I’m a mongrel,” Sean Paul said nonchalantly at the press conference, soon after his dip in the salty pool. He stressed the second syllable of “mongrel” in a perfectly Jamaican way. His choice of word, furthermore, seemed to imply not only full acceptance but furthermore celebration of the mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds of the vast majority of Caribbean people. This is a sentiment that Cape Verdeans can easily relate to. Yeah, we’re mixed. We’re Creole. What of it? He explained further that he was black, white, Chinese, Portuguese — his full name is Sean Paul Ryan Francis Henriques. His name, like his music, is a composite of the melting pot of cultural influences represented in both Jamaica and the West Indies in general.

I can’t help but continue to be fascinated by this and other examples of creoleness that defy any strict racial or cultural binary.

Jamaican music and culture, more than anything else, were my real primer to the world outside of the predominantly white, suburban environment I grew up in just north of Chicago. Specifically, the music of artists like the Skatalites and Bob Marley and the Wailers opened my eyes and ears to a new world of ideas. What was this almost unintelligible English? What were these odd rhythms of ska, reggae, and rocksteady, somehow familiar in the context of Motown yet almost confoundingly exotic? What does “Babylon” mean? “Zion”? Who is/was Ras Tafari? By the time I was about fifteen I had learned what a different language Jamaican Patois was from my own from watching interviews of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh; it took me years to understand them without subtitles. “400 Years,” a song penned by Tosh about the lasting legacy of African slavery, taught me much more about how it affects the psyche of a person to bear that historical trauma than any textbook ever could. It was the Jamaicans who first taught me to question the status quo, to challenge and dispel the ignorance of the subtle yet predominant sentiment among so many white American people, even in supposedly liberal Chicago, that “black” was synonymous with dangerous, degenerate.

I was excited to see Sean Paul perform live the next day, but I would be working the whole time, I knew, putting out various fires as they inevitably flared up, maybe even literally. I was already on a big sleep deficit from the night before so I made sure to slam shots of espresso throughout the day. Shortly after the press conference, I took a cab over to the venue — an abandoned airplane hangar — to try and finalize the layout of the perimeter using dozens of enormous empty shipping containers with the help of a surly crane operator and almost laughably vague directions from Will, Johnny, and Fred about how to get it done.

Somehow, it all got done.

By the afternoon of the next day, Saturday, hours before showtime, we were more or less ready. It helped to know that Cape Verdeans rarely showed up in full force to party earlier than midnight as various contractors scrambled to finalize details on the stage and VIP sections. In the meantime, Johnny had an idea for me.

“Go down to Sucupira [the open-air market of Praia],” he said, “and get a bunch of CV gear for Sean Paul to wear on stage.” He took out his wallet and handed me about 5,000 escudos (then about USD$65), a considerable sum in Cabo Verde.

Since it was a late Saturday afternoon, when I got to Sucupira it was almost eerily quiet. Most vendors were drowsily cleaning up their stalls as quitting time approached and the calm of the Sabbath loomed. Beyond the criterion that they sell Cabo Verde national sportswear, I picked one clothing stall among the narrow corridors of the market solely because the two ladies working there just seemed nice. They were likely a mother and daughter and, as I walked up, they seemed surprised to see a customer at this time of day, much less a white guy speaking Kriolu.

“Hi, I need to buy lots of Cabo Verde clothes!” I announced like a huge weirdo.

“Okay,” said the mother, a little suspicious. “We’ve got all this stuff here.” She slowly gestured to her merchandise. But you don’t get coddled with too much customer service in a traditional open-air African bazaar; you pick what you want and then haggle over the price with the vendor. I picked a blue soccer jersey, a couple of t-shirts, a baseball cap, and a few other small items emblazoned with Cabo Verde’s blue, red, white, and yellow flag. I couldn’t hold it in any more, my ulterior motive for such a shopping spree, so I just blurted it out: “I want to tell you who this is all for. Do you know who Sean Paul is?”

They didn’t, so I explained.

“Oh, that’s nice,” the mother said, nonplussed.

“Yes! Your stuff is probably going to be worn by Sean Paul on stage at tonight’s show. It might get on TV or in the newspapers. Cool, isn’t it?”

They smiled and humored the branku dodu, this goofy white boy, once again. Without haggling I handed them most of the money Johnny had given me and caught a cab back to the venue.

The big show, as expected, started extremely late. Around ten PM, two local opening acts put on tight, choreographed performances as hundreds of young, well-groomed Cape Verdeans continued to flow into the airplane hangar. (I would give more details here but I was so tired that I found a quiet spot backstage, tipped my baseball cap over my face, and took a nap.)

Sean Paul finally emerged at about one thirty, after a long intermission. The crowd, now fully served with Portuguese Super Bock beer and fruity ponche liqueur, went wild. Backed by a small band, Sean Paul played all of his pulsating hits and brought one of the openers, Denis Graça, up on stage to accompany him on one song.

The energy was still high as three AM approached, but it was clear the show was winding down. Sean Paul said his goodbyes, thanking the crowd profusely after his final song. He left the stage and I felt a little let down that he hadn’t worn any of the gear I had bought for him. I never gave it to him directly, so maybe he never got it in the first place?

Just then, the crowd gradually started to cheer, stomp, and clap for an encore. After a few minutes, Sean Paul came out once again, now wearing the sea-blue Cabo Verde jersey I had bought for him in the market. Seeing it as he pinched and held out the jersey’s sides to emphasize the text over his chest, the crowd went wild and his final song began to chants of “Ka-bu Ver-di! Ka-bu Ver-di!” When the local newspaper reported on the show in the next day’s edition, the featured photo was of Sean Paul at this very moment.

When everything died down a few days later, I went back to Sucupira with the newspaper in hand to show the mother and daughter that their merchandise was now famous. But I got lost in the labyrinth of near-identical vendor booths, so after about an hour of searching, I gave up. I was disappointed but I consoled myself with the knowledge of how quickly word travels in a small city on a small island; I like to think that they eventually saw the picture anyway. I hope that it made their day.