Sean Paul says that recent comments he made on a Jamaican radio station regarding Jay-Z and Beyoncé was taken out of context.
Paul recently appeared on the Too Live Crew, Action & the Burgerman radio show, where he reportedly backed up the host’s theory that Jay wasn’t comfortable with their 2003 collaboration “Baby Boy” because he didn’t like them spending time together. But in a new interview with, HotNewHipHop Paul set the record straight.
“It was a radio show here in Jamaica and I get this regularly. When I go to Texas, also, radio shows there, I don’t know what it is, people are like, ‘So tell me…’ and it gets to that part in that interview where they’re like, ‘What happened with you and Beyoncé?’ Nothing really happened. The hit song was dope,” Paul explained.
Paul went on to explain what he actually meant by his comments. “You know, some of them made up their own mind. That’s the whatever. Sometimes with interviews, you can say, ‘I’d rather not speak about it,’ but then, people would think that something was going on,” he said. “So, I was trying to defend it like, ‘Hey nah, but weird things did happen, that’s probably why there were rumors,’ but people leave out ‘that’s probably why there were rumors’ part.”
He also vaguely touched on what transpired while they were shooting the video, in which his part was filmed separately from Bey’s. “There were weird things that happened on stage with our performance, with the video. I know a headline said that, ‘Oh, Jay-Z didn’t want me there.’ It had nothing to do with him as far as I’m concerned,” Paul explained. “[Beyoncé’s] her own artist that was managed by her own manager. They were going out at the time. They weren’t married yet. I don’t think he would have influenced whatever her vision was. She’s a very determined person. She’s very precise with her thoughts and her movements and she works very hard. It was probably her vision.”
Paul also addressed why he and Bey have rarely performed the song together. “So, what I did speak about in that interview was that there were some weird things that happened and that’s probably why people had rumors about it because a couple of times while on stage, we tried to perform [‘Baby Boy’] properly,” he said. “There were problems with the ProTools, which doesn’t usually happen. There was problems with my mic in one performance in Germany. That’s probably why people started talking about [it].”
Paul added that “nothing ever happened with me and her, except for a hit song,” adding that he “never said anything about what they’re reporting me to say.”
The fact that Paul didn’t appear in the video alongside Bey “blew up into crazy stuff,” the Jamaican artist said back in 2012. And later, when Paul didn’t perform the song with her at the 2003 MTV VMA’s, many thought Jay-Z had barred Paul from being in the spotlight. But Paul denied the gossip, explaining that he’s known Hov longer than he’s known Bey and that it was blown out of proportion.
“The general public blew it up in certain things. I just remained quiet about it for years because it was doing its work. There was just a lot of controversy,” Paul said. “She’s an amazing artist, the song was at #1 for like nine weeks, so that was a very special time for me and for dancehall.”
