In 1996, Sean Paul Henriques had a crucial decision to make: focus on his budding career as a dancehall-reggae DJ or complete his degree at hotel-management college. Since you're not reading Innkeeper Monthly, you've probably figured out that Sean Paul, as he's now known, made the right call.

"My lecturers, they always say, 'Yo, you should go back,' " he says. "I did learn how to cook. You had to make a five-course dinner. Chicken cordon bleu is easiest for me. I can debone a chicken and stuff it in eleven minutes!"

Sean Paul's inescapable single, "Gimme the Light," mixes rapping, singing and the lyrical subject matter you would expect from a Jamaican party song. (Sean Paul is not requesting a low-calorie beverage.) Elsewhere on his new album, Dutty Rock -- dutty is Jamaican slang for a used marijuana pipe -- Sean Paul teams up with the Neptunes and Razel of the Roots.

"When I was growing up, dancehall was the biggest music for me, even though I wasn't from the ghetto area that produced it," says Sean Paul, who grew up middle-class. "I saw myself as part of a generation that didn't care about uptown, downtown or ghetto. I was a Jamaican." To break out in the competitive Jamaican dancehall scene, Sean Paul traveled around the island, performing at barbecues and schools.

Before hotel school, his most serious obstacle to a musical career was athletics. "My parents, my brothers, aunts, cousins, they were all swimmers," he says. After his dad was jailed on marijuana charges, Sean Paul -- thirteen at the time -- competed for the Jamaican swim team. "My father had always encouraged me to do it," Sean Paul says, "so that was a way to get a hold on him."

One final nonmusical endeavor: Between swimming and hotels, Sean Paul worked in a bank. "I was counting money," he recalls. "It was not my own. I did not like it."

[From Issue 910 — November 28, 2002]