Shaggy — It Wasn't Me
The get-caught-and-just-deny-everything anthem of 2000 — Shaggy and RikRok trading a call-and-response about brazenly denying an affair. An accidental single that became a number-one smash on both sides of the Atlantic and a karaoke staple forever after.
By 2000, Shaggy — the Jamaican-American dancehall artist Orville Richard Burrell, already behind '90s hits like "Oh Carolina" (1993) and "Boombastic" (1995) — had seen his career cool off. "It Wasn't Me," a duet with British-Jamaican singer Ricardo "RikRok" Ducent, was never even meant to be a single. It became one by accident: a Honolulu radio DJ, Pablo Sato, played a leaked cut from Shaggy's album Hot Shot, request lines lit up, and grassroots demand snowballed until the song had to be released officially.
The result was one of the great comeback stories of the early 2000s. Pushed to radio in November 2000, "It Wasn't Me" hit number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in February 2001 and number one in the UK the following month, where it became the best-selling single of the year. It topped charts across Australia and Europe, powered Hot Shot to the top of the album chart, and set up the follow-up single "Angel" to hit number one as well.
The song's staying power is all in its premise — RikRok caught red-handed, Shaggy's absurd advice to simply deny everything ("it wasn't me") no matter the evidence. That call-and-response has kept it alive for two decades as a party sing-along, a karaoke-night guarantee, and an endlessly quotable meme.
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