Beenie Man’s Producer Bought a Record by Every Guest on the Album

Beenie Man, photographed in 2017.

Before Kemar McGregor programmed a drum for Beenie Man’s new album, he went out and bought a record by every artist who was going to appear on it.

He studied their styles, then adjusted the swing and character of the drums to fit each collaborator individually. Then he spent weeks tracking down plug-ins and software capable of reproducing the sounds of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Three Days at Number One

The result, Eminence, went to No. 1 on the US iTunes All Genres chart and stayed there for three consecutive days, ahead of The Game’s The Documentary III and Sam Smith’s Hazel Eyes.

Beenie Man’s reaction, as told to DancehallMag, is the best description of a chart position anybody has given this year. “When I get a number one in the world, that is not a natural feeling. It is like you’re driving and somebody lick you with dem car and you’re like, ‘What the hell happened?’ It’s unexpected and phenomenal at the same time.”

The All Genres chart is the hardest one on the platform to reach, because it pools daily sales from every category rather than ranking a dancehall record against other dancehall records.

A Producer Who Did the Homework

McGregor is unambiguous about authorship. “The entire concept was my concept,” he said, describing a process built on experimentation, deep research and a great deal of trial and error.

The vinyl-buying is the detail that explains the record. A guest verse usually arrives as a file dropped onto a finished track; McGregor built each track around what he had learned about the person who would be on it, down to how the drums sit against the beat.

That is an unusually old-fashioned way to make a collaboration album, and an expensive one. Fourteen months and more than US$400,000 went into it.

His summary is brief: “A lot of time and effort went into this album, and the musical chemistry with Beenie Man was out of this world.”

The plug-in hunt is the part a producer of another generation would find strange. Recreating a late-nineties record is not simply a matter of choosing older sounds; the specific compressors, samplers and reverb units of that period each imposed their own limits, and it is those limits the ear recognises. Chasing down software that reproduces them is closer to instrument restoration than to production, and it is why the record sounds period-accurate rather than merely retro-flavoured.

What T.I. Asked For Instead of Money

The guest list started as a demand rather than a wishlist. “I told Kemar McGregor that I needed Rick Ross and T.I. on the album,” Beenie Man recalled. “He said he could do it, and I was like, ‘What?!'”

T.I., according to DancehallMag, did not ask for a direct fee. He requested a US$200,000 radio budget for his song instead — which is a considerably shrewder deal for a featured artist than a cheque, and a small lesson in how the business actually works.

The shape of that list is worth noting on its own. American rappers, American R&B singers, a British-Jamaican artist in Stefflon Don, and Jamaican deejays in Elephant Man, Tifa and Pamputtae — the album is built as a set of bridges rather than a showcase, with each pairing aimed at a different market.

Around them the album gathers Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Ashanti, Mya, Rotimi, Lola Brooke, Elephant Man, Stefflon Don, Tifa and Pamputtae. Beenie Man’s own pick is “Hat Tip” with Rick Ross and Rotimi: “I love the intro and the melodies. They remind me of the quality that the greatest combination songs in the world have — instant danceability and familiarity.”

The Jamaica Observer records how it began, which was rather less grand. “I did the first song with Etana and she was eventually replaced with a next girl. It is after that we really started to work on the album and go into the studio.”

Dancehall in a Different Format

Beenie Man is precise about what he thinks he is doing, and it is not what the marketing would suggest. “I don’t feel like me a do dancehall; I am making dancehall in a different format.”

The target era is stated outright. “I am bringing nostalgia. I am bringing back the feeling of the ’90s and the 2000s because, if you go into the new format, you can get lost.”

DancehallMag hears the reference points on the record itself: several tracks echo the crossover energy of Snow’s “Anything for You”, Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper” and The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy”. Those are three of the specific records by which dancehall entered the American mainstream.

It is a different position from the one Buju Banton took earlier this year. Buju argued the form needs no new name and no addendum; Beenie Man is happy to say he is working in a different format, as long as the reference point stays the era he came up in. Both are arguments about preservation, arrived at from opposite ends.

His warning about the new format is worth taking at face value rather than as an old man’s complaint. Contemporary dancehall production is fast, sparse and built for short-form video, and an artist whose whole method is the long crossover single — a hook, a guest verse, a rhythm that carries a whole club night — genuinely would get lost in it. Choosing to make the record he knows how to make, at that budget, is a commercial bet as much as a nostalgic one.

Purchases, Not Streams

NY Carib News makes the point that matters about the achievement: the iTunes Albums chart measures digital purchases rather than streams.

That is a meaningfully different signal. A streaming number can be built by playlist placement and passive listening; a purchase requires somebody to decide to own the record. On the album chart it went ahead of releases by Phoebe Bridgers, Ella Langley, Nipsey Hussle and Bino Rideaux.

It also says something about who the audience is. Buying an album outright in 2026 skews towards listeners who came up when that was the only option — precisely the nineties and 2000s audience the record was engineered for.

This is his twentieth studio album, released through Billboard King, and it follows Simma in 2023. Twenty albums is an unusual figure in a genre where the single and the rhythm compilation have always mattered more than the long-player, and where most careers are measured in tracks rather than records.

A Birthday in Manhattan

The timing was convenient. The Jamaica Observer notes that the chart run landed during his birthday week in the United States: best man at his friend Dino’s wedding, then New York, then a private cruise around Manhattan on the Sunday and dinner with friends.

“My album is just different,” he said. “I have been working on it for the last 14 months.”

Fourteen months and four hundred thousand dollars is an enormous commitment for an artist thirty years into a career, in a genre whose economics rarely support it. The producer’s vinyl-buying is the same instinct expressed at the level of craft: nobody involved treated this as a catalogue exercise.

Whether it converts into the Grammy attention already being floated is a separate question. What the iTunes run demonstrates is narrower and harder to argue with — a dancehall album, made deliberately to sound like 1998, outsold everything else on the platform for three days running.

About The Author

Will Lisil

Founder of MW3.biz, building technology that empowers creators and democratising access to digital tools.

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