Shaggy has said you have probably misunderstood his 2000 hit “It Wasn’t Me” this whole time.
“It was a big misconception with that song because that song is not a cheating song,” he told People. “It’s an anti-cheating song. It’s just that nobody listened to the record to the end.”
The song, which Shaggy wrote with Rickardo Ducent, Shaun Pizzonia and Brian Thompson, was his first No. 1 hit in the U.S. and made the Top 20 in Canada. In it, he declares: “To be a true player you have to know how to play."
Shaggy said most people are fixated on the titular refrain.
“It's a conversation between two people and you have one guy, which is me at that point, giving that bad advice, like, ‘Yo, bro, how could you get caught? Just tell her, It wasn't me,’ and then at the end, the guy says, ‘I'm going to tell her that I'm sorry for the pain that I've caused. I've been listening to your reasoning, it makes no sense at all. Going to tell her that I'm sorry for the pain that I've caused. You might think that you're a player, but you're completely lost.' “Nobody hears that part! That's what the song says."
Shaggy added: “No one ever really buys into that, and I keep explaining it to people. Then, they go listen to it back and be like, ‘Oh dude, I totally missed that.’”