“I appreciate the fact that others looking in can see what we are doing for the music,” he said of the list. In 2020, Shakespeare was placed at 17 on Rolling Stone’s greatest bassists of all-time list. Shakespeare had been nominated for 13 Grammys in his career and won twice, once in 1984 for best reggae recording for Anthem and then in 1998 for best reggae album for Friends. In the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, they were described as “one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica”. The pair worked with artists such as Madonna, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones, Sting, Serge Gainsbourg and Britney Spears. They were also responsible for key shifts in reggae music as it headed to digital, introducing the “Rockers” beat and later working with Chaka Demus & Pliers to create a novel sound that distinguished songs such as Bam Bam and Murder She Wrote. In the following decade, their status grew as they worked with artists such as Joe Cocker and Grace Jones.
![chaka demus pliers all she wrote chaka demus pliers all she wrote](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/igjbyD9P16o/maxresdefault.jpg)
Their breakout work was on Mighty Diamonds’ 1976 album Right Time. The pair bonded over their varied taste in music but specifically their interest in reggae production. Sly and Robbie had come together in the mid-70s after Shakespeare already carved out his own music career from a young age. He will be remembered for his sterling contribution to the music industry and Jamaica’s culture. (3/3) When it comes to Reggae bass playing, no one comes close to having the influence of Robbie Shakespeare. “He will be remembered for his sterling contribution to the music industry and Jamaica’s culture.” “I’m really big on citing sources,” he stresses-and here, these footnotes also add up to a killer weekend playlist.“When it comes to reggae bass playing, no one comes close to having the influence of Robbie Shakespeare,” tweeted Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness. Those images, etched into memory, still do, judging from this short list of hits that continue to influence his work. ”I’m a child of the generation where everyone would sit around and watch the premiere of a Janet Jackson video, and it would run your life for, like, a month,” Jawara says. With his younger sister, Candace, as a patient accomplice and muse, he began re-creating the power bobs and mile-long extensions seen on Missy Elliott, Lil’ Kim, and Christina Aguilera. “In the late ’90s, early 2000s, everything was controlled by the music videos: the way we dressed, the way we looked, the way we talked,” the hairstylist says of the collective fascination with MTV, VH1, and BET. While that dancehall backdrop set the tempo for carefree maximalism, it was a teenage move to another Jamaica-the neighborhood in Queens-that revved up Jawara’s creative pace. His hashtag on the post: #startedasabraider. If his career has taken him backstage at Chanel and Fendi during his years assisting Sam McKnight, and now on set with the likes of Solange, Dev Hynes, and Zendaya, those roots are never far. “That’s when I fell in love with all of it,” he explained in the November issue of Vogue, as part of a story spotlighting rising hairstylists who are reshaping the narrative around hair. If the visual inspiration was new, the hairstyling techniques went way back-to his aunt’s salon in Jamaica, where young Jawara got a hands-on education in over-the-top dancehall looks. A borrowed line from this year’s Migos track, “T-Shirt,” it was just the latest example of Jawara’s encyclopedic catalog of music video references that weave into his editorial work: in this case, the piled-on animal pelts, finger-wide twists, and statement shades worn by the hip-hop group. “Imma feed my family, ain’t no way around it,” the hairstylist Jawara recently captioned his Instagram post of the model Imaan Hammam, decked in a caramel-peach fur coat and a headful of his crisply executed cornrows.