Music

Between the triumphant, box office-topping Bob Marley biopic and the long-awaited release of dancehall legend Vybz Kartel, Jamaica has had a lot to celebrate in 2024. This year also marks the ten-year anniversary of Where We Come From – the landmark 2014 debut studio album from Popcaan, one of the most important dancehall artists of the past decade and half. 
Following early Stateside crossover success with heaters like “Only Man She Want,” “The System” and “Unruly Rave,” Popcaan released Where We Come From via Mixpak Records, the Brooklyn-based indie label founded by record producer Dre Skull. Upon release, Where We Come From became the first of Popcaan’s five consecutive projects to reach the top three on Reggae Albums. According to Luminate, Popcaan has moved over one million career album equivalent units, with Where We Come From accounting for 130,000 of those units. 

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To commemorate ten years of Popcaan’s debut, Mixpak has released a new deluxe edition featuring three previously unreleased songs: “Beat the Struggle,” “Don’t Finesse Me” and an acoustic version of the set’s title track. 

“Part of me wonders why the hell they weren’t a part of the original album,” Dre Skull tells Billboard. “It’s exciting to dust off some songs from that era and share more about what was happening in the studio and in Popcaan’s head at the time.”

As executive producer of Where We Come From, Dre Skull developed an incredibly intimate partnership with Popcaan. The two dancehall maestros first crossed paths in 2010 during the recording sessions for Kartel’s Kingston Story, the first full-length release for Mixpak. Though they met before “Clarks,” a globe-conquering collaboration between Popcaan and Kartel, dropped, Dre Skull instantly recognized Popcaan’s “natural star power.” By the end of 2011, he signed Popcaan to a three-single deal that yielded “The System,” a song that combined the politically conscious lyricism of roots reggae with the bombastic tempos of dancehall, laying the groundwork for an album that would usher dancehall into a new era. 

Around the time Popcaan signed that initial deal, Kartel, his mentor since he joined Gaza Music Empire in 2008, was arrested for cannabis possession. That charge would trigger a decade’s worth of legal ordeals, including a life imprisonment sentence for a murder charge that would take until 2024 to overturn. With his mentor imprisoned, there was an opportunity for Popcaan to assume the leading role Kartel had occupied for years – but this time with a twist that prioritized emotional vulnerability and melodic delivery over brash braggadocio. Dre Skull started conversing with Popcaan’s team about a larger album deal around the end of 2012; though he encouraged them to pursue deals with majors should they be offered, his work with Kartel and on Kingston Story earned the trust of both Popcaan and his team, setting the stage for the first of two Mixpak-backed Popcaan LPs. 

Contrary to America’s most dominant genres, dancehall’s affinity for the album as an artistic statement is relatively recent; dancehall albums are often compilations of an artist’s hottest songs from the past few years. “As a fan, I love that, but the press was not giving their full attention to pure singles,” Dre Skull says. “You’re going to be hard pressed to get on the cover of The Fader with just the hottest single. I’m not saying it’s never happened, but it’s rare.” Kartel did end up landing the cover of The Fader for Kingston Story, as well as a print feature in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. Those PR wins provided a blueprint for Popcaan’s Where We Come From rollout – and foolproof confirmation that a fully realized LP was the best way to formally introduce and break Popcaan in America outside of hubs of Caribbean immigrants like New York City. 

Ten years later, Where We Come From still stands as a stunning amalgamation of mid-2010s dancehall and the boisterous dance-pop that dominated top 40 at the time. “Everything Nice,” the album’s lead single – which was originally recorded on a completely different beat, according to Popcaan — slyly combines elements of dancehall’s sunny synths and drums with the languid emo-rap vocal stylings that were beginning to creep into mainstream hip-hop at the time.

There’s also “Waiting So Long,” a pop-dancehall fantasia that casts Popcaan as the conductor of a kaleidoscopic orchestra of syncopated handclaps, stirring strings, ethereal chimes and tinny synths that keep the track in lock-stop with the electro-pop of the times. Those EDM-adjacent flourishes also pop up on “Addicted,” a song tucked away in the album’s back half that flaunts Popcaan’s knack for catchy pop melodies that don’t betray the roughest edges of standard dancehall delivery.  

“There’s so much subtlety. Because of his mastery with melody, his songs can be catchy in different ways,” says Dre Skull, who produced five of the album’s 13 tracks. “For a certain subset of songs, my view was the riddim should almost contrast with that. 

Where We Come From was impressive upon its debut – and remains so – because of how deftly Popcaan balances the record’s party moments with its stints of introspection on tracks like “Give Thanks,” “Where We Come From” and cinematic album opener, “Hold On.” After impressing Dre Skull with his grasp on weightier topics like violence, poverty, remorse and guilt, the Brooklyn producer “had a feeling the melody and the chords on ‘Hold On’ would resonate” with Popcaan. And they did. “Everything we still get the minimal/ Society still treat we like criminals/ But one day we’ll be free at last/ Jamaica,” he croons at the end of the song’s first verse. 

“At the time of creating Where We Come From, I said exactly what I wanted to say and sang about how I was feeling,” Popcaan tells Billboard. “I just wanted to touch people’s hearts while being real. I always try to motivate the yutes who are still in the struggle to never give up, and in doing that through music you expose some vulnerability.” 

For Dre Skull, “Hold On” felt like a “mission statement.” “Some of those songs are like hymns,” he muses. “He’s giving music to help anyone get through their hardest day or week. At the same time, he’s singing hymns that are based on things going on in his life. I have come to see that he’s writing those for himself, and they serve a purpose internally.” 

Notably, Where We Come From houses just one collaboration, the Pusha T-assisted “Hustle.” Popcaan and Pusha previously worked together on 2013’s “Blocka,” and the Virginia Beach rapper was the only artist he reached out to while making the album. “Sometimes it might make good business sense or a be a good look [to have big-name features on an album] – but this was a very important building block in Popcaan’s career. We wanted it to be a reflection of who he was,” notes Dre Skull. 

Arriving on June 10, 2014, Where We Come From materialized at the same time the music industry was on the precipice of a culture-shifting transition to streaming as the dominant form of consumption. Billboard started incorporating YouTube data into its chart rankings the year before Where We Came From dropped – but Dre Skull was already familiar with just how important the video-sharing app was to the dancehall ecosystem. He remembers a digital scene dating back to 2009, where kids in Brooklyn would run YouTube channels like music blogs, uploading the year’s hottest dancehall singles to their tens of thousands of followers. “Dancehall artists and their managers were paying those teenagers to upload their music, because they wanted to be part of that stream of consumption,” he recalls. “It was a similar thing to rap’s mixtape era, where there was all this unmonetized and uncheckable consumption happening. Those artists weren’t getting money off those streams, but they were getting show bookings.” 

Following the strategy they employed with Kartel’s Kingston Story – Dre Skull notes they were an early adopter of uploading lyric videos for every song on an album – Mixpak capitalized on Popcaan’s YouTube pull with complete uploads of his early radio interviews, “Unruly Clash Wednesdays” series (a weekly showcase for burgeoning deejays to battle-test their skills in front of live, participatory audience) and commercials compiling the album’s rave reviews. Though streaming would truly explode by the time Popcaan’s sophomore effort, 2018’s Forever, rolled around, the inroads he made on those platforms with Where We Come From set the stage for streaming juggernauts like 2020’s Drake and Partynextdoor-assisted “Twist & Turn.” 

In the ten years since he dropped his debut album, Popcaan has morphed into one of the most recognizable dancehall stars of the 21st century, working with everyone from Chris Brown to Burna Boy. To date, he’s earned over 1.7 billion official on-demand U.S. streams – a testament to his remarkable ability to sustain crossover success. 

“Popcaan showed how to be a successful artist in this new era,” proclaims Dre Skull. “He’s proven to be a very strong operator who knows how to follow his own vision for his career instead of another person’s template. With [Where We Come From], he showed other dancehall artists that albums are important and reminded them that they’re a very good way to push your career to career to new levels. More people are putting out proper albums as an artistic statement and not just a compilation of previously released singles. And musically, he also showed that you can make a serious album and not go chasing hits but still end up with some.” 

As dancehall figures out where the genre is headed next, other stars looking to emulate Popcaan’s success would do well to revisit Where We Come From and its pivotal rollout. Though his focus is currently on celebrating the 10-year anniversary of his debut, Popcaan has new music on the way with Dre Skull. Now signed to Drake’s OVO Sound label, Popcaan and Mixpak formally parted ways in 2020, but their work together continues to inform the future of both Popcaan’s career and dancehall as a whole. 

“We made a classic,” exclaims Popcaan. “A timeless and boundary-breaking album that still resonates today. 10 years later and still going strong!”