In a Time of Daggers, a Reggae Artist Shows a Benign Side

Sean Paul stands alone among Jamaican dancehall reggae stars: a relevant figure on the American pop landscape, instantly recognizable beyond his home country and genre. He’s the most prominent reggae star on these shores since Shaggy, for better and worse.

Josh Haner/The New York Times
The Jamaican star Sean Paul celebrating the release of his fourth album, “Imperial Blaze,” at a party at the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea on Tuesday night.
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And for certain, crossover success has its miseries: in Sean Paul’s case, the ignominious distinction of being (almost certainly) the first reggae artist to namecheck Pilates, previously the terrain of Madonna (who rapped about it in an ungainly fashion) and Kanye West (who did so with humor and flair).

There it is, that unlikely reference, on “She Want Me,” from Sean Paul’s fourth album, “Imperial Blaze” (VP/Atlantic), which was released on Tuesday. “She want me fi bend up her body just like Pilates,” he raps. “She call me the dagger daddy.”

Daggering, a sexually explicit dance style that has generated a firestorm of controversy in Jamaica in the past year, wasn’t on display at all during Sean Paul’s album-release concert at the Highline Ballroom on Tuesday night. In recent years the benign Sean Paul has always won out over his tougher instincts, last seen with any regularity in the years before his 2002 breakthrough hit, “Gimme the Light.”

To his credit, though, no Pilates was on display either. Instead Sean Paul, flanked by as many as six muscular female dancers, bopping on and off stage in ever changing formations, showed his boredom with his role atop dancehall’s crossover heap. At the beginning of his set, he did a brief run of early songs, including the limber “Deport Them”: it was the happiest he seemed all night. He dispensed with his latest single, “So Fine,” early on, and appeared uninterested in his best-known records — “Like Glue,” “I’m Still in Love With You,” “We Be Burnin,’ ” “Get Busy.”

On “Imperial Blaze” — produced largely by Stephen McGregor, known as Di Genius, one of Jamaica’s most promising young talents — Sean Paul has almost completely abandoned his grimier side in favor of sung melodies and soft subject matter. He’s always been far more interesting rhythmically than lyrically, but here his tendency to overenunciate, an accommodation that makes him more palatable to foreign ears, holds him back.

Still, even though “Imperial Blaze” is an album of compromises, they’re happy ones — this space is his turf now. At the Highline, during an overlong version of his 2006 hit “Temperature,” one of his dimmest songs and also one of his handful to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, the music switched for a few bars to “Calabria,” originally by the megaclub dance-music producer Rune RK. The reggae-inflected version of that song featuring Natasja Saad was a minor hit in the United States and in Europe, but in this country it has a more mainstream identity, best known for its use in a Target commercial.

A jarring intrusion? Not at all. Sean Paul sounded right at home.