It’s time to get Grimey.
Tyson Wilson, most popularly known as Verseewild, or simply Versee, is introducing another persona to his roster: (A.K.A. Grimey).
“I had some other personas during the years, but I found the three most popular ones are the Ahzam Boss, which was really a name, the Nut Vendor, and Dirty Versee, which was both a name and style of singing. It has been a while since I came up with a different alias,” he told Crop Over Pulse. Wilson was a man on the move, speaking to us over Zoom while on a break from a music video shoot.
“I said, ‘how can I take up the Dirty Versee style to a different level?’ I was fooling around with some things in my head, and the word Grimey is a word that I used…but I never heard it used in soca before, so I decided to come with A.K.A. Grimey.”
The new persona is a central figure in the She Still Want It song (on the Player 1 riddim) and music video. The song details a “sneaky link” (meeting up with someone who is not your main partner).
“The man was an outside man, encouraging the girl to sneak away and link with him. That is a grimey move,” he explained with a laugh.
Wilson has also released Bounce It (also on Player 1 Riddim), which he refers to as a new dance anthem “for the ladies” and Hush Ya Mout’ (on the Red Man riddim) or what he calls the ‘badmind anthem’. There are plans for more releases for 2023.
This year marks 15 years since Wilson released Push it Back, which brought him to notoriety as an artiste and performer. Before the release of the evergreen track, he was a well-known deejay, finding himself at the turntables at the tender age of 11. By the early 2000s, he was a staple on the local scene.
Wilson recalled that he would come up with ad lib to songs in his set, in order to garner a greater crowd response. That practice caught the attention of his fans, who encouraged him to create his own music.
“One day [local soca artist] Junior Killa said, ‘I have a riddim for you to sing on’… I told him I am not a singer, I am a deejay, but then I decided, why not? You always have a hope that everything you do goes well, but I wasn’t expecting to become a popular singer or to travel overseas. I wasn’t believing it would happen and I am grateful that it did,” said Wilson.
It would take him another five years to find a hit, he stated. It came in the form of Dibby in a Fete and Scab it Out, both released in 2013: “That encouraged me to keep singing because up to this day I still get bookings overseas for it [Dibby in a Fete]. After that it was just about being consistent. I have the Nut Vendor and other songs that did well.”
He is also one of the few artistes who have had an insider look at the growth of bashment soca over the years. Wilson believed that the genre has grown in acceptance, leading to more bookings for those in the sub-genre.
“If you have a popular tune that year, you are booked for all the major events. Years ago, it was getting a fight: you would have a bashment song that was playing in the soca fetes, but the bigger promoters wouldn’t book you because they would say that is not real soca, in fact that it is not real music. But things have changed, and people have realised that if the public wants something there is nothing you can do to hinder it. If you want your events to come off, you have to get the artistes with the popular songs… and every year there are bashment hits.”
However, he noted that there are still certain titles in Barbados that aren’t given to bashment soca artistes, even if they have the most popular songs for the year, but he is hopeful that the time will come, when there is change in this area as well.
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