Green Key 2024 Preview: Shaggy

In an outcome that nobody—literally nobody—could have predicted, Dartmouth has invited the universally renowned Shaggy to perform at the widely anticipated annual Green Key concert. More privately known amongst his friends and family as Oliver Richard Burnell, Shaggy is notorious for producing wide-reaching hits such as “It Wasn’t Me” in which a friend of Shaggy’s is caught cheating on a girlfriend, and Shaggy advises the friend to deny the situation by vehemently repeating that the phrase “It wasn’t me.” 

The song’s success is no surprise, for one can suppose that Shaggy is used to repeating the phrase when asked about his many appearances in “Scooby Doo Mysteries.” 

Rumor has it that the writers of Scooby Doo reached out to Shaggy to request “It Wasn’t Me” be made the theme song of their TV show, such that the perpetual claims of denial echoed by the show’s villains be made apparent in the show’s opening credits.

Earlier this year, Shaggy came under heavy scrutiny for reportedly fabricating his Jamaican accent during performances. This revelation left the Programming Board scrambling, questioning whether or not Shaggy still meets the Board’s standards for diversity and obscurity. 

Ultimately, Shaggy remains slated to come to campus, indicating that he and the Programming Board may have reached a deal in which Shaggy will maintain his finely tuned Jamaican accent for the entirety of the performance, lest Dartmouth avoid alienating a lot of campus and pull even more money from the Programming Board. After scrolling past all of the Scooby Doo results, I managed to find the music video for “Boombastic” on YouTube. 

With choreography and video quality that would put my middle school final history presentation to shame, it is not difficult to understand why this song echoed through the halls of so many house parties and fraternity basements when it first came out. 

While perhaps Dartmouth students would prefer a performance more relevant to their own lives, it does not take much imagination to imagine swaths of drunken Dartmouth students grooving to unforgettable lines such as “Call me fantastic, She touch me inna my back, she says I’m Mr. Boom-boom-boom-boom Boombastic, tell me fantastic.” This year’s Green Key performance is not the Jamaican icon’s first stint at Dartmouth. In 2012, Shaggy gave such a riveting performance at Dartmouth that the Programming Board has since become inundated with a plethora of requests for Shaggys’ immediate return to the College on The Hill… or, perhaps, the college’s budget was too stringent to finance a concert other than, in the charitable words of one Fizz user, “a ‘who’s who’ of one-hit wonders.” The enthusiasm for Shaggy demonstrated by the surveys put out by the Programming Board indicate quite the scarce selection of notable artists available within the school’s budget. 

Shaggy’s repeated presence in less than ten years has begged the question among many students, “is Shaggy inspired or is Dartmouth simply tired?” Although we at The Review cannot confirm, we believe we have our answer. 

One might question why Shaggy’s performance is happening this year considering the explosive campus protests that have been occurring over the past month, something that has even led to Columbia University bending the knee to entitlement and canceling their main graduation ceremony. It is likely that Green Key will proceed without incident however, for there is little more enticing to ostensibly passionate protestors than the opportunity to drink and listen to rap music. 

It would be surprising were there any interruptions, besides the fear of Shaggy potentially deviating from his accent. Like all events involving the cast of Scooby Doo, Shaggy’s performance is expected to be predictable, repetitive, and with many, many, shouts of denial.

We don’t yet know whether or not Mr. Shaggy’s performance will, indeed, be fantastic, but we can at least rest assured that he will be called Mr. Boombastic