Shaggy Skips Explicit for Suggestive

May 14, 2001 -- Shaggy is the guy who made "bangin' on the bathroom floor" part of adolescent lingo, thanks to his "It Wasn't Me," so it's not surprising that he's pushing the limits again with the suggestive "Freaky Girl," the fourth single from his multiplatinum chart-topping album Hot Shot. But this time he doesn't think there's that much for anyone to get upset about.

"I just sat in my living room thinking about things people can get freaky with, things that are freaky," Shaggy says of writing the song. "You write down on the side of your paper — whips, chains, hanging from your chandelier, things you think would be funny. That's the first stuff that comes to mind when you talk about someone being freaky, right? And I said, 'I'm going to write about being freaky, and it's cool if you want to be freaky,' and that's what I did — I'm not saying that we're going to use whips and chains; I'm asking you, 'Are you down with that?' It's a simple question."

Shaggy says he's had a bit of backlash to his songs; one school district, he says, banned "It Wasn't Me" from being played on its buses, which he calls "just stupid." But he thinks that for the most part, people who hear his songs "accept them and view it as fun."

"It's because I don't use the obvious words," he explains. "I don't like hearing records with bleeps, so I might find words that might paint the picture that would not be so blunt or offensive; I call it clever writing. I'm not with explicit lyrics; I'm with suggestive lyrics. Kids don't know, man; one mom told me about her son hearing 'It Wasn't Me' and asking her, 'So mom, um, why is he bangin' on the bathroom floor and not on the door?' The kid didn't have a clue. You know what the mom said? 'Oh, that's because you have neighbors, and banging on the door might be a problem, so they do it on the floor.' [Kids] only have a clue if the adults put it in their head and make it sound like it's something bad; then they'll be saying, 'Oh, shit; he said the nasty.'"

Shaggy kicks off a North American tour opening for the Backstreet Boys on June 8 in Orlando, Fla.