Prepare to be earwormed. Queen Omega and Little Lion Sound’s No Love Dubplate was a viral hit in the summer of 2023. By the end of 2023, No Love Dubplate had 120M views across Instagram and TikTok, and over 30M plays on YouTube. The numbers have continued to tick up. On YouTube alone, the track now has over 60M views. On first listen, the impassioned, soulful reggae stylings of Queen Omega stand out. She is commanding; her singing sounds like a powerful, fresh take on authentic classic reggae.
As good as Queen Omega is, why did this track exceed the popularity of other “niche” reggae releases? A clue may lie in the “Dubplate” in the title. A dub version, or dubplate, is when a reggae DJ or producer improvises over an instrumental version of a song. In the case of No Love Dubplate, the track is built on the instrumental of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s 2000 hit The Next Episode. Queen Omega owns the backing curated by Little Lion Sound, but there is a West Coast hip-hop classic under the hood. Let’s watch.
Queen Omega (real name Jeneile Osborne) was born in Trinidad in 1981, which is more or less when the great wave of reggae crested. Queenie (as she is known) started her career as a backing singer in Soca bands. Her career took off when she became a Rastafarian and wrote and performed in the roots reggae style (an anomaly for female reggae singers, many of whom now opt for more modern reggae stylings). Queen Omega has released several acclaimed albums and toured with the legendary Marcia Griffiths in 2010.
A further reason for the breakout success of No Love Dubplate could be that while the lyrics are brim-full of classic reggae tropes, there are no references to “Jah” or “Marcus Garvey.” This could account for the song having a broad appeal for contemporary listeners. As for The Next Episode, the 2000 Dr. Dre single hit 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. The public was reminded of the track when it opened the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show on February 13, 2022 (the first full-on hip-hop Super Bowl halftime show). Here it is.
Who would have thought The Next Episode could come out sounding like No Love Dubplate? Who is Little Lion Sound, the producer who matched West Coast hip-hop with the vocal stylings of Queen Omega? Nicolas Meury started Little Lion Sound in 2004 in Geneva, Switzerland. From 2006, Little Lion Sound organized street parties in the reggae-sound-system tradition in France, Australia, and, of course, Switzerland.
In 2010, Little Lion Sound opened a recording studio in Geneva, where big-name reggae artists like Capleton, Sizzla, and Brother Culture recorded dubplates. In 2013, Little Lion Sound collaborated with Derrick Sound to establish Evidence Music, which releases a range of music from Hip Hop to Reggae to Afrobeats (5000 releases in ten years!). In 2016, Jannali Littman joined Little Lion Sound. In 2023, in the words of the Reggaeville site, the sound system “caused a worldwide viral sensation with their No Love dubplate.”