Speaking from his home in Toronto, Snow is still baffled that his reggae-hip-hop merger “Informer” topped charts and moved millions of copies over 25 years ago. “That’s a jail song,” he says, still sounding surprised. “It’s not, ‘Baby, I love you.’ I wrote that song in jail about informers. But people didn’t know what I was singing.”

When no one was looking, “Informer” — with its pumping beat, spit-fire patois and “licky boom-boom down” hook — has refused to go away. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler danced to it in the 2015 comedy Sisters, Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon included it in one of their “History of Rap” medleys on The Tonight Show, and Drake sang a portion of it during a recent Juno Awards tribute to Canadian music. Last year saw the release of a slew of EDM remixes of the song, and a buzzed-about Irish sitcom Derry Girls (available on Netflix) featured “Informer” in a recent episode.

But few of those usages top the incorporation of the song into Daddy Yankee’s monster 2019 hit, “Con Calma.” A Spanish-language remake of “Informer,” the song also features what Yankee calls “a surprise factor”: newly recorded parts by Snow himself. “I wanted to pay tribute to the classic,” Daddy Yankee says, “and the best way to do that was to bring the man who made it.” The song has hit Number One on various charts and has been streamed and downloaded tens of millions of times; last week Daddy Yankee and Katy Perry performed it together on the American Idol finale.

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