An uncharitable way of viewing the Fugees first effort under Ruffhouse Records, 1994’s Blunted on Reality, is the scene in CB4 when Chris Rock and co. are cycling through looks and sounds trying to find a schtick, grasping for an identity as a group that will make them palatable to a wider audience. The record sounds like much of the rest of the rap of its year, or considering this was the same year Nas dropped Illmatic and Biggie dropped Ready to Die on the other side of the Hudson, maybe a few years earlier. It’s full of shouty, fast raps that evoke Das-EFX, Leaders of the New School, Lords of the Underground, the Fu-Schnickens, Black Sheep, and Brand Nubian.
On Blunted on Reality, Lauryn is obviously a gifted mimic and does an admirable, nasal Yo-Yo and/or Ladybug Mecca and/or Queen Latifah impression. Meanwhile, Wyclef Jean is riffing on everyone from rappers like Fredro Starr to prominent ragga artists like Mad Lion and Mikey Jarrett. It’s an admirable attempt that bricked very hard, and it’s now difficult not to laugh when you hear Clef referring to himself as an “MC Psycho.” There’s also little to no singing on the album, and what’s impressive is how “just fine” their debut is despite willfully avoiding the other elements of performance the trio were great at.
“[Blunted on Reality] captured our talent, but it sounded out of touch with who we were as performers. We were taking orders from our production company and couldn’t get the sounds we heard in our heads onto the record”, as Wyclef would put it.
Another way to view the Fugees first album is that they just had to muster the courage to be themselves and find the proper means through rap to relate their complex identities. If they were lacking courage, they found it on The Score, an album that transformed the group’s sound and arguably, hip-hop itself. The album turns 30 years old today, but its seeds were planted decades before its release by the group’s autodidact creative genius and driving force.
When Wyclef, born Neulest Wyclef Jean, was a kid, he was in a family band with his brothers and sisters in East Orange, New Jersey. Wyclef was named after the 14th century Catholic reformer John Wycliffe, who was best known for initiating the first translation of the bible from Latin to English so everyone could read and understand it. Wyclef’s father, Gesner, started his own church in America and forbade his children from secular music, so they had to smuggle their radio listening time. The creation of the church also led to The Jean Family Band coming to be. Wyclef wanted their band to perform the funk and rock songs they loved, so he devised a plan to reverse the trick Ray Charles pulled a generation before him. They would learn the arrangements to songs by The Police, or James Brown, or Pink Floyd, and change the lyrics, turning them devotional, slipping them past their pop-illiterate father. This was arguably Wyclef’s first act of brilliant synthesis, long before he’d begun a rap collective that called themselves the Tranzlator Crew before they renamed themselves after a refugee camp.
Around the time of the Haitian Refugee Crisis in the ’80s and early ’90s, “Fugee” was one of the many slurs and AIDS jokes that would be hurled at Haitian kids by everyone, including the Black American children Wyclef went to school with in East Orange. His parents had immigrated from their native Croix-des-Boquets, where Wyclef was born. Their visas ran out, but they stayed here, eventually arranging for their children to join them in the Marlboro projects near Coney Island before immigrating once again to New Jersey. That's where Wyclef discovered racism for the first time. He only spoke Creole when he arrived in America, but picked up English by listening to rap. It was much like how he understood the instruments he’d cycle through easily: The accordion, the guitar, the standing bass. Whatever he’d take on, he’d learn quickly, by ear.
Wyclef’s first exposure to reggae came courtesy of his cousin, Jerry “Wonda” Duplessis, who brought records with him from Haiti when he joined the Jeans in East Orange. It was the ’80s, and because he grew up in the United States and not back home, Wyclef didn’t have exposure to kompa, calypso or zouk. It was this Jamaican product refracted through a Haitian lens. Much like the Family Band, devotional acts in Haiti were taking the reggae from their Caribbean neighbor and remixing it Christian. Wyclef fell for reggae immediately, becoming enamored with Gregory Isaac, Jimmy Cliff and most of all, Bob Marley, and from there got into sound system culture- listening to Stone Love tapes and practicing the accents of the MC shouting in patois — and their sound clashes, where competing selectors would bring custom dubs that played fast and loose with genres, mixing the Eurythmics in with the reggae, to battle for supremacy and the crowd’s affections.
As he got older, Wyclef got into his Newark high school’s battle rap circuit. Clef remembers the school was segregated between Black and Haitian kids and he was determined to break those regimented social lines enforced with violence. He wasn’t afraid to stand out, dressing New Wave, like Boy George, at a school that was in the thrall of Golden Era hip-hop. But he wanted to become a good rapper because that’s what the Black kids respected. “It was about earning a place of equality for all of my Haitian brothers and sisters in school,” Clef said, looking back. He never gave up on his musicianship; he played in a jazz band and he studied Bach and Art Blakey. But he became locally respected for his ability to spit in any of the four languages he was fluent in. He infused it all with reggae flourishes. Wyclef's brushes with low-level rap fame made him a commodity to a bright young fellow Jersey Haitian who was good at recognizing talent and connecting the right people. He was named Prakazrel Samuel Michel (aka, Pras), and he invited Clef to join the rap group he was putting together.
As an equation, you could argue that at its inception, hip-hop was an amalgam of Caribbean rhythms and soul records blended into an intellectually curious, playful, cross-cultural Metropolitan soup. This was essentially the recipe for the Fugees: two Haitians (Wyclef and Pras from Irvington) and a Black American woman with a love and encyclopedic knowledge of Motown, Stax, Chess and Columbia (Lauryn Hill, also from East Orange), whose combined sensibilities define The Score. In Lauryn, Pras had unearthed a boundless talent, an aspiring multi-faceted artist who was acting off Broadway or on soap operas or opposite Whoopi Goldberg or in Steven Soderbergh films when she wasn’t rapping in DIY North Jersey “Booga” basement studios. Together, Wyclef and Lauryn would make the Fugees the closest rap ever got to Fleetwood Mac. But the recipe took some testing before they delivered their Rumours.
It’s hard to blame them for not having their style and sound consecrated right away because The Fugees — as no-brainer a proposition they appear to be with hindsight — don’t have much in the way of antecedents. In ‘96 they were “the other” in an artform made by and for the other. They were Haitian at a time when Dave Jolicoeur, or Plug Two or Dove from De La Soul were arguably the biggest Haitian rappers in rap history and not particularly known for this identity. They were from Jersey at a time when what borough you were from still mattered deeply in New York rap, but they weren’t Redman or Naughty By Nature or The Outsidaz, though they were cool with that collective. Blunted on Reality could be seen as The Fugees trying to fit into that boom bap underground tradition and sound. They were not gangstas nor were they wood medallion Garveyist prophets of rage. They needed a new vessel for their unusual skills and were casting about for an acceptable way to convey personalities and abilities that hadn’t really found an expression before in rap.
Stylistically, what the group figured out between Blunted and The Score was calming the flow to a conversational cadence and as a result, sounded far more naturalistic and comfortable (with the possible exception of Pras), and particularly in Lauryn’s case, “Like themselves.” But what mattered the most was the group getting out of its own way and letting Pras, Clef and Lauryn be Pras, Clef and Lauryn, threads of distinct talents and contributions pretzeled by Clef into a unified vision. As a title, The Score could represent a film’s soundtrack or a heist, and the album plays like both. The entire LP has a cinematic gloss, production value in a post-Bad Boy, cleared-samples era of luxe sonic engineering more aligned with It Was Written than Illmatic. But it contained a perspective more aligned with the latter than the former.
Because of Blunted on Reality’s commercial failure, the Fugees sophomore project allegedly had a smaller budget than its first album, which caused the group to self-produce to avoid blowing the bread on outside producers. This winds up becoming The Score’s greatest strength: the sound-clash eclecticism of its makers’ taste. The Score balances Wyclef’s Akai S900-captured samples of The Flamingos’ doo-wop, Ramsey Lewis’ smooth jazz, Teena Marie’s ’80s Tiger Beat pop, and The Main Ingredient and Cymande’s ’70s soul. At the same time, the crew packed their bars with still more references to Toni Braxton, Cyndi Lauper, George Gershwin and Nina Simone. What L Boogie brought to the table was the soul music Wyclef had largely missed because of the decade he came to America and his parents’ limited taste, which she backfilled with the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye and the Delfonics.
Wyclef refers to the album as a “candid picture” of where the trio was in life- lacing their bars with creole, rapping in the same Jersey basement as his romantic partnership with Lauryn had escalated from flirtation to full-blown, doomed affair. Clef believes that passion and unity is the album’s secret sauce. I’d argue that the secret is actually the writing, because it is so deeply personal and specific, coming from the perspective of streetwise, but sensitive drama department and church band stoop kids, jotting down street life observations from the Haitian table at lunch. It’s because despite an album cover referencing Scorsese and Puzo, it achieves a level of humble universality juiced with the rocket fuel of two once-in-a-generation vocal talents.
And no amount of intellectual framing can obscure how powerful the album is simply because it provides a stage for Lauryn and Wyclef as both rappers and singers at a time when those disciplines were siloed. Seeing two virtuosos combine their multi-faceted talents seamlessly was a brain-breaking magic trick. Even in its supremely confident, casual and toned-down delivery, Lauryn and Wyclef’s raps still bore some of the babbling, syllable-inventing, -tism/-ism and SAT-word-shoehorning headwrap, White Owl and grilled firm tofu Black Bohemian ancestry from which it came. But this was torn from a widely accepted style guide for dorm room East Coast rap of this era that was softened by vocal performances as accomplished as any crooner or songstress — ever — with the gall to treat Bob Marley and Roberta Flack classics as dubplates.
“Killin Me Softly” was the last song added to the album. It is another example of Pras’ wise and prudent decision-making and equally formidable visionary business mind in his established role as the group’s unsung glue guy. Wyclef wanted to add to the track and make it a grand orchestral statement. But Pras knew it had to live and die on a minimalist drum pattern, bassline and Lauryn’s vocals. It’s “just” Lauryn delivering the karaoke performance of a lifetime, of Flack covering Lori Lieberman, that instantly turned the song into a jazz standard on a rap album that will live forever. It’s possible the single most recognizable and chord-striking sound for my entire age range of millennials is Lauryn’s circular vocal run towards the end of that song; a source of light and heat that powered culture for the next 2 years, if not still to this day.
The Score could be seen as a tipping point in which rap truly showed the world its four-quadrant potential, when it pierced the veil of mainstream American culture. It was able to sell 15 million copies at a time when I’m not sure there were 15 million actual rap fans on Earth. It won two Grammys in a year that saw the proper births of Jay-Z and D’Angelo, TLC’s crush of terrestrial radio and music video television, and 2Pac’s release of his second and third best albums. Boomers embraced The Score for the singles if nothing else, but it’s hard to fully express how widely this album penetrated culturally. It could play on MTV outside the confines of Raps! It played on Z100 in addition to Hot 97. It played at weddings and quinciñeras and over the loudspeakers every morning at New Jersey sleepover camps. All over America, tapped-out white uncles with the black and orange jewel case wedged in with '70s classic rock CDs in their Eddie Bauer Edition Explorer middle consoles might spontaneously turn to their nephews and confess, "I like the song where they rap about working at Burger King." It's arguably the album’s most perfect articulation of the group’s entirely relatable perspective on the code-switching necessary to survive inner-city life.
The Fugees would serve as the forebearers of the Soulquarians and even Kanye West, and much later Drake. Long after that, Doechii. They turned the rap album into a performing arts school talent show with space for pop song covers and spoken word. The Score gave license to rappers to be normal about their hostile, aggravating, depressing and ambitious Black American and Black immigrant experiences.
In 1997, Wyclef released The Carnival, a solo effort that retained the vibe of a family affair because it included the participation of Lauryn and Pras for what ended up being the final time. He’s continued to release decent to great music over the subsequent decades, full of “Ecleftic” good taste, full of Bob Marley references (a legacy Lauryn is now ironically directly a part of) alongside dubs that run the genre gamut. He’s produced tracks for Destiny’s Child, Whitney Houston and Carlos Santana, among other legends. He's done film scores, too. The Carnival was an unqualified double platinum masterpiece and still is somehow a footnote in the wake of Lauryn Hill’s perfect rap/singing solo effort that felt like something she needed to flush out of her system, which was awarded the greatest album of all time several years ago by Apple Music, and was the only studio album she’d ever produce. In spite of, or maybe because of several embarrassing scandals in the lives and careers of all members, the Fugees have soft re-united and still occasionally tour. I saw them all together a few years ago down the Turnpike in Philly, and I report they retain their electric chemistry. I’m also not convinced they’ll ever make another album, or should even try.
In 1999, at the height of his post-Fugees fame, Wyclef played at an all-star tribute to Johnny Cash. The gig was a dream come true. His mother had always loved country because it reminded her of the singing style and harmonies Christian missionaries brought to Haiti when she was a child. Together, mother and son listened to Crystal Gayle, Charlie Daniels and Kenny Rodgers, but Johnny Cash was always Wyclef’s favorite. At the tribute, he covered “Delia’s Gone,” alone on stage, backlit with his dreads under a cowboy hat, strumming a guitar with only a base for accompaniment. He sang with an affected twang spiced with a Haitian music nerd’s swag, changing a few key lyrics, subbing “Brooklyn” for “Memphis,” and spitting a verse a capella in the middle of the performance. It would’ve made for a fine dub. Clef was worried his hero might not appreciate a kid from Croix-des-Boquets taking artistic liberties, but when he saw him later that night, Cash said he appreciated the ambition. “That’s what real folk music is all about,” Wyclef would recall Johnny telling him years later, “making a song your song.”
