Wyclef understood the value of an unlikely sample, and so we end up with a big rap album that jacks Enya and the Flamingoes’ beloved oldie “I Only Have Eyes For You” on consecutive tracks. They were working from a very specific blueprint: deep neck-snap mid’-90s East Coast boom-bap, the sort of music that could’ve been on a Heltah Skeltah album, except cleaned-up and streamlined, with a few of the ancestral pop-music allusions that Puff Daddy was already taking to the bank. The Fugees, along with associate Jerry Wonder, produced almost the entire album themselves, and they’d found their musical voice by then. They recorded the whole thing in Wyclef’s basement studio, and the most prominent guests were Rah Digga and Young Zee, from the group’s Jersey-underground contemporaries the Outsidaz, and Diamond D, the permanently underrated purist rapper/producer.Īnd yet it doesn’t sound like a bare-bones operation. There are samples - presumably expensive ones - but Wyclef didn’t bother to clear most of them, which would lead to a few lawsuits once the album blew up.
There are no big-name singers or guest-rappers on the album. But the album was still a pretty bare-bones operation. Instead - maybe realizing he had something with this girl - he gave them another shot. Their label head could’ve justifiably dropped them. It had taken all the ideas flying around in the world of alternative rap - the acoustic guitars and reggae overtones and get-free sentiments - and ground them up into a chunky, heterogenous mess. Why would they? Blunted On Reality, the trio’s 1994 debut, had been a failure, both creatively and commercially. Listening to it now, it’s clear that the Fugees didn’t command the same label resources that, say, Biggie Smalls would when he released the sweeping double album Life After Death a year later. Nobody expected The Score to score the way it did. But before all these strange stories would play out, that girl and those guys would record one indisputable classic together, a slick and smart and soulful rap blockbuster that would dominate the world and prepare the way for all the pop-minded rap rebels that followed. And even Menudo would come back, after a fashion, as the former member Ricky Martin would triumphantly unvanish two and a half years later. (Last year, he recorded a song with Avicii and Matisyahu.) But the world would eventually turn without him. He’ll do anything, no matter how obviously wack, to stay visible. (Just one example: He put Kenny Rogers on a song with Pharoahe Monch in 2000.) And he still refuses to go away completely. Wyclef would record one pretty good solo album of his own, and for a while, he was an inescapable presence, imposing his loony culture-collision ideas on the world.
Pras basically would he recorded the fun hit “Ghetto Superstar,” starred in the D-movie Turn It Up, and then essentially blinked out of existence. The guys didn’t vanish, at least not at first. It’s not clear that she’ll ever get it completely back together, and she’ll always be remembered as the artist who walked away at the peak of her power. That’s still an ongoing story, even though Hill will occasionally pop up to play the odd festival. And then she intentionally vanished, disappearing to have a couple of kids and then to follow some sketchy religious guru. The girl would go solo, two years later, recording an album that conquered the world. Of course, that line turned out to be eerily prophetic, too. He knew that he wanted to be a pop-music force, and for a time, he was. And yet Wyclef still resented the idea that he was somehow expendable. Wyclef and Pras Michel, his fellow Fugee, didn’t have any other options.
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She’d already starred in the soap opera As The World Turns and the movie Sister Act 2, and she was still enrolled at Columbia University when her group was recording The Score. And if the group didn’t work out, she had options. It was clear to anyone with ears that Lauryn Hill was the best rapper in the Fugees, and she also had this incredible weathered, powerful singing voice. For one thing, Wyclef had to acknowledge something: His group had a standout, and he wasn’t it. “If you read the magazine, it says the girl should’ve went solo / The guys should stop rapping, vanish like Menudo,” he’d rap on his group the Fugees’ 1996 track “Zealots.” Looking at that line right now, with 20 years of distance, there’s so much going on in it. Sometime in the mid-’90s, Wyclef Jean read a magazine that fucked up his day.
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