The New Jersey-based trio brashly asserted that hip-hop was pop music with the power to open up and change the world.
From left, Lauryn Hill, Pras Michel and Wyclef Jean of American hip hop group Fugees perform live on stage at The Forum in London on 5th June 1996. ‘ Wyclef Jean leaped from the grandstand stage and climbed a chain-link fence, reassuring a panicky military policeman, “It’s cool, it’s cool, I do this every day, I’m from Brooklyn.” Then he vanished into a crowd of 15,000 delirious Trinidadians.
“All I can say is that when I meet black kids or Chinese kids or white kids, I try to show them the universal. Any kid can be intelligent if he’s given some awareness of the world. See, I could talk about guns all day, but what am I teaching anybody? At the end of the day, nobody gives a fuck. But I feel like what were doing will help a lot of kids. Like tonight, stopping and doing a spelling bee. And. yo, the crowd was into the spelling bee.
While there’s been much rightful moaning in recent years about the segregated nature of commercial radio, the Fugees actually embody a potentially genre-bending format. “They’re totally credible, musically, with our listeners, and they elicit a lot of emotion,” says Lisa Worden, music director for modern-rock radio giant KROQ in Los Angeles. “The Fugees are the only hip-hop group that it makes absolute sense to play on an alternative station.
From the moment she discovered her mom’s basement cache of 45s , I had soulful visions. “I haven’t slept in my bed since, like, ’86 or ’87,” she confesses. “I got these big-ass headphones with leather cushions and went to sleep on the floor listening to music. I became, like, the musical historian. My family would go, “Lauryn, baby, who wrote that song, that “Hypnotized”?’ And I’d be like, ‘Linda Jones, 1967.
Lyrically, like Jean and Michel, Hill invokes a dizzying array of references, from childhood games to nostalgic sorrow , as well as nodding to all sorts of politically charged figures . “You reference something usually because its respected or detested,” says the Columbia University sophomore. “Not because you’re a foot soldier but because you want to evoke that power.”
Michel is the Fugees’ soul in the hole, the original member whose underlying, around-the-way-guy manner balances the starchild auras of Jean and Hill. His brotherly affection for Hill is palpable. “I remember when we were doing ‘Ready or Not,’ she was singing the bridge, and she started crying, like, really crying, but she kept on singing. And yo, man, it just hit me in the heart hard….
Wyclef Jean was a child prodigy, but not as a musician. “When I was born I had the gift of the spirit in me, and my father [a Church of Nazarene minister] knew it. Ever since I was little I could take a mass of people and influence them.” Finally, Ruffhouse/Columbia’s Chris Schwartz and Joe “The Butcher” Nicolo got it. After a production mismatch sabotaged 1993’s awkwardly hyper debutresulted. “The way Clef strips things down, like on ‘Killing Me Softly,’ and leaves the sound so open, yet with such emotion, its genius,” says Nicolo, engineer for Schoolly D, Kris Kross, and Cypress Hill. “It works perfectly with Lauryn’s voice. I mean, every A&R guy is dying to reproduce that sound.
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