From a basement in East Orange, Wyclef, Lauryn and Pras stirred real rap alchemy
EAST ORANGE -- Twenty years ago, we were introduced.
To Lauryn Hill, the crystalline ghetto-soul ingenue from South Orange.
To Wyclef Jean, the forthright Caribbean emcee and producer who stirred real rap alchemy from a basement in East Orange.
To Pras Michel, the bombastic bass vocal and groove master who stabilized the band.
And let's be clear -- the Fugees were explicitly a hip-hop band, with live instrumentation, a Rolodex of rock and reggae influencers, limitless compatibility (while it lasted, at least), and a musical mission scraped straight off the street.
"We wanted to bring a different perspective of the hood," Jean told NJ.com earlier this year. " ... we wanted to do something where the neighborhood would feel like their voice was being represented."
Such was the thesis of "The Score," the short-lived group's second and final album, and the most unfettered and undeniable portrayal of urban life in New Jersey music history.
Hill's own "Miseducation" notwithstanding, our state has yet to produce a more momentous rap narrative of any sort, and the project's candid trek through its "ghetto Gotham" of Newark is surely on par with the elites of hip-hop's '90s golden era: Notorious B.I.G.'s "Ready to Die," Nas's "Illmatic," and 2Pac's "All Eyez on Me."
Though the trio disbanded not long after the album's 1996 release, the social relevance and deep musicianship of "The Score" burns with a new generation of African-American artists, including rap's current king of acclaim Kendrick Lamar.
Like Lamar, the Fugees stood in opposition of the ultra-violent (and often opulent) "Scarface" gangster image perpetuated at the time by New York's Notorious B.I.G., Nas, and the touted newcomer Jay Z. Mainstream rap in '96 was ensnared, too, by the heavily publicized coast-to-coast feud between the East Coast's Bad Boy Records (with B.I.G. and Puff Daddy leading) and Death Row Records in California, fronted by label owner Suge Knight and superstar Tupac Shakur.
Despite the Fugees' proximity to New York -- and to Newark, voted the most dangerous city in America by Money Magazine that year -- the Ruffhouse Records (Columbia) signees steered clear of the "hustler" archetype; they chose whiskey sours over sipping Cristal champagne, they donned leather jackets over furs and mafioso fedoras (see Jay Z's "Reasonable Doubt" album cover).
Hill and Jean were both college educated, and even when they exuded a familiar tri-state hubris, they astutely kept their fingers off the trigger.
"While you're imitating Al Capone, I'll be Nina Simone, defecating on your microphone," Hill, then just 20, rhymed on the audacious "Ready or Not."
Aesthetics aside, the band's commentaries on what have since become prevailing rap topics -- street violence, police brutality and racism -- were constructed not from a place of raw aggression, as was Biggie's "Ready to Die," but from a place of racial pride and understanding, that the need for change in its crime-ridden Brick City had become dire.
"We gotta get our family together, man. We gotta get organized, we can't just be out here high and smoked up," the band pleads, as the party fare of "Fu-Gee-La" fades into the unsugared city doom of "Family Business" -- "just walkin' the streets death can take you away."
Current Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, son of the esteemed poet Amiri, provided a seething, spoken-word album intro with added urgency: "If you ain't ready now, you ain't never gonna be ready."
The ride inside the group's urban psyche rolls deeper still with "The Beast," a quick-witted depiction of the members' distrust of police:
"You can't search me without probable cause
Or that proper ammunition they call reasonable suspicion
Listen I bring friction to your whole jurisdiction
You planted seeds in my seat when I wasn't lookin'
Now you ask me for my license registration"
Tragically, "The Beast" is likely today's most relevant tale; a seemingly endless streak of controversial police incidents sustains a wariness between cops and black communities in many major cities.
But the genius of "The Score," forged in Jean's basement studio under his uncle's house on South Clinton Street, comes not in its direct railing against the establishment -- which rapper hasn't unleashed his own, off-brand "F--- Tha Police"? -- but through its subtlest jabs.
Take the anti-gunslinger track "Cowboys," which deconstructs the merger of two intrinsically American images: the "gangsta" hip-hop star and famed cowboy outlaws Jesse James and the Sundance Kid. The entire song is spat over plucks from a sitar -- perhaps the most foreign-sounding instrument to American ears -- in a deft repudiation of the U.S.'s entrenched romanticizing of violence. Fugees is short for "Refugees," after all. The sitar sound was, like almost every instrumental melody on "The Score," a sample from a decades-older black band, in this case the Harlem soul outfit The Main Ingredient's "Something 'Bout Love."
Through the record's 60 minutes, the trio never strays far from an homage, or a pop-culture history lesson: the famed hook to "Ready Or Not" interpolates "Ready or Not Here I Come (Can't Hide From Love)," courtesy of the '60s R&B group The Delfonics, and of course, Hill's jumbo breakthrough "Killing Me Softly," was mostly a straight cover of Roberta Flack's No. 1 hit.
References to several Blaxploitation films: "Superfly," (1972) "Blackula," (1972) "Cooley High," (1975) and the parody "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" (1988) are strung through the lyrics tongue-in-cheek. Though some labyrinthian rhymes, specifically from Jean, flash much further back, even to Greek mythology: "I haunt MCs like Mephistopheles, bringing swords of Damocles."
The Fugees, left to right: Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill and Pras Michel. (MARC BAPTISTE)
Ultimately, this is how "The Score" must be remembered in 2016: as an innately smart project, and as a rap record that allowed not only for the genre's traditional (and traditionally masculine) concepts of pride and arrogance, but for Hill to begin the exploration of femininity and empowerment that she would unfurl in earnest two years later, on her mammoth "Miseducation of Lauryn Hill."
"The Score's" lone moment of vulnerability fuels the final chapter, "Manifest," where Hill's transparent verse details anguish over a lost love -- possibly bound to her on-and-off affair with Jean himself -- and how, after "he convinced me I was worthless," that no man was worth such pain.
Pras Michel slings one more, braggy verse on "Manifest" and the album concludes, as does the Fugees' recorded history. A handful of performances and two Grammy wins would follow, and by 1997, the three-piece with unending promise -- and the lightning they pressed to vinyl in East Orange -- was no more.
The personalities that made "The Score" so dynamic and ostensibly drew Jean and Hill to each other the first place (despite Jean's marriage to designer Marie Claudinette in 1994) eventually pulled the band apart. These days, all parties choose to play he-said-she-said. Jean claims in his 2012 memoir "Purpose: An Immigrant's Story" that after Hill became pregnant in late 1996, she led him to believe the child was his, though the true father was Rohan Marley (son of Bob). Hill has not publicly responded.
As talents separated post-Fugees, each member of the group scored immediate success: Jean's solo debut "The Carnival" was met with acclaim, Michel earned a platinum single with "Ghetto Supastar," and of course, Hill went on to write the most revered female hip-hop album of all time.
But consider this: when the Fugees' Ruffhouse debut "Blunted on Reality" flopped in '94, some speculated Hill would leave the group to go solo, right then and there.
Two decades later, we thank the rap gods that the three-piece were given another chance by their label -- not so dissimilar from Bruce Springsteen's one-more-chance scenario as he wrote "Born To Run" -- to return to Jean's East Orange basement studio, harness that magical, thumping vibe, and settle the score.
Bobby Olivier may be reached at bolivier@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyOlivier. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
