If this deference immediately pleases the hip-hop faithful, to most outsiders it makes no difference. Wyclef’s rubbery, rude-bwoy delivery and Pras’s deeper, slightly menacing tone are straight from the MC textbook, and even Lauryn owes a partial debt to the way that hard-core innovators like the Wu-Tang Clan fucked with meter first. Yet only Lauryn has a tone that could be called distinctive–gritty yet playful, as if she were delivering her pointed raps with a sly grin. Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, Wyclef Jean, and Lauryn Hill (who go simply by their first names) are wonderfully gifted word slingers, flipping multiple rhymes in every line with nonchalant ease and incorporating popular culture from Al Capone to Nina Simone.
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There certainly isn’t anything new about the Fugees’ rap style. In fact, it’s so smooth, nonbelievers have a hard time seeing how unprecedented it truly is. Unlike De La Soul’s Daisy Age revolution, which turned off hard-core fans, or Public Enemy’s apocalyptic rage, which alienated the pop audience, the Fugees’ brand of genius pleases everybody because it’s a quiet synthesis, not a brash innovation. This inimitable trick is perhaps the only one that could, in this deeply fragmented moment, unite the hip-hop and pop audiences, yet it could only come off by the Fugees’ deft sleight of hand. It’s a good example of how the Fugees manage to stand in two places (or more) at the same time. On the other hand, the double entendre may be sailing right by the Fugees’ mainstream audience without registering at all. The phrase is so potent I wonder if rap fans understand it even without hearing the album first. “Killing me softly” is a phrase that the Fugees repeat throughout The Score as shorthand for the way poverty and racism take their toll on inner-city blacks even when the bullets aren’t flying. On one level, it signals that “Killing Me Softly” is now just another catchy, ready-made groove–a fact demonstrated by the response it generates in concert.īut on another level, the cover is a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the group’s misappropriation of the title metaphor. Fugee Lauryn Hill closely follows Flack’s serene phrasing, aching tone, and overall gentility, but her passivity is undermined by a goofy sitar sample, a funky hip-hop rhythm track, and some rowdy joshing from her male crew members.
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Yet the Fugees have supplied a brand-new generation of radio listeners with brand-new uses for the song. Her masochistic portrayal of an adoring, helpless female fan was so enervated it even managed to creep out a third-grader like me. After all, Roberta Flack already died a thousand soft deaths with her huge hit in the winter of 1972-’73. Omnipresence inevitably leads to backlash, and “Killing Me Softly” is no exception. If you’re a casual pop consumer you may not have heard the crew’s two official singles, “Fu-Gee-La” and “Ready or Not,” but you couldn’t escape the covers of Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” and Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” if you lived in Greenland. All over the radio, the Fugees are inescapable. The buzz started with hard-core rap fans, but it has been sustained by devotees of nearly everything else. Out on the street, this apparent contradiction is only reinforced by the group’s ability to breach markets normally considered mutually exclusive.
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Rap magazines give the Fugees props for standing tough and taking on the problems of the street with fresh ideas and hard skills, while mainstream giants from Time to the New York Times praise them for leaving behind the gangsta poses that signal “the street” to most outsiders. The group has sustained this amazing success through an equally amazing achievement: being all things to all people.
#THE FUGEES THE SCORE FULL#
In its second week, the album zoomed into Billboard’s top five on both the pop and R & B charts as we pass through the second full month of summer, it has slipped to number six in R & B but hasn’t budged in pop. Half a year ago, the Fugees were an obscure hip-hop trio from New Jersey with a two-year-old debut album that had gone almost nowhere and a perpetually budding reputation among hip-hop heads for great live shows that included “real instruments.” Then, on the second Tuesday in February, Columbia/Ruffhouse Records released the group’s second album, The Score.