Music
Looking Back
How the Fugees shaped modern hip hop
From Blunted On Reality to a UK arena tour this October: looking back over the 30 year legacy of the Fugees
The landscape of hip hop as we know it could have been radically different. In 1994, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel released their debut album, Blunted On Reality. Retrospectively, the album was a join the dots of reggae, boom bap, rap, jazz and soul, and the sonic gym that trained the Fugees for their seminal classic The Score. But commercially, it was a flop, selling only a handful of copies.
A more callous record label bigwig would have severed ties, cut their losses and welcomed in another artist in their attempt to make some cash from the bubbling rap scene. In an auspicious turn of events though, emboldened by a remix of Blunted On Reality’s ‘Nappy Heads’ that edged the song into the Top 100, the Fugees were spared from being dropped. The group got to live another day, and with a pot of money and total creative control (unlike on their debut) to make an album, their story properly got started.
To understand just how that album, which went on to become The Score, is now entrenched in music lore as one of the greatest albums of the 90s, arguably of all time, you first need to understand the cultural landscape at the time. When the Fugees released The Score, they did so in the midst of a number of horrifying conflicts that saw the amount of people seeking asylum in the West swell rapidly.
Ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian War had seen the killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men, with thousands of others expelled from their home, while hundreds of thousands of people were murdered in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Over in South Orange, New Jersey, the Fugees identity was grounded in refugee spirit. Their group name was a shortened version of the word, while Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel shared Haitian heritage and sometimes rapped in Creole.
“In the global consciousness, the stock of the refugee was therefore particularly low,” author and writer Musa Okwonga wrote. “People in conflict zones were meant to be killed and not heard. The Score arrived in that world, defiant and unashamed, daring and endlessly epic.”
2024 is a different chapter from the same story. Against a backdrop of politicians urging ‘Stop the boats’ while people around the world are displaced and killed for simply existing, the Fugees record feels just as pressing. While it arrived into the world in an unrepeatable magic snatch of time, circumstance, and talent – the messages The Score holds are timeless.
From the jump, The Score is introduced as “A refugee camp production” in ‘Red Intro’. Instead of asking for permission, or quietly blending into the background so as not to cause disruption, the Fugees placed their refugee experience front and centre; presenting it as a position of autonomy, power, and a theatre of realism.
First single ‘Fu-Gee-La’ took a rejected Fat Joe beat and a sample of 80s Teena Marie song ‘Ooo La La La’ and plaited Hill, Jean and Michel’s chemistry into an instant classic. Elsewhere, the group sampled Enya (‘Ready or Not’), 50s doo-wop group The Flamingos (‘Zealots’), soft rock guitarist James Taylor (‘Family Business’), jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis (‘How Many Mics’) and many, many more. That kind of mining for samples and sounds, from nostalgic childhood artists handed down from parents, to genre clashes, is a foundational part of modern hip hop. These days, there’s barely a track that doesn’t touch an interpolation of some kind – whether that’s an instrumental, a beat, or even a meme – and a lot of that is thanks to The Score.
Elsewhere in US hip hop, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry was in full momentum. Seven months after the Fugees released The Score West Coast rapper Tupac would be killed in a drive-by shooting, and six months after that East Coast rapper the Notorious B.I.G would die in similar circumstances.
The Fugees’ style of hip hop brought a different kind of energy to the landscape. There was Hill, who could bring both soulful raspy vocals, and a melodic flow that went shoulder to shoulder with her male contemporaries at a time when women simply weren’t visible in the rap scene in a serious way. Then there was the actual spine of The Score. The group eschewed, and even poked fun at the gangster rap that was prevalent in the 90s. “How many mics do we rip on the daily? Say me say many money, say me say many, many, many” they jostle on ‘How Many Mics’. But there’s also ‘The Beast’, which took on government cuts to food stamp benefits for legal immigrants, police brutality against Black Americans, the Central Park Five, and “Ghetto Gotham”.
It was Hill’s raw vulnerability that made The Score more than a political album, more than a masterclass in genre splicing. To become a best-selling record you had to strike a chord with the many millions of people who were also blind or apathetic to those things, either by choice or by privilege. That’s where ‘Killing Me Softly’ enters the scene. The cover, made popular by Roberta Flack, also sampled A Tribe Called Quest and captured a uniqueness that somehow straddled the “breaking beats” that Fugees strived for with a darkness, melancholy and melody that completely caught fire.
‘Killing Me Softly’, although not even intended as a single, blew up the charts and cemented the Fugees as a commercial success from Europe to America. ‘Ready Or Not’ followed, becoming the group’s second chart-topping song in the UK, with Enya deciding not to sue the Fugees over the unapproved sample, assuaged that it wasn’t ‘gangster rap’. The Score had done it. Whether it was the darkness and the sociopolitical commentary, or Hill’s rhymes and incredible vocal might, people around the world were voraciously listening to the Fugees.
A couple of years later, Hill would write and produce solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, a neo soul masterpiece stripping bare the power, pain, and complexities of being both a woman, and Lauryn Hill. The record broke Grammy records, influenced countless artists, and captured the critics and the public in equal measure – a rare alchemy.
Next month the Fugees and Hill will perform together in a series of live shows. Speaking about the enduring impact of The Score, Wyclef Jean told Billboard, “It still resonates now because it’s reality music. It’s all from the soul, so it has no time or place”. The Fugees may have recorded their iconic album almost twenty years ago, but seeing the group perform a body of songs searching for justice and connection while balancing defiance and owning difference couldn’t feel more timely.
Photo credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images
