Jean acts on his love and commitment to his homeland as he returns to Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake to help as best he can to rebuild his country. Jean openly reveals the tensions and the intense love that he and Hill shared, and he candidly uncovers the gritty details of the Fugees' multiplatinum success, The Score. With his music, Jean hoped to bring people to a world where, at least for a while, everything was going to be okay and to make people feel good no matter what they were going through.
Jean conducts readers on a journey from his childhood in Haiti, where his preacher father auspiciously named his son after Bible translator John Wycliffe and musician Toussaint L'Ouverture, to his youth in New York and New Jersey, where in junior high Jean discovered his purpose in life though music.
Very quickly, however, Jean's passion for music, his fierce love for his family and for Lauryn Hill, his partner in the Fugees, and his deep and abiding devotion to his native country, Haiti, forcefully reach out and grab the reader, who is soon rocking along to the rhythms and harmonies of a brilliant musician composing the score of his life. Hill's dual-threat presence, Jean's booming toasts, and Pras' knotty rhymes made Fugees a shining example of balance The Score's sonic palette, which honored the New York area's then-burgeoning underground through precise use of massive hits and crate-dug gems, made the group's second album a key part of hip-hop's 1990s explosion.At first glance, award-winning hip-hop musician Jean's memoir is just one in a long line of tales of a poverty-stricken youth climbing out of a hardscrabble life rung by rung on the ladder of music. The former allowed her to show off her reference-packed, thoughtful MC skills, while the latter established her rich, confident alto as one of R&B's great voices. "Ready or Not," which flipped a late-'60s single by the Philly soul outfit The Delfonics into a rallying cry for Black music, and "Killing Me Softly With His Song," a boom-bap-propelled cover of the ode to musicians made famous by Roberta Flack in the early '70s, both defined late-'90s hip-hop and turned Hill into one of its biggest female stars. (If you use the intricate, incisive rhymes the trio casts across The Score as a predictor, the answer is "a lot.")įugees' take on the swaggering yet claustrophobic sonics of '90s East Coast hip-hop give The Score a charge that remains electric decades later, as the boastful "Fu-Gee-La" and the hazy title track prove. Its lyrics are pointed and political, while also being laced with wit: "How many mics do we rip on the daily?" Hill and Jean crow on "How Many Mics," the album's first proper song. The trio of Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel formed in the late 1980’s in South Orange, New Jersey. The homespun hip-hop production on The Score gives it a vibe not unlike a lengthy listening session with friends, complete with running gags that bust up the room its sample list includes hooks from classic soul sides and sound-system-worthy beats, as well as bits borrowed from Enya, Francisco Tárrega, and The Moody Blues. Ready or not, in 1996 the Fugees dropped The Score and scored an opus masterpiece that achieved massive commercial and crossover success and is now considered a classic album. The album that came out of that cellar, 1996's The Score, became one of the defining hip-hop albums of the '90s and launched Jean and his bandmates Lauryn Hill and Pras to stardom. When the New Jersey hip-hop trio Fugees regrouped to record their second album, they went underground-to the basement of Wyclef Jean's uncle, which was transformed into a recording studio and rechristened as the Booga Basement.
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