Fugees
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. 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. The group has sustained this amazing success through an equally amazing achievement: being all things to all people.
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Omnipresence inevitably leads to backlash, and “Killing Me Softly” is no exception. After all, Roberta Flack already died a thousand soft deaths with her huge hit in the winter of 1972-’73. Her masochistic portrayal of an adoring, helpless female fan was so enervated it even managed to creep out a third-grader like me. Yet the Fugees have supplied a brand-new generation of radio listeners with brand-new uses for the song. 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. 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.
There certainly isn’t anything new about the Fugees’ rap style. 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. 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. 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. If this deference immediately pleases the hip-hop faithful, to most outsiders it makes no difference. What matters is the way they make the text accessible to all through two elements that take longer to absorb: the music behind the raps and the message within them.
Many delighted critics have suggested that the Fugees might even show hip-hop a way out of its mire of bullets, blunts, and bitches. Roni Sarig wrote, “Their assault on gang-sta’s dark reign could signal the most momentous shift in popular music since Nirvana smelled teen spirit.” But this misjudges the nature of the Fugees’ achievement and the extent of the dilemma they’ve overcome. Everything about the Fugees celebrates their multiple identities, makes the most of their separation from any one community. In the short term, this kind of escape is not a clear option for most young African-American male rap artists. Caught between the rock of subcultural ossification and the hard place of mainstream co-optation, they will continue to cling to the rock (and their glocks, and their cocks) so long as the mainstream maintains its open antagonism toward their community.
