by Wyclef Jean
“All I want to know is one thing,” Claudinette said. “What is going on between the two of you?”
“We’re making music together.” Lauryn said. “That’s what we do, it’s intimate.”
“It is,” I said. “We have our own language.” I could feel the sweat spilling over my brow and down my arm pits.
“I want to know what’s going on besides the music,” Claud said. “Is there something else going on between the both of you?”
The silence probably didn’t last long, but in my mind it took ages and ages. No one was saying anything. I couldn’t take it.
“I am in love with Lauryn, Claudinette,” I said. “I’m in love with her.”
Claudinette got out of the car and slammed the door as hard as she could. Lauryn turned the engine over and pulled away, driving down the street. I was still in the backseat losing my God-damned mind. I had spoken from the heart but I didn’t know what I was saying. I was feeling; I loved them both and I had no idea beyond that.
A block later Lauryn pulled to a stop.
“Get out,” she said.
“What?”
“Go home,” she said. “Now. Get out of the car and go home, Clef.”
I don’t know if that’s what I wanted to do but that’s what I did.
Lauryn sped off, and I didn’t look back as she did. I had one thing in mind: I ran back to Claudinette, back to our house. I got upstairs, but she was not willing to have anything to do with me. I didn’t care; I started talking at her, just like a babbling idiot, but all that I said in that moment came from the heart. I meant all of it; I didn’t want to lose her—no way. I knew that. Yet I also loved Lauryn; I knew that too. But I knew I’d be nothing without Claudinette. It was as if Claudinette was my foundation, my rock, and Lauryn was my dream. At the end of the day, only the foundation exists, only the rock can hold your weight.
I loved them both in such different ways, but how could I hope to say that? And I’d already looked Claudinette in the eye and told her that I was in love with Lauryn. Here she was sitting before me.
“Claud, let me explain,” I said, “I know what I said, but I don’t mean it. I’m in love with Lauryn. I am in love with her because we made music together. I know that doesn’t make sense to you and I hope all you can do is let it go, but we made something together musically that is bigger that both of us. It’s important and it’s beautiful, and I love her for that, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with her. We don’t have that kind of love, like you and me. It’s something different. I know I said I love her, but it’s something different.”
Claud was not having this. She just kept shaking her head slowly, looking like she wanted to kill me.
“This piece of music we are working on, Claud,” I said, “it’s incredible, you’ll see. Lauryn and I made it together and that is why I love her. That is how I love her. It is really about the music.”
There was no getting away from Claudinette’s tractor beam.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” Lauryn had said.
That moment, with both of the women I loved in one car, calling me out, defined my character. It put me to the test that I’ve done my best to pass ever since. I’ve been blessed with the kind of life where temptation is always in the wings, and I’ve done my best to avoid what brought King David down. Luckily when I’ve strayed, my life, Claudinette, has been my rock. We are together and we will never be rocked.
6
FUGEES ON FIRE
The Fugees were a family coming apart just as everything we’d worked for creatively was coming together. The drama between Lauryn and me threatened to tear us apart before the record even came out, so the success that followed was often hard to enjoy. All of the pressure that came with it was like dynamite tossed on a bonfire.
The Score got rave reviews everywhere, from The Source, where we got the coveted five mics, to Vibe, to XXL, to Rolling Stone, to the New York Times. The Fugees were called the second coming of conscious rap; a next generation’s A Tribe Called Quest. We were different from Bigs and ’Pac and everything else. We were musicians, we were referencing soul music, we were talking about our times, and we had a female rapper as strong as the males.
The other side of having someone like Lauryn in the band, with a voice as beautiful as hers, is that critics immediately said that she should go solo and leave Pras and me behind. Her voice is something special, they said, while we were just a couple of average rappers from Haiti. The biggest haters said we should get back on the banana boat we rode over here and let the girl have a real career. That always bothered me, because in terms of composition and production, that album was mostly my doing. I’ve made a lot of music and I’ve won a lot of awards, and I’ve thought about all of this before now. But looking back on The Score today makes me call into question The Source magazine’s rating system. Back in the day The Source was the bible of hip-hop, and we lived and died by those ratings. Four or five mics in The Source meant everything back in the nineties. We got five mics for The Score, but what I’m saying is, considering that I came up with the ideas for most of the music and a lot of the hooks, shouldn’t I get five mics just for myself?
All that noise didn’t matter; that shit didn’t touch us at all, not even Lauryn. Because even though we were in the middle of our issues, she was loyal, and there was no way she was going to abandon her brothers after all we had done and been through together to make it.
The Score was the result of so many people’s contributions, musically and in terms of the vibe that surrounded the Booga. But the truth is that album is nothing but the three core elements: Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill, and Pras Michel. Anyone can say what they like about which of us was more important and who has more talent, but if you took any of us out of that formula, that record would not be what it is. We were a team and if you take one out of the equation, you lose the magic.
That’s not to say you’d never have heard of us otherwise. If it weren’t for the Fugees, would Lauryn Hill have become famous? Yes, she would have. Would Wyclef Jean have become famous? Yes, I would have. I don’t know what anyone else involved in the record would have done, from the musicians who played in the studio to the guest rappers to Jerry Wonder, even. They all might have gone on to do great things on their own. I do know that because they were involved with us, they went places faster, and got places they might have never been. The Score changed the game by taking intelligent hip-hop to the top of the pop charts. And it changed the lives of everyone associated with it.
If the Fugees had never come to be, Lauryn Hill would still have become a star, but I’m not sure if I would have become a professional musician. I think I would have ended up in the ministry in some way. I know I would have been a leader, because just like the men I’m named after, it’s in my blood. If I devoted myself to the church, I would have risen high in those ranks because that is who I am. I’ve always been the son of a preacher man.
We came out strong on The Score and we made it big. To this day people still say that Lauryn was the real star and that Pras and I rode her coattails. If they want to believe that, I’m not going to waste time stopping them. If they look deeper at all of us as talents, they’ll find the truth. We might have been one thing as a group, but if you look at us individually, you see where the talent is by what we did after the Fugees. If a group has hit songs together, you have to look at who has hit songs afterward. Who has the most? If you look at what I’ve released myself and what I’ve written for other artists like Shakira, I do. Lauryn and Pras had their moments, too, but I have the most hits to my name as a writer and producer. I’m not saying I’m any better; I’m just saying those are the facts.
When I think back on the Fugees, I realize that our album covers say it all. Blunted depicted a three-headed baby tied together, being held down by the hand of The Man. On The Score, that three-headed baby had cast itself in its version of The Godfather. We were out to settle the score—with all the critics and haters who’d heard our fi
rst album and thought we were shit and had nothing to say. Our album hit number 1, we had multiple hit singles, and less than a year after it came out, we’d sold over 6 million albums in America alone. We won a Grammy for “Killing Me Softly,” and we stayed on the charts for the rest of that year and most of the next. All of the hip-hop critics who hated on Blunted became our biggest fans.
That album is fifteen years old and it still sounds fresh. When I hear it, I’m taken back to those times and to that little room where we did it all. The Booga Basement isn’t there anymore, but the building still is. It’s a house, but it’s not the same house because a fire took the original down to the foundation. It doesn’t matter; the soul of the Booga lives on. And all of that equipment we used is with me in my new Booga Basement, which is in a very humble room in Bloomfield, New Jersey. I do my mastering and proper recording in my studio in Manhattan, but I like to create and vibe out in a space closer to my roots, in the basement of a building that you would walk right by and not think twice. I feel anonymous there, and I like coming and going as I please. At Platinum Sounds there is a legacy of hits and plaques on the wall to prove it, but I don’t want to see that when I’m creating. I write from my heart and I don’t look to the past, only to what’s inside and what is ahead of me that I have yet to achieve.
It didn’t take us more than a few months to record The Score. Blunted on Reality took much longer, which seems crazy. The Score is who we really were, and putting yourself out there honestly is easy if you know yourself. The only pressure we felt making that record came from ourselves.
We hit the road to promote as soon as The Score came out, because we expected it to be another uphill battle over the course of a few years getting the word out there. But then our single charted, and then it hit number 1. Then our next single hit the top 10. Soon that tour schedule had no end in sight and we were playing huge venues in countries we’d never been to before. “Killing Me Softly” hit number 1 in the States while we were on tour in France, playing Paris. The French had loved the Fugees from the first, so it was nice to celebrate that milestone there.
“Hey Paris,” I said, before we started the song. “Y’all always embraced us, so I’m happy to let you know something before anybody else in the world. This next song we gonna play for you just hit number 1 in America. I think you know the words, so let’s do this one together.”
The entire audience stood on their chairs and danced. They were jumping up and down, breaking those seats in two. They sang every word with us, and I’ll never forget that moment.
As the tour offers kept coming, our label began to love us like they never had before. The minute “Killing Me Softly” hit the top of the charts, they packaged and released “Ready or Not,” which was fine with me, because that was the only thing that could follow up Lauryn’s performance on our first big hit. We had to come with something original, too, because we had made that first single our own, even though it was already Roberta Flack’s hit.
The Fugees’ train was rolling, and because we were making money for Columbia, I finally got my wish: a meeting with Tommy Mottola, who was the head of Columbia at the time and a legend in the business in his own right. I had asked for a meeting with him when we first got signed, but he had no interest in sitting down with some Haitian kid from the little Ruffhouse imprint. It took a number-1 single to get that meeting, and that’s cool. I always told Lauryn and Pras we’d have a number 1, but the truth is, as great as I knew The Score was, I expected to sell something like five hundred thousand copies. I had no idea we’d do 20 million.
Meeting Tommy Mottola was more than just a symbolic thing for me, because I had been after a meeting with a guy with his kind of power ever since I interned at RCA Records back when I was fifteen. Working for Jan Berger, walking through those offices, all I kept wondering was, Who is the guy at the top of all this? What’s his office like? What is he like? What does it take to be the man on top like that? I’ve always wanted to be a leader and I wanted to know what a guy who ran a huge international record label looked like. When I finally got my chance I discovered that Tommy was a real gentleman. He had us up to his office and I think he fed us some spaghetti. It was straight out of Goodfellas, and it was over before I knew it.
We kept going around the world, because our next single, “Fugee-La,” hit the charts hard, too. The video for that song honors one of my favorite films, The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff. It’s about a reggae star coming from nothing and making it out of the ghetto in Kingston, and becoming one of the top music stars of his time.
We were touring so much that being tired became my everyday state of mind. We were on planes, on buses, never stopping, always doing press or performing, making appearances, and being photographed. It got to the point that a few times I even asked the road manager how many minutes we had to play to fulfill our contract, and I’d make sure we did not thirty seconds more even if we had time for another encore. It got to the point where one night, somewhere in America, I faked passing out at the side of the stage, just to cut the show short so I could get some sleep. I was put on oxygen and taken away in an ambulance. I got a little nap in there, then when I got to the hospital, I told them I was alright and asked to be taken back to my hotel. Pretending to pass out was the only way to not get sued by the promoter that night.
During that tour, in Amsterdam, I experienced my first coffee shop and being able to smoke as much weed as you want in there. There was liquid weed, cookies, and all of that, but that didn’t interest me. I went for some variety called El Niño, around noon. Next thing I knew it was midnight and I’d not even left the place. I spent twelve hours there, until someone from the crew came and got me. From there we walked through the Red Light District, just looking at all the beautiful women on display. It felt like Sodom and Gomorrah or something.
When we played Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, I could not believe just how huge we had become. I looked over and I saw Mick Jagger in the balcony watching us. So I did the only thing that made sense to me: I climbed up the rigging to say hello to him. Mick fucking Jagger! I got right into his booth because I’m a maniac when I perform and said, “Yo! Mick Jagger in the house!” And then our DJ dropped the beat to “Satisfaction.” Moments like that change your idea of who you are and what your music means to the world.
As the energy of the Fugees spread further, our shows became events. We had always thrown ourselves into the performance, but now that our songs were connecting with people on a larger scale, the energy that came back at us every night was more intense than anything we had ever given out. All of this fueled the drama, too. The band and our tour was a pressure cooker waiting to explode. This strange kind of energy took us over, and it made the shows more intense, because we were performing songs that told the story of our relationship, all while it was still getting played out. Things between us went in cycles, so as we toured the world, certain countries ended up seeing us at our most raw, just because that’s how the stars aligned. Our Japan dates stand out in my mind because they were really crazy. Japanese fans are intense to begin with, so the second we stepped off the plane we were like Michael Jackson or the Beatles to them. People swarmed us wherever we went and at every show the crowd knew every word to every song. Having those songs about Lauryn and me sung back to us like that was too much sometimes, and she and I got into it offstage like we never had before.
We discovered sake on that tour, too. We didn’t know what it was; we were just kids from New Jersey. We were told it was made of rice, but we had no idea it was stronger than wine. It tasted refreshing and it looked like water, and we drank it like there was no tomorrow. Pras really got into it, and one night, we found out how much onstage.
It didn’t seem like anything was really wrong until we got to Pras’s first part in the first song. Lauryn and I finished our parts, then all of a sudden there was silence. I looked over to see that Pras had fallen off the front of the stage. He liked to party but he didn’t
have a drinking problem, so this kind of behavior was new to us. But there he was, trying to go on with the show, lying there on his back, on the floor in front of the stage. It was a mess. He got out some of the words, and I filled in the rest of his verse. We made it through the rest of the set, because hitting that concrete definitely sobered him up. It was gonna take more than sake to take us out.
Back in the States we did photo shoot after photo shoot and in every interview, Lauryn and I kept our business out of the press. We never even had to talk about it: we knew what was best for the group, because that was bigger than both of us. Our little problems had no business being involved in our business, and we honored that. When we did interviews, we said that “Killing Me Softly” was so soulful because all of us were going through some issues at the time. Both Lauryn and I even talked about the fact that she is crying on the lead vocal take; we just didn’t say why.
For me at least, it felt like if we stopped at all we’d lose momentum and everything would end. Opportunities kept coming at us, and I saw no reason not to take them. We lived every moment to the fullest, hopping planes for gigs overseas, award shows, magazine cover shoots, tours of our own—just about everything. I was aware that this moment was special and that it was a peak that might not last, so I decided that we should do something that would mean everything to me and Pras while that window was open. I realized that we had to give back to the culture that had shaped who we were and we had to use our influence while we had it.
“We got to go to Haiti.”
I know that a lot of what I say sounds like I’m bragging, but without my ambitions I would have died quietly a long time ago. I always held Bob Marley in my mind as a role model who represented his culture, and now that we had achieved some success and I had the attention and influence to do so, I organized a concert down in Haiti. This was the beginning of my efforts to bring the world’s focus to my native land, which is something I intend to do for the rest of my life.