CAROLINE SULLIVAN thought live hip-hop was boring – until she saw the Fugees play in London
HOW big is “big”? In the Fugees’s case, big enough that Sony had to stop making their number-one single, Killing Me Softly, because it wouldn’t get out of the charts over the summer to make way for the next single. That in turn went straight to the top, helping the band’s current album, The Score, sell nine million copies since its release in March.
It’s the more remarkable for the fact that, save for one-offs like the Coolio single, hip-hop acts simply don’t sell in those quantities. But then the Fugees aren’t your typical hip-hoppers.
The trio, who hail from the deceptively lyrical-sounding East Orange, New Jersey, employ sensual female vocals as much as they do rapping, and the voice’s owner, the fashion-modelish Lauryn Hill, is no mere foil for the two male Fugees. This in a genre where women must usually go solo to achieve any recognition. Even more relevantly, the Fugees make the diametrical opposite of gangsta rap. Despite dedicating their Brixton Academy show to Tupac Shakur and issuing half-hearted calls for insurrection, the Fugees are positivists who believe civilisation isn’t yet in irreparable decline. Until it is, they’re going to party – and the audience is coming with them, dammit.
Their show takes to task the belief that rap is boring live. It’s as if they’ve never heard of the two-slobs-barking-into-mikes formula. They’re on a mission to entertain, and if that means stopping the show to sing Happy Birthday, or wading into the crowd to berate some unfortunate who didn’t have the “right vibe”, so be it. They even put a Fugee spin on the moment when the house was divided and each half told to shout in turn: Hill split us into “all the ladies with real hair” and those without (and it was hard to tell who were more numerous).
The Fugees made much of their eclecticism, constantly dipping, with the aid of a drummer and bassist, into other people’s songs, from Walk On The Wild Side to the Jackson 5’s ABC.
Even Killing Me Softly did not escape their irreverence, but the dazzlingly perfumed girl fans crooned along anyway, eyes closed to conjure up memories of Spanish waiters on summer holidays. This was as the Fugees would have wished; as Wyclef said before an explosion of tinsel signalled the finale, “It ain’t about black and white.” Nope, it’s about music, love and real hair.