The new CD by Wyclef Jean, the dreadlocked powerhouse behind The Fugees, features ska, 41 gunshots, Pink Floyd and a rapping Kenny Rogers
Dom Phillips Hip-hop makes sense in New York: the town that created it is still enslaved by it. On a muggy afternoon, the street vendors on Broadway blast out rap, selling mix tapes from trestle tables. Chest-shaking levels of bass explode when four-wheel drives screech up at stop lights. At trendy downtown clothes stores like Triple 555 Soul and Phat Farm, staff rhyme along as they shift hip-hop-inspired outfits: crisp, elegant, baggy. Thousands of teenagers gather outside MTV headquarters on Times Square for a personal appearance by the white Detroit rap star Eminem.
On the 43rd floor of a midtown hotel, on top of the hip-hop world, Wyclef Jean lounges on a couch and lets a smile crawl across his face. He’s enjoying explaining how he got Kenny Rogers to revocal his classic The Gambler, just so Wyclef could press it on to vinyl and scratch it up, DJ- style, for his new album. Wyclef persuaded him to change the lyrics. The bearded country legend now sings: “Touch the turntables, your sound is done.” You may remember Wyclef from The Fugees – the international hip-hop act who sold 11- million copies of their Grammy-winning album The Score after their reggae-hip-hop cover of Roberta Flack’s soul weepie Killing Me Softly With His Song swept around the world. He was the dreadlocked one with the guitar who kept saying: “One time, two times.” He was also the band’s creative powerhouse. Since The Fugees went their separate ways (only temporarily, they insist) and singer/ rapper Lauryn Hill became an international diva in her own right, Wyclef has kept busy writing and producing for big-league artists like Whitney Houston (hit My Love Is Your Love), Santana (recent United States number one Maria, Maria) and fellow Fugee Pras (the band’s underachiever with just one hit, Ghetto Superstar). In 1997, Wyclef released the eclectic double-platinum-selling solo album Carnival. Hip-hop now outsells country music in the US and is second only to rock, but its conventions can be just as tightly knit. Wyclef’s wide-ranging new album The Ecleftic will unpick the stitching a little further, featuring a ska number, 41 gunshots, guest appearances from Mary J Blige and a blast from the Earth, Wind and Fire brass section. Oh, and a Pink Floyd cover.
“This shit is still exciting for me,” grins Wyclef. “I like to go against the grain, against what’s out there. Every day is like a challenge.” But first, The Fugees, who were unusual not only because they turned their lyrical attentions away from materialism, as did early Nineties hip-hop acts like De La Soul and The Jungle Brothers, but because they did it so successfully.
With two Haitians – Wyclef and fellow rapper Pras – in the band, their music was strongly rooted in the Caribbean, while Hill’s potent presence added street-level feminism.
At one early London show, she raised roars of approval from both sexes as she chided boys for dissing their mothers. Her solo album, The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, earned her five Grammies and she has now married into reggae royalty, bearing two children to Bob Marley’s son Rohan. Hill may have left The Fugees behind, but their spectre still hangs over Wyclef. His album starts, like so many in the genre, with a skit: Wyclef phones Tommy Mottola, the notoriously fierce head of his record company, Sony, and former husband and Svengali to Mariah Carey. Mottola says forget the solo stuff, where’s The Fugees album? “Badda bing!” It’s not really Mottola, of course, and luckily for Wyclef Tommy’s not upset. “Tommy liked it, man,” grins Wyclef, cheeky enough to add a Mafia reference: “I’m not in the river.” The next track, Fugee This, Fugee That, asks his former bandmates to get in touch. Couldn’t he just have called them? What’s his fellow rapper Pras doing? “I don’t have a clue, man.” Did Wyclef ever, as was wildly rumoured but never confirmed, have a sexual relationship with Lauryn Hill? “All I’m gonna tell you is this, man,” he says. “Marvin Gaye – Tammi Terrell. Prince – Sheila E. Wyclef Jean – Lauryn Hill.” But Wyclef can’t leave it there. “I’m a sexy guy. Things happen,” he says. “The worst thing is to be in a group with a banging [beautiful] female, period. She’s banging. And I don’t care who you are, you’re a man, you’re gonna be like …” and he wolf-whistles. What kind of tension might that relationship have caused in a tight-knit three-piece? “There’s always friction,” Wyclef stonewalls. “You always going to get confusion and anger and all of that,” he adds, “but when we on stage – lightning and fire.” At the height of The Fugees’s success, I interviewed the band. Wyclef, wearing a green tracksuit, turned a photo session in an east London council estate into an impromptu football match when a gang of kids appeared with a ball. He came over as passionate, committed, earnest even. It came as quite a shock when he introduced his solo career a year later, wearing a white suit, singing a pop-rap version of The Bee Gees’s Stayin’ Alive. “The critics bashed me with that,” he recalls. Wyclef the preacher transformed into Wyclef the “playa” (hip-hop parlance for hotshot). On Carnival, he sang about all the girls he cheated on. Carnival, actually an impressive, eclectic album that delved further into Caribbean rhythms and melodies, spawned a gentler follow-on hit for Wyclef, the lilting Gone Til November. Bob Dylan popped up to star in the video, declaring of Wyclef: “He’s my man.” The album mixed star guests like the Neville Brothers with a loose narrative about Wyclef’s life. His disadvantaged origins, growing up a poor Haitian immigrant, have been well- documented. His difficult birth was helped by a pair of forceps: they literally pulled him out. His father is a Nazarene pastor who fled to Miami, then Brooklyn, from the country’s infamous dictator Wyclef-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. He had a church in Flatbush.
“Outside the church, drug-dealings would be going on,” Wyclef told America’s Vibe magazine. “Inside my father was preaching from the Book of Revelation.” In Haiti, the young Wyclef kept busy making instruments from rubbish and assembling his first gun; in Brooklyn, he mixed radio hits with the gospel vocals from his dad’s church.
Some rappers, perhaps understandably, are unwilling to look beyond the musical and geographical ghettos that spawned them. >From the beginning, Wyclef clearly had a wider perspective. He may roll out raw basslines that sound like they grew up on the beach, but he has an irrepressible way with radio-friendly pop references. The Ecleftic shifts moods with impressive dexterity. On 911, he sounds like a Motown Bob Marley on a romantic duet with Mary J Blige; 41 Shots For Diallo recreates the controversial shooting of African street trader Amadou Diallo by New York city police; Diallo, the track that follows, features Senegalese star Youssou N’Dour. There’s raw rap there, too. “Hip-hop is a beast,” he explains. “I feed the beast enough hip-hop on the album.” Coincidentally, his vast bodyguard is also called Beast. But Wyclef’s most confrontational moment comes with his trademark acoustic guitar, when he tackles one of rock’s most sacred cows: Pink Floyd’s campfire classic Wish You Were Here. Surprisingly, Wyclef’s acoustic reggae stylings work perfectly on the track’s plaintive refrains, and the track opens with another skit, this time featuring a redneck sheriff who pulls over the tour bus and demands: “Play me some Pink Floyd, boy and I might just let you go.”
Wyclef jokes that hip-hop obsessives will be “smoked out” by the time they reach Wish You Were Here (track 25). So will Pink Floyd fans, no doubt. He is, he says, simply repaying the debt so many white rock groups owe to black music’s legacy: “I’m probably the only kid that is daring enough to go there … I didn’t sample Pink Floyd, I stood up there and sang the whole song and played all the guitar parts. The whole Ecleftic is there to open up people’s heads and let them see another side of the ghetto that they didn’t know existed.” Wyclef doesn’t live in the ghetto any more, but he still has community-minded motivations, taken care of by the Wyclef Jean Foundation, which helps 10 children from deprived backgrounds and musical talent. One is a guitar player from the Czech Republic, one a saxophonist. “He got drama, mom’s on welfare, all kinds of things. Same thing with me, my mom was on welfare.”
This wide-ranging album comes at a good time. The film Ghost Dog, directed by Jim Jarmusch with an original score by the RZA from Staten Island hip-hop collective Wu Tang Clan, has relocated the codes of hip- hop in a visionary new context. William Shaw’s book Westsiders, a document of struggling rappers from the decimated ghettos of south central Los Angeles, vividly places the language and motivations of hip-hop in a violent and deprived social landscape. The unsolved murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, after a prolonged and vicious west versus east slanging match, seem to have forced gangsta rap to take stock. “You can feel that it’s changed,” Wyclef says. “It’s more of a peaceful environment … there’s more unity.”
Maybe. Wyclef has a beef of his own, with a young rapper called Canibus. Having already fallen out with the veteran rapper LL Cool J, Canibus has turned on Wyclef, who acted as executive producer on his debut album and who Canibus now accuses of “spoiling” it.
Wyclef’s retaliation – the track Where’s Canibus? – refers to a stage appearance they shared when Canibus dressed himself up to look platinum, in an ambitious prediction of album sales. “I came up with a name for him,” says Wyclef. “He’s called the Tinman. It ain’t that serious cause I’m a boxer,” says Wyclef. “I’ll take him in the ring, though, any day.” It’s a careful response because, while he doesn’t want to get shot, Wyclef also can’t be seen to back down. To maintain his precarious pole position – credible with both suburban European and urban American audiences – Wyclef has to walk a high wire. He has to be both preacher and playa. Hip-hop, at its best, is one of the world’s most spontaneous and vibrant cultural forms; at its worst, it can be nasty, violent and misogynistic. Sometimes it can be both at the same time. Contradictions like this also swirl around Wyclef: on one level, son of a preacher man full of universal concerns, on another, lad-about-town, braggart, stud. (“Put me down with the greats as far as relationships,” he says.) The man from Columbia records tells me they see Wyclef as a Bob Marley. And there’s no doubt he could be a contender for that title: likeEMarley he has an instinctive sense of universality. But only time will tellEwhether he can pull off the comparison. If he does, it will be the most impressive high-wire walk of his life.