Purpose

by Wyclef Jean

  “Who is the owner of this house?” they yelled.

  “He’s not here,” I said.

  “Who is responsible for that goat outside?”

  From a very young age I had learned not to trust any kind of organized army, especially those dressed in black.

  “What goat?” I asked. “Nobody here has a goat.”

  “We are taking the animal,” they said.

  They covered the goat in blankets and off he went in an Animal Rescue Unit vehicle. Our eyes locked as they were loading him in and I swear to you his expression said it all: “If only I could talk, I’d tell these motherfuckers what you did to me, taking me to a club, putting me in a goddamned shirt. Fuck you.”

  Whatever, goat, you’d have been stew if it weren’t for me.

  THIS IS HOW HUNGRY we were as a support group. We once opened up for KRS-ONE and after our last song we dropped the instrumental of “The Bridge Is Over” and freestyled over it. KRS’s DJ, Kenny Parker, ran out from backstage, snatched our DJ by the shirt, threw him away from the decks, took the record off, and walked offstage with it. We deserved that because it was a ballsy thing to do, freestyling over one of his biggest hits, basically his theme song, just to prove to him personally that we could rhyme over his beat. We wanted to show him we were coming in, and that we’d thought we had arrived. That was cocky and tasteless.

  We opened up for Biggie and Puffy, too, just after they’d come out with “Warning” and were really starting to get on. We were all at some college show. At that time record labels made all of the acts they were breaking do college tours, because back then the colleges had money to bring in concerts. In the nineties everyone had more money.

  “Hey yo, here’s how it’s gonna work tonight,” Biggie said. “We’re going on before you.”

  I wasn’t expecting that one.

  “But we’re opening for you,” I said. “They all came to see you.”

  Biggie was walking around our dressing room, picking up a few percussion instruments we had.

  “What you think is gonna happen after you come out with all these cheap tricks and cymbals and shit and get the people excited running around making noise like you do? I’m gonna just stand there and do my songs? You’ll be banging on all that shit and take the crowd with you. I’m going first.”

  We were flattered because Biggie was such a huge talent, man. We knew it, even then, just like anybody who ever saw him or has heard his records can say. This was too much for us to hear him say that we were too good to go on first.

  “No, man, we can’t do that,” I said. “We don’t have hits like you do. We love you, man. We want to open up for you. You’re the star, man. You’ve got to let us play first.”

  “Not tonight, homie,” Bigs said. “I’m up. You’re next. That’s how it’s going to happen.” And that’s how it went down. You’ve got to hand it to him; he saw how it was and did right by himself. I guess that reputation of us being the killer Fugees had gotten through to him.

  We opened for just about everyone that meant anything in nineties hip-hop: Nas, Wu-Tang, Onyx, Naughty by Nature, you name it. But once we became known as the opening act that stole the show, everybody was less friendly to us when we showed up that night.

  We were just happy to be out playing and touring Europe and America, no matter how small the shows were or how chilly the reception from the headlining act. We discovered who the Fugees really were on the road—in every way—because we loved to perform. With some studio experience under our belt, I started to put together a sound in my head for our next album. I was going to capture our energy the right way and translate that live feeling directly to our new music. I hadn’t developed the skills yet to create it all myself, but I was on my way.

  It wasn’t easy for me to explain it. Besides, we were working with Khalis Bayyan, who had sold 100 million records with Kool and the Gang, so I kept saying to myself, What the hell do you know? For me to have gone to Khalis and tell him I thought the tracks should sound different would have been like a nobody telling Dr. Dre he could teach him a few things. I’m not saying I hate Blunted. I’m just pointing out that of all the songs only three of them—“Vocab,” “Some Seek Stardom,” and “Giggles”—reflect the true sound of the Fugees because those were the only ones envisioned entirely by us as producers.

  We had something going on that record to be sure, but it didn’t showcase everything we had to give. It wasn’t who we really were and how we had come together as performers. We were learning, still new to the recording process, and we weren’t experienced enough to drive that train ourselves. We needed to make some changes, to get our onstage sound onto a record and to keep playing bigger markets. We had a reputation for being the opening band nobody wanted to book, and we weren’t going to get large-scale gigs on our own unless we had a radio hit. We were never going to rise higher in terms of our profile as a live act no matter how great we were, and if we did nothing about our recorded sound we’d just fade away. The one person who understood this was our product manager at Columbia, Jeff Burles. I recognized the problem, yet I had no solution for it. But our man Jeff did: he hooked us up right away with a producer named Salaam Remi to do a remix of a song on Blunted. We meshed so well with Salaam that—out of no disrespect at all—we left Le Jam and Khalis and signed a production deal with Salaam. We loved Khalis and how far he’d taken us as our mentor, but the truth was Salaam Remi understood exactly who we were and how we wanted to sound. We didn’t have to explain ourselves and we didn’t have to argue or try to convince anyone in the studio that what we were hearing was something they should consider. With Salaam, we were all on the same page before we even opened the book.

  Working with someone like-minded behind the mixing board was a breath of fresh air to us. Salaam was more current and closer to our age, and at the time he had produced a few songs we connected with. He did Super Cat’s “Ghetto Red Hot,” some stuff with Shabba Ranks, and other artists like them that bridged the gap between rap, dance hall, and early reggaeton. We felt cool with him, just comfortable off the bat, so we were able to stretch out and create musically. The first day we hung out with him was incredible; it was like that scene in the Ray Charles movie, Ray, when they recorded “What’d I Say.” He just put on a beat and said, “Clef, go in there. I want to see what you can do. I want to hear what your voice is.” He let it roll and we explored every idea we had musically.

  I freestyled for about twenty-five minutes, and Salaam still has that track today. It’s a priceless piece of off-the-cuff, free-association rhyming—and those are his words. Within that twenty-five minutes, at one point I said, “Yo, Mona Lisa, can I get a date on Friday and if you’re busy I wouldn’t mind taking Saturday-ay-ay.” And that one minute is what became our first big hit. Salaam heard it all. He was the guy who plucked that diamond from the mine. I sure as hell didn’t know that was a dope hook. I was too busy going off on my own trip. I don’t even remember why I was even thinking about the girl I called Mona Lisa. I hadn’t thought about her in years, and that day, there was no reason at all why she should come to mind. But that’s the way creation is, and you can’t question it when it comes.

  After I was done going crazy, Salaam put Lauryn in the booth, then Pras, and he took notes about what we did the whole time. Only after he’d heard all of us, and everything we spat out that day, did he come back to that Mona Lisa line. Honestly, all of us had forgotten about it; it had gone by that quick.

  “That line is gonna be the hook to this song.”

  “Who did that again?” Pras asked. I felt the same way—and I had sung that shit.

  “Listen,” Salaam said, “your group is so talented that we basically gotta dumb y’all down. We gotta bring it for the knuckleheads first. And then, after you win the knuckleheads over, everybody else will come. We gotta keep it knucklehead right now. Save that other shit for later. This hook is perfect, it’s got melody, it sticks in your mind, and nobody gonna forget it.” He was so r
ight about that.

  Before we set that loose on the world, Salaam started doing his thing by remixing “Nappy Heads” off of Blunted. We listened to him and focused on our flow and kept our rhymes basic and simple but never stupid, like A Tribe Called Quest always did. They are the best example of a group that always took you on a journey without confusion. They said what they had to and did it with wit and intelligence without flaunting their wordplay. They didn’t shy away from vocabulary either. Tribe was always a group that hit the balance right. We went for that same ideal on this remix and I think “Nappy Heads” captured the essence of who we were. It started making a whole lot of noise at college and major market radio and because of that, we immediately went back to Europe and then kept touring small markets around the United States.

  Here is a deep Fugees story to inspire all the kids who want to be entertainers of any kind. After we recorded “Nappy Heads,” the number-one station in New York City was Hot 97, and the number one DJ at that time was Funkmaster Flex. Salaam was a friend of his, so he brought the record to Flex personally. He gave him the original remix with our voices on it and an instrumental version with no vocals. Flex told Salaam he’d play it. So for the next two weeks, we listened to his show every night, waiting to hear it. A couple of days passed and he hadn’t played it, but we kept listening anyway. Every night we were like “Flex is about to play our shit.”

  Finally, he put the instrumental on, as he talked over it. We were freaking out. “Aw man, he’s never going to play this thing; he’s playing the instrumental!” We called our friends, but we weren’t sure if we should be excited or not because our song was being used as background music with no rapping. Is that something to be proud of?

  And then out of nowhere, after ten minutes of Flex gassing us, he dropped the verse, and we went wild.

  “Oh, Mona Lisa, can I get a date on Friday?”

  Our song was being played on the number one station in New York. My life was complete as far as I was concerned. That was in 1995. I had no idea what was coming next.

  ANYTHING WAS POSSIBLE AFTER that, and we all felt it. We’d delivered our song to the knuckleheads and they liked it. That moment was when things got real for the Fugees. We went back out on the road, continuing our grind 24/7 from that moment until we broke up. It was as if getting our song on Hot 97, in our home market, was the pistol at the beginning of the horse race. It didn’t matter what we’d done before that. Afterward, everything was different: everything was faster and more intense than we could ever have imagined. It was a roller coaster with loops and corkscrews that never let us off. I’m not lying when I say this: the Fugees never took a break. The Fugees kept going. Then they just broke up.

  5

  THE SCORE

  I feel like an old man every time I tell a young gun what the music business was like in my day, when my group’s biggest record came out. I’m not even talking about how it was back in the days of Grandmaster Flash or even Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest. I’m talking about my day, which was only fifteen years ago—but that’s how much the world of music has changed. That’s a blink of an eye in the history of the business, but back then the things considered impossible today were still possible. Back then, in the nineties, a record could come out and sell 15 million copies if it struck a chord with the world at the time. Back then, radio could still make a somebody out of a nobody, and you couldn’t get recorded music for free unless you taped it live off the radio. People would line up to buy an artist’s new CD the day it came out, because to hear it, you had to own a piece of plastic with that song recorded on it.

  A record that talked about what was going on at the time was something that everyone had to have back then because it was more than a record: it was a moment. Dr. Dre’s The Chronic was one of those records. Biggie Smalls’s Ready to Die was one of those records. Tupac’s Me Against the World was one of those records. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt was one of those records. And the Fugees’ The Score was one of those records. Everybody who loves hip-hop has a memory from the summer of ’96 involving one of the singles off The Score. Don’t even try to tell me y’all don’t. And unlike a lot of those other records, songs like “Ready or Not,” and “Killing Me Softly,” crossed over to pop fans, too. Our second album was one of those records responsible for bringing hip-hop into the mainstream, and making it the driving force in music for the second half of the nineties into today.

  In 1996, there was so much great music out that for us to sell 15 million records worldwide really meant something. Hip-hop and R&B were at their best that year: Biggie and Tupac had just released their masterpieces, Jay-Z was heating up, TLC was at the top of the charts with CrazySexyCool, and Wu-Tang had us all in check. D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar was out, and Michael and Janet Jackson had just dropped “Scream.” We had to have skills to take those charts by storm the way we did.

  The Fugees were raw talent and passion, and it shone through. The musicality was there because we had lived side by side with each other since we started rehearsing in front of that mirror back in Jersey so many years before. There was love in that music, too, the love between Lauryn and me. We had become a real couple, even though I was with someone else at the time. It didn’t matter; she and I had our own musical and romantic language, and you can hear that in the music we made together. That’s why it touched people; that’s why it’s so real. You can hear the tension in the music, all of that impossible love. It was like we knew it wasn’t going to work from the start, but we couldn’t shy away. It’s not that it was wrong; it’s just that it was too good to be true. The way we related we couldn’t sustain because it was this whirlwind of creativity, this success, this performance. It was a fantasy that we engaged in because it was almost as if the music and the group and what we were doing drew us in. It was like all of that depended on this love we shared. But it wasn’t real-life love. And we found that out—boy, did we.

  The Score is raw storytelling: it’s a candid picture of who we were and the times we were living in. We didn’t make it in a slick upscale studio; we made it in a basement in the ’hood in New Jersey. Our recordings were pure—no tricks in sight—and it connected with music fans around the world. We had built our fan base one country and one city at a time, so when we came at everyone with The Score, they were ready.

  I remember after we did the remix for “Nappy Heads” with Salaam Remi, we went out on the road to Germany to do a gig with Das EFX. It was weird. They were some big hip-hop group in a very traditional style, and we were opening up doing our thing, with all our instruments and all that. We were always about having a band and a DJ because we were so much more than just rappers: we were a group. The live instrumentation sparked our performance, because we were musicians in every way. Our drummer at the time was a cool cat named Johnny Wise, who is known for how well he plays break beats. That was his main thing; overall his drum skills were pretty unique and not exactly technically perfect. But that was all good to me, because having a nontraditional drummer was important to me. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t play rock or jazz as well as what he did with us: the point was, no one played the breaks in our songs better. When Johnny got on the set and started laying it out, L, Pras, and I lit up and we did our thing. I had to feel that shuffle beat he laid down, because I was the Cab Calloway of the Fugees, leading everyone, showing them which way we were going to move.

  Those German shows were unusual because no one was expecting us. We’d smash them usually, but there was one night that we were in some area overrun by skinheads. I don’t know who booked a hip-hop group in that bar, but we walked in and the word “nigger” was spray painted real big on the wall. That was an interesting welcome. Honestly, I had no idea why or how that shit got there. Coming from the States, it made no sense to me. I didn’t think racism like that existed outside of the United States, because why would it? Racism here, and that word specifically, is a product of slavery and American history. What did Germans know about “nigger�
��? But fuck, there it was, on that wall for all to see, in the depths of this country. We were far from home but that same hate was all around us.

  We opened up and the show went alright, and then these German hip-hop groups played, who were dope and cool, but nothing could really offset that racism vibe that we felt the minute we walked in and saw that word on the wall. So it was a weird night. I didn’t feel like I was in danger, but I didn’t feel welcome or comfortable either, and there were all these German groups performing music that was invented by black people from the Bronx and the Caribbean. Still, I’ve got to hand it to those German rappers. I remember thinking how no one at home was going to believe me when I told them that I saw German hip-hop acts who knew what they were doing. I could hardly believe it myself.

  Our European travels took us to France, Iceland, England—just about every festival going on at the time—and that is how we built our name from the ground up. The funny thing was that when we landed back in New York with Das EFX, who we’d been supporting, all of us heard our song on the radio in the car on the ride home.

  “Yo, yo, this is the Fugees with ‘Nappy Heads,’ on Hot 97, where hip-hop lives!”

  We had been opening up for these guys and there was our song coming out of the radio. Apparently it had become one of the most played tracks in the few weeks we were gone and nobody had told us. Our stock had gone up from being in tenth place, playing support slots on European tours, to being the headliner right there in our hometown.

  That summer we played Jones Beach and I was about ready to lose my mind. It felt like we’d spent years rehearsing for that very moment, and this was something I couldn’t deny. No one could take that moment from us, standing there on that stage with the ocean behind us, playing our hearts out to a hometown crowd. All that rejection, all of that choreography learned in front of that mirror, all of it to go from a room in Germany with racist remarks on the wall to a sold-out crowd at Jones Beach. The minute I opened my mouth and sang, “Mona Lisa …” the entire audience sang the rest with me. They knew every single word. Our success didn’t come overnight, but when it came, it came faster than the blink of an eye and it was overwhelming, like the top of a roller coaster.