by Wyclef Jean
She and I started out in a friendship that was beautiful, and over time it developed into a deep romance. And since it didn’t work out—and it tore her up emotionally—a lot of people have blamed me for Lauryn’s emotional instability and artistic inconsistency afterward. It’s sad but true that she’s not been herself as an artist in the years since The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. No one is more upset about that than I am. I mean it; I am her biggest fan and I always will be.
I’ve been told by many angry people who are also her fans that if I hadn’t messed with her she would not have gone so insane. My response to that is: you can talk as much as you want to talk, because talking is easy, because you’re not the one who was in my shoes. You’re not the one who had to be around that beautiful woman 24/7 sharing genius space with her. We shared a creation, one made of our passion, molded into music that went out into the world and became an album that seized the times. It’s the yin and the yang; there is a give and a take. We gave of ourselves, we put ourselves together to make something, and what happened was the price we had to pay. I wouldn’t take that back if it meant taking back what we did with the Fugees. I can’t speak for her, but I hope she feels the same.
THE SCORE WAS THE soundtrack I’d had in my head for a long time, and the album that Lauryn, Pras, and I were destined to make. It was driven by my relationship with Lauryn, but let me say right now that we couldn’t have done it without Pras. Out of the three of us, he was the hustler, he was the business mind, and he was the most like a record-label visionary. He was like our L. A. Reid or Clive Davis: he had the vision to bring us together because he felt that magic would happen. It was his idea to get my voice on that first record, because he knew that if he got me into the studio with Lauryn and Marcy and him, something really good would come out of it. Along the way he contributed all kinds of pieces to the puzzle that needed to be there. He brought that rock element to the group and always had great production ideas in the studio because he loved rock music, from Metallica to Guns N’ Roses. The sounds of those records and the way they were produced was something that affected his idea of recording and it kept our music fresh. Pras was always an equal partner, and he was always the glue that kept the three of us together. Pras suffered a lot because of that, too. He had to deal with all of the emotional ups and downs going on between Lauryn and me. He had to play the middle, sometimes on my side, sometimes on hers, depending on what was going on. He had to see both points of view and then do what it took to keep the train moving. I know his attitude as things got more intense with Lauryn and me was always, “Damn, I didn’t create this shit to have to deal with this shit.” He got the short end of the stick. He put all that frustration he was feeling aside while we were together doing our thing, but after we dismantled the group, all of it came out. And he had every reason to be angry, because an incredible group that he put together got taken down by a romance.
No matter what was going on, though, the Fugees never, ever fought about music. We had complete synergy and complete respect on that level because our attitude was that a song wasn’t right until all three of us felt comfortable with it. If somebody was uncomfortable, it was wrong and we had to keep working. There was a lot of trust between us at the time on a musical level, so even when Lauryn wanted to kill me, she’d respect me if I said she needed to do another vocal take and know I wasn’t just saying it because we were fighting. It was the same way I respected her when she told me I needed to change a line in my verse or adjust the musical arrangement. I never for a minute thought that her motives for saying that or not agreeing with me were anything but pure. I knew that just like me, Lauryn’s first love is music, and that she’d never let her other feelings get in the way of the art. I was the composer, Lauryn brought the soul, and Pras brought the over-the-top rock element. And we knew that about each other and we knew that formula worked because it allowed our individual talents to shine within our group dynamic. We were all for one and one for all where it counted.
We brought all of our talent—and all of our drama—to The Score. There is no better snapshot of who we were as a group than that album. By the time I sat down to get the music for the album together, I had learned my way around a mixing board from Salaam Remi and Khalis Bayyan and, courtesy of Renel Duplessis, I had all the vintage gear I needed to get the sounds I heard in my head onto tape. We were of one mind about that, because we’d spent so much time together. This next album was going to be us on the road, right in the studio, telling the story of who we were and the world we lived in. We weren’t going to let a producer shape us into anything other than ourselves, because no one was better fit for the job. I was the composer, so I led the charge.
I started collecting samples from old records and made beats on my MPC. I was always really into jazz, ever since my days in the high school jazz band, so Miles Davis and John Coltrane had a lot to do with how I set about composing the music. Just listen to Blue Train, Giant Steps, and On the Corner and you’ll know everything there is to know about me as a composer and producer from that point until today. Those cats knew musical space inside and out, and I hope I’ve taken even a little piece of that wisdom and put it into what I do.
I wanted the depth of jazz, but I wanted a pop sensibility, too, so my reference there when I started writing the music for The Score was “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. I listened to that song over and over and it was a hugely inspirational theme to me. It had the mood and vibe that I wanted for the album—something beautiful and grand. I wanted that orchestral sound and those sad melodies behind Lauryn’s vocals. I wanted to capture how important a song like that sounds. The only problem was that I didn’t have a philharmonic orchestra in the Booga Basement and I sure as hell couldn’t afford to hire one. I didn’t even know enough string players to fake a quartet. But that didn’t bother me because I had always gotten by on what I had. I took a few weeks to go through records I had to create samples that captured the grandeur of an orchestra, and I married them to beats that reflected the gritty attitude of the streets.
The place where The Score was made is the backdrop to the album; it defines it more than fans can probably understand. The Booga Basement was a unique space, and the ’hood was a character all its own. The people that came in and out of that place every day all those years—the thugs, the dealers, the gangsters, the murderers, the innocents, the hustlers, the lost souls, the good, the bad, and the ugly—they are all a piece of that record. Their energy was in that room because the door to the Booga was always open. I’d learned that from my grandmother back in Haiti: leave your door open to everyone in the neighborhood so that no one will steal from you. If you make your home their home, all will respect it. Some days I woke up to rats running all over the basement and the room where I slept; some days I woke up to someone from the neighborhood crashed out on the floor. It was never boring.
The everyday sounds of our neighborhood were part of the music as if they were nothing special, but in that context they became epic. When I listen to those songs today, now that so much time has passed, I appreciate it all the more. In the skits on the album you hear Chinese voices, which were very much a part of our world. We hung out at the Chinese man’s grocery store and we had watched kung fu movies from the time we were kids. I’m a huge fan of the marital arts, and Asian stars from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan. In my mind, I’ve considered myself a ninja forever, and if you’re laughing as you read this, go ask anyone who grew up with me. I’m agile and I always have been—I’m telling you. On The Score, when you hear the voice of Shannon Briggs on a skit it’s no joke. That’s him. He is a boxer we knew from around the way who came in and ad-libbed for us. He said, “Yo, my name is Shannon Briggs. I get paid to knock people out.” It was the truth.
The album was all that we were; it was where we were from, all the sights and sounds, and all the drama between us. I heard love songs, I heard true stories, I heard a score. I heard an extension of the Shakespearean play that Lauryn a
nd I had been in together, set to our personal story. We had become an opera unto ourselves and now we had the ability to sing it out in our own way.
When we got off the road and back to the Booga and started in on working, it became serious real quick. It was like the intensity of touring—of proving ourselves night after night—had nowhere to go, so we focused it on the songs. You’d think we’d want to chill for a while and relax, but we didn’t. Grinding was instinct at that point. I think after, like, one day of sleep I was restless and ready to work, and so were Pras and Lauryn. We got right to it, locking ourselves down in that basement for hours. The studio was our canvas and the album came together naturally. All that we’d worked out subconsciously on the road flowed through us once we were there in our own backyard.
I sampled almost everything you hear on that album using an Akai S900, which is the cornerstone of all hip-hop created from the late eighties through to today. For those of you who don’t know what that machine is, it’s the first sampler that was introduced to the mass market. It was affordable, it was basic, it was the Sony Walkman of making beats. I’d say it was like the first iPod, except that the S900 didn’t change much from the time it first came out in 1986 until it was updated in 1996. It allowed you to record thirty pieces of music no longer than ten seconds each onto its memory chip, and if you have enjoyed any hip-hop record released between 1987 and 1999, I’m telling you, most of what you are hearing is the Akai S900 at work, from De La Soul to A Tribe Called Quest to Outkast to Dr. Dre. It should be in the hip-hop hall of fame.
My other go-to machine was a Linn 9000, which is one of the oldest and still one of the best-sounding drum machines money can buy. Roger Linn was a sound engineer and instrument designer who created the first real drum machine, the LM-1 in 1979. He recorded a session drummer playing a real drum kit and converted it into digital samples, so the machine sounded like a human being. All of his machines, including the Linn 9000, can be heard on every great early-eighties synthesizer-oriented album, from Michael Jackson to Prince to all the New Wave English bands. In the late eighties, Linn’s company went out of business, but Roger was recruited by Akai where he invented the MPC 60, which combines sequencing and sampling with performance pads—basically making it the perfect drum machine. It is now called the MPC 3000 and it’s still used onstage and in the studio by hip-hop artists everywhere.
When it came out, the Linn 9000 was expensive—it was about five thousand dollars—but by the time I was putting the Booga studio together in the early nineties, it was old. Everyone was using MPC 3000s and a lot of cats didn’t know how to use a Linn. I had learned that thing backward and forward from Khalis, so I was all about it. I could get drum sounds from the same era that Lauryn was channeling. It was perfect.
The way the Fugees worked never changed: our producer would give us a beat and when we all felt it, we’d take turns freestyling until the song presented itself to us. Lauryn always found the melody, and a lot of the time she’d come with the lyrical hook, too. Then we’d all find our way around the song and the subject matter. We were used to having someone guide us in the past, and we’d needed it before, but times had changed. We had evolved out there on the road playing shows all over Europe, at college campuses all over America, and we knew who we were now. We knew what we wanted to say and how we wanted it to sound. We still needed a producer to feed us a beat, but this time that producer was me.
One of our greatest moments of creation was unexpected, and like the greatest surprises, it yielded one of the greatest songs we ever wrote. The way it went down is a real inside look into who we were, and it’s a moment I will never forget. The song I’m talking about is “Ready or Not.” The main studio at the Booga was downstairs in the garage. That is where we did vocals, and that is where the mixing board, keyboards, and microphones were. Up on the first landing, still in the garage, before you got into the house, there was a small storage room and that’s where I slept most nights. That little closet became my home away from home. It was almost like a monk’s room in a monastery, with nothing in it that would take away from my pursuit of the music. I had a bed, my sampler, my Linn, a TV, and nothing else. The room had no insulation, so it was cold, but I didn’t care: it was my crib. And I was in there one rainy day, watching Sleepwalkers, one of my favorite movies, which is based on the Stephen King book, while I worked on a track. One of my brothers had put me on to Enya, whose music I still love to this day. When I first heard her I became obsessed, so I was in there messing around with some samples of her songs because I loved the moodiness of them. I had a simple hip-hop break beat going on my Linn 9000 and was looping an Enya sample over it on my MPC.
Just then my door burst open, and Lauryn Hill was standing there.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
She scanned the room, and then looked me in the eye. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve got a beat and a loop. I’m just messin’ with this.”
We both sat in the semidark just listening. The sample came back around, and then the beat kicked in—doom-cha, doom-cha. And then Lauryn started singing.
“Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide … I’m gonna find you, and make you love me.”
I got shivers all up my spine. It was magic. We both knew it.
“Keep goin’,” is all I could manage to say.
That song was born in that small room, just the two of us alone in the dark. She closed the door, she kept singing, and as the beat rolled on the words flowed out of her. It was natural, it was beautiful, and I fell more in love with her on the spot. That moment in that closet I called a bedroom was one of the most meaningful times we ever shared. When we finished the final recording a few weeks later, Lauryn cried during one vocal take, after she’d run through the song a few times. The version you hear on the record is the one where she cried, because there was none more honest. She and I were going through our shit, and that song and her performance says more than I could ever put down here on this page.
The way I justified being with Lauryn in the studio and doing music the way we were and being with my wife at the same time was that I loved what Lauryn and I had while we were creating. She was my muse and we did beautiful things together, but I loved being at home with someone who had nothing to do with the music industry or the art of music at all. Claudinette loves music, but she and I barely talked about it at home. She was the woman who made me believe, like she did from the beginning, that I was going to get wherever I wanted to go in the crazy industry she let me run wild in. She wasn’t with me because of what I did; she was with me because she loved me for the funny, witty character I am.
“READY OR NOT” BECAME the Fugees’ anthem, the first song music fans around the world remembered us for. Though, in my opinion it’s not the essence of The Score. To me, “Zealots” is the most important track on that album. It’s not the most pop friendly, but it lays out our philosophy. I took a sample of “I Only Have Eyes for You,” by the Flamingos, which is a classic, beautiful, orchestral love song. The lyrics to “Zealots” are deep because I worked on my verses with my brother Sam, who was in law school at the time. Sam was always a scholar, whereas I never was, but we understand each other when it comes to the meaning of life and human knowledge. I wanted to write a verse that referenced all of the great thinkers that mankind has known, but I’d not read the books enough to know the great from the fake. Sam did, and he gave me an academic’s take on a battle rap.
I haunt MCs like Mephistopheles
Bringin’ swords of Damocles
Secret Service keep a close watch as if my name was Kennedy
Abstract raps simple with a street format
Gaze into the sky and measure planets by parallax
Check out the retrograde motion, kill the notion
Of biting and recycling and calling it your own creation
I feel like Rockwell, “somebody’s watching me.”
That was what
Sam inspired. He kicked that knowledge my way. He gave me the word “parallax,” which is the difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight. I love that whole concept: it means what you see may be something else if you change your perspective.
The Score is full of consciousness on that level but the three of us didn’t set out to make a record like that. We wanted to speak to our lives and the times more than we had on Blunted, but we didn’t try to project any message directly. We wanted to make music that moved the population, and we wanted it to move us, and be fly. We always knew that we would never talk garbage; we wanted to speak the truth without being preachy. All we ever talked about was how to just be ourselves, and how to let our own beliefs, such as they were, come through us by focusing our minds on the music. We were and we are three different people, so we knew that the messages would be in the same spirit, but definitely different. So we never set out with a goal for a particular song; we just trusted in each other to be what we were, and trusted our collective mind to make something real. The messages in the music came through straight from our souls, from our subconscious, not guided by any conscious decisions.
The Score is a yearbook; it’s the growth of three individual talents. At the time, Pras was in Five Towns College and Lauryn was attending Columbia University, so they were reading and learning, becoming educated and enlightened. They grew beyond the street-corner rhyming we did on Blunted. I had to keep up so I relied on my brother Sam, like I said. The Score was very philosophized, and I think that’s why there has not been another Fugees album. After all this time, and even though we don’t speak about it, I believe that we all know what it means to make a Fugees album. The synergy of the three is the Fugees. We know how it is supposed to sound and we know how deep it needs to be, and that’s not there between us now. Doing anything but our best would be an insult to what we’ve done.
