Purpose

by Wyclef Jean

  Our synergy was unique, and you can hear it all over our music. It was born from all that time we spent together, and we don’t do that at all anymore. Back then we knew each other’s every thought and I don’t care who you are; you can’t just walk back into a studio after being apart for so long—after not even talking for years—and expect that magic to be there. We’re all three different people, and different in different ways. On the cover of Blunted was a three-headed baby and a hand holding it down: that was the Fugees. We were tied at the hip 24/7, until that knot came loose.

  LOOKING BACK AT WHAT inspired me musically and lyrically during the creation of The Score, I have to say that one of the biggest influences on me personally was the church. I had left my father’s house, but he still had hopes of bringing me back into Christian music, so he sent me Jimmy Swaggart books and all kinds of things to read, acting like he didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. The truth is, as much as we disagreed, I missed my dad and I missed the church, but I wasn’t going to stop making hip-hop. So Christianity was on my mind when I was writing lyrics. I had read the Bible cover to cover several times by then and all of those stories were a part of what I was writing. Listen to my rhymes, on songs like “Manifest”:

  I woke up this morning

  I was feeling kinda high

  It was me, Jesus Christ and Haile Selassie

  Selassie said greetings in the name of the most high

  Jah Rastafari

  Christ took a sip of the Amaretto

  Passed it down the table, said today I’ll be betrayed by one of you 12 disciples

  Give me a clue who could do this to you?

  The kid on the block who makes less money than you.

  That was my version of the story of Judas betraying Christ for the gold.

  I’ll never stop being impressed by how much Lauryn came into her own on The Score. She was the caterpillar that became a butterfly. On Blunted she was still learning how to rhyme, so lyrically she had the training wheels on. Pras and I held her back because she wasn’t ready to be unleashed. In the years between, she wrote, she practiced, and she became a true artist. She is one hell of a rapper, and that came shining through on The Score. Just like I’d been waiting to shine as a producer, she’d been waiting to do it as a rapper, so once we both got our chance, we ran with it. We did it our way.

  ONE OF THE THINGS that helped Lauryn to rap better was something that helped all three of us become better rappers. It is what I call our training, and it involved a group from New Jersey called the Outsidaz. We used to hang with them a lot, just passing the microphone, ciphering, doing what people call battle rapping. They were fixtures at the Booga and in our lives back then and we all took pieces of what they did, because they were the best.

  The Outsidaz are legends in nineties hip-hop: everyone from Eminem to Big L references them in their songs if you go deep enough into their catalogs. Those guys were like the Shaolin monks of freestyling at the time as far as I was concerned. They were the Wu-Tang of New Jersey, but they never got the recognition, because it takes more than talent to be successful. RZA is one hell of a business man, and unfortunately the RZA of the Outsidaz, Slang Ton, ended up getting shot before he could really get things going for them. All I can say is that if you’ve heard the earliest, nastiest, most out-there rhymes that Eminem threw down back in the day, these guys were leagues beyond that. They were just ill and completely insane. Eminem name-checks them on his first album, because he had to; he is a continuation of what they started.

  The only way I can describe them is to say that the Outsidaz were ’hood thug nerds, if you can imagine that. They were street, and they were tough, but somehow they had spent years in the library and had greater book-smarts than all the kids who stayed in school. They were the kids who dropped out of school because they were bored but who learned about the world by reading every single book they could find on the subjects that interested them.

  When we were making The Score, Young Zee and Pacewon and Slang Ton, rest in peace, came to the Booga all the time. Their swagger was nothing you could even describe. Slang read a lot of science all the time, so he based his rhyme structure on a metaphoric logical style like Killah Priest from Wu-Tang Clan. When Slang Ton rapped, you would understand two out of every five sentences in the precalculated equations he spit. But that’s exactly what he wanted: he intended to grab your attention and make you think, but he didn’t want you to know for sure what he was talking about. He wasn’t keeping secrets, because if you asked him what it all meant, he’d break it down for you like a professor to a student. But he was all about avoiding the obvious when it came to lyrics.

  Slang Ton was also very high all the time. As someone who gets high, listen to me when I tell you that he was real high. The guy was so high that he once spit on my dog. I had a German Shepherd mix named Black that I got for protection when I started living in the Booga full-time. The dog kept watch and let me know when someone was coming in, but overall he was pretty relaxed. Except when Slang Ton came around: that dog would sit in front of that dude and growl the whole time until he got up and left. Black just hated this guy. Slang Ton tried to ignore it, until the one day when he’d had enough and just spat full in my dog’s face. The dog snapped his jaws at him, as I would have if I were a dog.

  “Man, what did you do that for?” I asked him.

  “Fuckin’ dog was looking at me funny.” And he said no more.

  WHEN THE OUTSIDAZ CAME around, it was a chance for the Fugees to learn a few things, because, like I said, they were freestyle gods. They were like Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid for us: we couldn’t understand how they were so good, but we sure as hell knew they were good. So we knew to pay close attention to everything they did. They loved to battle rap, and they’d do it everywhere they went, whether or not they had opponents. When they didn’t, they’d just battle among themselves, and those moments were when the learning happened for observers like us.

  We went head-to-head with them whenever they were around, and as much as the Fugees lost, which we usually did, we learned a lot. Those ciphers were like being on a team with the world’s toughest coach, or learning how to play a sport from a professional athlete when you’re still a kid. In those cases you’ll never be better than your teacher or your opponent, but that doesn’t matter. The act of battling them and losing teaches you more than the average coach would. The Fugees were never going to be better than the Outsidaz, but their skills pushed the limits of our rhyme abilities into new territory. Believe me, we tried, but there was no beating those dudes. They had already thought about what they were going to say to you three or four sentences down the road while they delivered their first line. And the more they got to know us, the more they knew how to take us out, because they learned our moves. It got to the point where they were in our heads, responding to what they knew we were going to say about them before we even tried to spit it.

  There is only one thing you can do when you come up against talent like that: if you can’t beat them, you join them. And so we asked the Outsidaz to do a track called “Cowboys” with us on The Score, and then we made them a part of our crew, the Refugee Camp, and got them an album deal. I came up with the concept for the song “Cowboys,” because that’s what I do. I told everyone to come in and build a verse off that theme and came up with the beat and music. Young Zee, he just talked right out of his brain on that track, man. His verse was amazing. There’s no mystery there: when the Outs hooked up with the Fugees, all kinds of weed was smoked. I’d fill this huge tobacco pipe, and those guys always came through with a few types of shit. We’d put all that weed and all creativity in one room and we always walked away with something special.

  OUR FORMULA WAS PERFECTED on The Score, and that’s why it crossed over into more markets around the world than most rap albums at the time. People responded to Lauryn’s voice, which is beautiful, like an angel. What she did was calm the group and the music down. Pras and I had so much
energy and so much to say that we were lyrical chaos: we made sense but we ran around yelling everything to make our point, because that’s how much passion we had. When Lauryn dropped into a song, everything relaxed. She was the element that kept Pras and me in check. She held it all together and made everything we did lyrically make sense.

  I know why Pras and I were so noisy: we listened to a lot of Metallica at the time. Don’t laugh; it’s true. We liked their intensity and their phrasing. Metallica knows how to get their point across. So if you look at our group as two MCs with too much energy and a lot to say, and one gifted rapper and soul singer who kept it all in balance, the Fugees will make sense to you. Our music was both types: conscious hip-hop and love songs, all in one.

  You can hear it all on “Killing Me Softly,” which was sampled and reinterpreted from Roberta Flack. You can also hear it on the song “The Score,”; that one was my concept, too. It is a sample of every other song on the album, as if the album is a movie and the song “The Score” is the soundtrack.

  The song “Family Business” came from Salaam Remi and it’s a basic Fugees track, while “The Mask” came out of me telling everyone to come into the studio with a lyrical mask for themselves to wear in the song.

  When we made The Score, I was in what I’ve come to call my scientist mode: I was in the lab, and on an adventure. I was experimenting, mixing things up, trying all the combinations I could think of until the music was right. It was a collaborative atmosphere, so there are certain things that I feel people took credit for in the making of that record that really came from me. At the time I was so concerned with getting it all together and driving us forward without losing all that momentum from touring that I didn’t take credit for a lot of things that were all my idea. Now that I know more about publishing and songwriting, a lot of the credits on those songs would have been listed differently. I’m not saying I didn’t get my credits. I am just saying that the collaborative environment among the people within the group and the people hanging around our studio during the creation of the record, that got more of them listed with specific credits than should have been.

  This doesn’t apply only to me, by the way. My cousin Jerry “Wonder” Duplessis, who I gave that nickname, was a big part of those sessions. He earned that title during the recording of The Score because he brought wonder to the tracks. He did so much more than he’s credited with, too. He was the spirit of the project and he was the backbone of that record, but since he wasn’t some huge producer yet, his contributions were downplayed. Jerry’s skills tripled through the making of that record and he came into his own afterward, but I was still fifty yards ahead of him.

  I had new ideas about everything we did. On my cover of “No Woman, No Cry,” I decided to detune my electric guitar completely so that it sounded like an acoustic. I didn’t have an acoustic at the time, but if you listen to that song you’d never know it because I was able to make my guitar sound like the original. The song “Manifest,” which is the outro of the record, I wrote from the perspective of a composer or a screenwriter-director starring in his own picture. I had the whole record in my mind, and at times I was like a dictator, telling Lauryn and Pras, “This is the story we’re telling; this is how our movie is going to be.” If you think about The Score as a film, I am the one who wrote the plot and assigned everyone their roles. I gave them their motivation when they didn’t know what it was in a particular scene. I was always the one driving things, but everyone else’s role was equally important; that’s for sure.

  One song that brings that whole period of time back to me is “Mista Mista.” It’s a simple tune, just me and my guitar, but I’ll never forget the night I wrote it. It wasn’t something I pored over; I just came home to the studio drunk out of my mind after a long night out at a club, so what you’re hearing on that track is the sound of Wyclef recording intoxicated.

  I don’t remember where I was, but I stumbled home that night, passing a homeless guy that was one of the local crackheads we all knew. He asked me for a dollar, because he always asked me for a dollar.

  “Mista, can I get a dollar so I can get the hell off this street?”

  “No, man.”

  “Can I get a dollar so I can go get me something to eat?”

  “No, man. You know damn well if I give you a dollar you gonna go smoke crack.”

  “No, no, Mista, I don’t do that no more. I’m drug-free! I’m drug-free!”

  His words and his face kept going around in my mind all the way to my door. When I got to the studio, I picked up the guitar, pressed Record and what you hear is what came out. Sometimes it’s just right the first time.

  That wasn’t the case with Lauryn’s masterpiece on The Score, “Killing Me Softly.” Getting that song done was an album unto itself. If you want to know the meaning of perfectionist, go into the studio with Lauryn Hill when she has her mind set on something. That woman is a visionary and recording that song, to her, was paying respect to the history of soul. She spent a year on that song, because she’d been talking about it on the road at least that long, deciding if she wanted to do it—and if she could do it right, but make it her own.

  Taking on a classic like that was stepping out for sure, and it didn’t matter how much Pras and I encouraged her, she had to make that decision for herself. We knew she could do it, but only her vote counted, you understand?

  I think the turning point was our relationship. As things got more complicated between us, that song came alive to her because she felt it in a very real way. It became a symbol of what was wrong and what was right between her and me, and because of that she wanted her version to be completely perfect. The thing was, we didn’t have session musicians on hand to recreate that song properly for her, so we worked and worked on it to get the backing track to sound as close to the original as we could. It took weeks, all while she and I went through our ups and downs, so that process alone became a love affair of the deepest kind, in both heart and soul. We both had to get this track right; it meant everything. We didn’t let ourselves say why, but we didn’t have to. We both knew.

  I enlisted what I call the Defender Rhodes to make that song swing the way it does. That’s a series of pads on the S900 that when you sync them to your keyboard, it sounds just like a vintage seventies Fender Rhodes organ. I played it until I got the part right, and I messed with the drum tracks until it all came together.

  Pras was the one who understood that the beauty of this cover was going to be its simplicity. I kept trying to add more sounds, more instrumentation, trying to capture the grandeur of the original. I wanted it to keep up with the depth of Lauryn’s soul on those vocals. Pras was the one who turned my head around.

  “No, man, we don’t need any more music. You got to scale that back,” he said. “Fuck the music. All we need is the break beat and the bass.”

  “You crazy, man,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Do you hear what she’s laying down? We can’t just leave that out there without nothing else.”

  “You got to trust me, man. Just try it.”

  He was right. The break and the bass carried that whole record. Lauryn needed nothing else. On top of that simple arrangement made on my Defender Rhodes, Lauryn’s voice is a dream, and I don’t care what anyone says, I think she sounds better than Roberta on the original version. Maybe that’s just because I feel the yearning in her voice, because I know where her pain is coming from. I’m sorry for causing it, but at the same time, I’m proud that we made something so beautiful out of a confusion we just couldn’t help.

  Let me give you an example of how intense this situation was. I knew that Lauryn and I were like fire and gasoline. I’m being real: when I decided to marry Claudinette, I made a life choice because she was the right woman for the life I wanted: a safe one. But at the same time I knew that our getting married wouldn’t mean the end of Lauryn and me. That would be like asking the sun to shine only between the hours of noon and 5:00 PM, you understand what I’m sayin
g to you? What I thought would happen was that Lauryn and I would continue to be together on the road, as a part of what we did together musically, until she fell in love with someone else and got married. That would be the only out: once we were both married, this affair would come to a natural end and we’d just be friends. Her marriage and pregnancy is what put an end to what we had, so I suppose I was right. Unfortunately the friendship part didn’t come along the way I’d pictured it would. But long before that, everything came to the surface—which I didn’t count on at all.

  Claudinette knew that there was something going on aside from our musical relationship, and she called me out on that. She told me she wanted to talk to Lauryn face-to-face, not just one-on-one: she wanted me right there beside her, because, according to her, that was the only way she’d be able to understand what was really going on between us. So one night, when Claud and I were at home and this topic came up, she made me call Lauryn and ask her to drive over to our house. It was more like Claud had hijacked me: the whole time I was on the phone with Lauryn, Claud was hitting me over the head with the phone, nonstop. She needed this to happen before any more time went by. She was over this shit and she was going to figure out what the hell was going on.

  Lauryn drove over in her car, and Claudinette and I came downstairs. Claudinette jumped in shotgun, right next to Lauryn, and I got in the backseat, thinking I’d never get out of there alive. The gig was up, man. I started sweating. I don’t think it was summer—I have no idea—I don’t even think Lauryn’s car was heated, but I was sweating like I had malaria. I could not deal with this situation on any level. I had a death fever leaking out of me from head to toe.