by Wyclef Jean
Lauryn is an amazing talent, but she needs to be directed. She needs a strong influence that she trusts to steer her creatively. Back in the day, she trusted me in the studio, but that trust is gone. After all we’d been through, it didn’t matter how much time had passed, she wasn’t going to let me fill that role again. She wasn’t going to turn herself over to me as her producer. It’s sad that we can’t get back to a place where she can just think of me as her big brother. I know that is asking the impossible, but the Fugees are used to accomplishing the impossible. I really thought we could get there after that much time apart, but I was wrong.
I didn’t expect things to be just like they were fifteen years ago when we got in the studio together again, but I didn’t expect her to be as opinionated about the direction she wanted everything to go. She wasn’t ready to bend from that, not even on one detail, so the sessions couldn’t progress at all. She and I knew what was fresh and what wasn’t, just like we always did. But when I talk about direction, what I mean is that she didn’t want to take any direction from me—like nothing, not even a suggestion.
It’s too bad, because in every country I go to, I’m always asked when the next Fugees album will come out. In some places we are like the Beatles. That is why Bono once called us the hip-hop Beatles, and I’ve never forgotten it.
That was an impressive thing for him to say, because I never saw us that way. I just saw three kids talking about their generation. We wanted to show people our age and everyone else that kids from the suburbs and kids from the ’hood could get together, and that we had more in common than we had differences. We showed them that kids from the ’hood weren’t savages and that the stereotype of what was being promoted wasn’t always true. We showed the world that kids like us could sing passionate songs. We could smile, make love, and be happy. Life could still be fun for us and we could all have the same dream and pursue the same life, all of us together. We took that message across the water and around the world. Hip-hop didn’t have to be about thug life; it could be just about life. And we should celebrate that, because life is a precious gift, and everyone’s life is different.
I never say never, but I don’t think we’ll be able to get the Fugees back together. I’d like to, but I think the magic is gone once and for all. It comes down to trust, and that is what we lost when we followed our hearts where our minds told us not to go.
7
WHEN THE CIRCLE BROKE
There was just one thing more bittersweet about my success than my drama with Lauryn: my father and I were not able to celebrate all that I achieved as it happened. I had gone against his wishes, and made a career in hip-hop, which he considered bum music, so he did not really want to hear about what I was doing. He understood that I had a group and that I was touring and that my music was supporting me as my occupation, but he did not ask questions about it, and he had no idea of the magnitude of the impact my music was having.
As for it being bum music, all I can say to that is that anyone who has listened to a Fugees song understands that our group was the furthest thing from bum music, by which my father meant gangsta rap or anything that glamorized the drug trade and violence. Bum music was what the hustlers and dealers in the ’hood listened to, so he associated anything that had the same beat and the same swagger with the culture that was destroying the community. The Fugees spoke the same language, but we weren’t saying the same things.
We were conscious and we had a message; we told our own stories and those stories represented what much of our generation was going through beyond the street tales that we heard on the radio all the time. Critics called us the most cohesive unit since Tribe Called Quest, and said that our eclecticism set us apart from every other group of the day. Even if he had read those reviews, it wouldn’t have made a difference to my father, because that boom-bap hip-hop break beat meant nothing but bum music to him.
When I was home from tours, visiting my parents, he and I spoke about the church, about our relatives, about the family, about everything but what I was doing on the road. It was like I was still in school and living at home: I was expected to come to services, and I did, and that was that. My mom understood things a little bit more, maybe because my brothers and sisters explained it all to her. She was proud of me and I think she understood how popular the group was, but still she didn’t really translate that to my dad. Or maybe she did; I don’t know. All I do know is that my father acted like it wasn’t any big deal, almost like it wasn’t making me a living. It didn’t matter that we were playing sold-out shows and making money; he saw it as a waste of time or some little diversion like Exact Change.
I wanted him to understand the magnitude, not only because I was proud of what my group was doing, but also because I wanted him to know that I had made something of myself. I wanted him to be proud that how he’d raised me worked; he may not have raised a church man like John Wycliffe, but he’d raised a leader like Toussaint Jean. I was a visionary in that sense, like he was. And like my father in his own way.
I wanted to find some way for my father and me to get on the same side of the invisible fence that stood between us. I wanted him to realize, as I had begun to, that he and I were more alike than different. It should be clear by now that my father was a proud man, so proud that he never believed in taking money from his own church for his salary. Until the day he died, he always worked at least one day job. When we were kids, he worked a few. He did janitor shifts at a few local hotels, cleaning bathrooms in the bars and lounges on weekends. I used to go with him, and I remember hearing cover bands doing songs by Bruce Springsteen. I learned to love songs like “Born in the U.S.A.,” which had a whole other layer of meaning to an immigrant like me.
During the years that the Fugees were at the top, my father worked for Donald Warnock, who owned a car dealership. My dad drove cars from one location to another, he worked in the garage doing oil changes, he washed cars, or he took care of anything else that needed to be done in the service and delivery departments. One day he was working with this Mexican brother, both of them under the hood.
“Hey Jean,” the guy said, because all of the Mexicans called him Jean. “You know something? You look like this guy who is a singer. He is in a group called the Fugees.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” my father said.
“Jean, you look like this guy. His forehead, it’s just like you. His nose, it’s the same as you. And his last name is the same as you, too.”
“What is his first name?”
“Wyclef.”
“His name is Wyclef?” my father said. “That is my son.”
“Wyclef Jean is your son? Then what the hell are you doing here, man? He is a big superstar! You’re funny, Jean. That’s not your son, man.”
“I am telling the truth. Wyclef Jean is my son.”
“Okay Jean! Sure he is. If Wyclef Jean was your son, you wouldn’t be working at Don Warnock. You would be owning Don Warnock!”
My father called me that night, out of the blue, which was unusual. If it weren’t an occasion of some sort, that usually meant something was wrong.
“Everything alright, Dad?”
“Yes, everything is fine. Everyone is fine. I have a question for you.”
“Alright.”
“What is it that you do?”
I wasn’t expecting that, and I wasn’t sure how I wanted to answer it either. We’d had this kind of unspoken agreement to not talk about the bum music I’d made it my life’s business to make. I hadn’t prepared for this day at all because I never expected him to ever ask me about it.
“Dad, you remember when I was younger and I told you I was into rap and that I’d joined this group called the Fugees, which was short for refugees?”
“You were making the bum music, the rap music, yes? Is that what you mean?”
“I know you think all rap is hoodlums and thugs and street music and gangs and drug addicts, but it’s not, Dad. It’s just a style of
music and a way of telling stories. I write lyrics about my life, but all of my inspiration is from the Bible.”
“I only hear bum music. Those kinds of people are the only ones I see listening to this kind of music.”
“I understand that, but it is not all the same. My group does something different and I think you’d really like it. We don’t talk about any of that. I turn to everything I learned from you in the church when I write lyrics.”
“That is good.”
“I think if you let me play some of it for you, you would understand.”
He was silent for a long moment. “Okay,” he said. “Come to church this Sunday. After the service we will sit and talk about what it is you do.”
When my dad opened the door that day, I was ready to walk through it. Our differences weren’t that much different than what had kept him and his father from seeing eye to eye. And though my father never told me directly how that affected him in his life, I know that it weighed on his mind. He never had the chance to build that bridge before his father passed.
“Dad, hip-hop doesn’t have to be all about drugs and violence,” I said. “It’s a way to tell a story. It’s just the backdrop, like a Bible song that retells something from scripture in a different way.”
“And do you need to use profanity to tell these stories?”
“Sometimes I do. Sometimes it’s necessary to make a point.”
“What is the story that you are trying to tell people?”
“We talk about our lives and who we are and where we come from. We talk about the world around us. It’s just life, and out in the world, people do use profanity once in a while, Dad.”
“Try not to do that, son.”
“Okay, Dad, I will. What most of my songs are about are Bible stories. I look at people I know or situations I come across in my life, and the first thing I do when I go to put them into a song is to think of which Bible story relates to my story the most. Then I use the knowledge in the Bible as my guide and my metaphor when I write my lyrics. It’s just like what you do in your sermons.”
He scratched his beard and looked at me a long time. “I think I understand this. You keep putting the Good Book in your words and you will spread knowledge.”
“That is what I’m trying to do, Dad. I also tell everyone that will listen about Haiti and where we come from. It’s a very big part of what we do.”
“And the people like your music? They come to see you play?”
“They do, Dad. A lot of them. All over the world.”
He nodded at me. “Then this is okay with me, son,” he said. “But one thing.”
“What, Dad?”
“Try not to use profanity.”
Something passed between my father and me that day, and from that point forward we had a man-to-man relationship. He and I were so alike that we had to oppose each other while I was growing up, but in our hearts we were the same. We might have chosen different churches to worship in to spread our gospel, but as different as they were, our goals as leaders were the same.
Now that my father is gone, I am grateful that he and I found a way to see eye to eye, because if we hadn’t, he would never have seen me play Carnegie Hall. It was a concert I called the All Star Jam that I organized to raise money for underprivileged inner-city youth through the Wyclef Jean Foundation in 2001. My debut double album, The Carnival had been such a success that I leveraged that attention to get this event together, and managed to get some big names as well, from Stevie Wonder to Eric Clapton to Marc Anthony to Mary J. Blige to Macy Gray. And it all went down on one of the most historic stages in the world. Carnegie Hall has a long history of classical music and jazz performances, but in terms of rock and roll and pop music, only the very best like the Beatles, Ike and Tina Turner, and Pink Floyd have played there. There is nothing like that building and that room; the acoustics are perfect and every seat in the house is, too. I couldn’t believe it when my manager at the time said that the Hall had agreed to host the show there.
It was going to be a night to remember for me, but still I was nervous that my dad might not come. I called him right away and begged him to come to see it. This was a big thing, because in all these years, he’d never come to see me perform my own music anywhere. I hoped that since he’d heard of Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton he’d realize that this wasn’t some ordinary concert for me. The best thing I had going for me was that it was Carnegie Hall—he would definitely respect that—but I still had only a fifty-fifty chance.
Let me explain something: my father didn’t care about how important some event was to anyone else in the world; he only did what he wanted to do. I’m talking about a man who turned down an opportunity to come to the White House with me to meet Bill Clinton. It’s true. I was invited to an event there and was allowed to bring my parents. My father’s response? “I do not want to meet Bill Clinton. My question to you is this: why do you want to meet Bill Clinton? He will not do anything for you! He is going to use you for his own image. I do not go. And you—you should not go!”
My father was so stubborn that he refused to go to the hospital or the doctors’ office regularly even when he felt sick. “Why would I go to get checked up?” he would ask. “I already know I am sick, just as I know I will get well. If I go to the hospital now they will take my blood, and I will see that blood no more. They will have that piece of me and they will put that blood in a blood bank. Then they will sell it for money. I do not go!”
What I’m trying to explain to you is that I had to come up with some kind of a pitch to get this guy to Carnegie Hall. Anybody else’s parent would have gone even if they didn’t like their child’s music. They would have gone just to see their kid lead an all-star cast for charity. That wasn’t going to be enough to get my father there. So I told him that I was performing jazz and world music with the Philharmonic Orchestra, and that it wasn’t rap at all. This wasn’t true, but it worked.
He was silent for a long time, the way he was when he was considering something. You never knew which way he was going to go. “Are you doing church music, too?”
“Yes, Dad, we are doing church music. I’ve got Whitney Houston coming out to do—”
“I do not know that person.”
“She’s a singer, Dad....”
“What kind of music does she sing?”
It went on like this for days and weeks, until finally he agreed to come. I felt like I had climbed Mount Everest single-handedly.
My dad and mom sat in the balcony with the rest of my family in a box overlooking the stage, which I couldn’t see at all when all of the bright lights hit my face. I wasn’t positive that he was even there when the show started; with my dad you never knew if he might change his mind at the last minute. But he didn’t. At that point in his life, my father had a long white beard and that night he wore all of his ministerial robes and looked like a regal Haitian diplomat. My siblings said he sat there very stately, taking all of it in, not really reacting to anything all night. That wasn’t unusual; he was a serious and stern man, who always looked unimpressed and unmoved by anything that didn’t involve his faith.
In the middle of the performance, when the show was really cooking, I stopped everything.
“Hold up, hold up. This is the best night of my life,” I said to the audience. “Want to know why? My dad is in the balcony, y’all!”
Everybody started cheering.
“He’s right up there. Can we get a spotlight on him? Everybody, say ‘what’s up’ to my dad.”
The audience went crazy, shouting and hollering at him, and in that spotlight I saw something that made all the hard times between us worth it: I saw my dad break into the biggest smile I had ever seen on his face in my entire life. He was beaming from ear to ear, belly laughing, taking it all in. He put his seriousness aside for just that moment, and he relished all of the love coming his way. Seeing him with his guard down, enjoying this time with me, still means the world to me. For that moment, he
allowed himself to stop being Gesner Jean, the minister who must demonstrate piety and devotion by example. For that moment, he was Gesner Jean, the proud father of the young man onstage. I feel so lucky that I was able to see him in that light. He and I were on the same page for once. It felt like he understood and it felt like he respected and accepted me.
After the concert my dad came backstage and, God bless him, he was still smiling.
“Now let me tell you something, son,” he said, his smile fading into his usual serious stare.
Oh no, I thought. He hated it.
“Do you know what it means to finally make it?”
“I do not know, Dad.... Success?”
“No, there is something greater than success, because success is only what others give you. Success comes from what they think of you, not from what you think of yourself. Only you can define your success. There is something more. If you have every race in one place: if you have black, white, and Asian, if you have dignitaries, if you have presidents of corporations all in one place to see you, and none of them sees your color, they only see the man, then you have finally made it. That should be your success. Only then when your color is invisible are you the man. And that, my son, is what I saw here tonight.”
I thank God every day for that moment.
ON SEPTEMBER 7, 2001, I was in the studio working on my album Masquerade when I got the call. I was in the middle of figuring out a part, playing something and seeing where the music took me, so I ignored the flashing light, which meant an outside call was coming in from the switchboard.
My engineer answered it and from the look on his face I knew it was serious. It was my mother.
“Your father is in an ambulance and his pulse is very weak,” she said. “They aren’t sure he’s going to make it to the hospital. There has been an accident.”
I doubled over, because my stomach had fallen through my feet. Tears poured from my eyes before I could even get a word out.
