Once upon a time, in the year that I would turn sixteen, a trio calling themselves the Fugees got on my last nerve by way or irritation though a rehash remake of the Roberta Flack classic Killing Them Softly. I didn’t know anything about what the hell a Fugee was, nor their affinity for name dropping their label Ruffhouse Records, nor anything about their catalog. All I knew is that the music video channels and all the Black radio in Chicago kept playing the worst sampled song in the history of sampling like it was the sound key to the holy grail and it was irritating as hell. In fact my irritation at Killing Them Softly got on my last nerve so bad, including in its original form, that I virtually tuned them all out whenever I could, which was so frigging hard at the success of the single itself.
For better or worse, that was my initial introduction to The Score.
Most of you all will lose your shit that I’m one of the rare people on the planet that ain’t feeling the trio comprise of Wyclef Jean, Pras Michel, and Lauryn “L-Boogie” Hill, nor their co-patriots sidekicks of John Forte, Young Zee, Pacewon, and others. Between Wyclef’s OCD overkill making noises that sound like a giraffe being choked rocking the mic and Pras Michel coming in on the bottom flat as can be like he’s doing hip-hop karaoke I just never saw the hype. On the flip side of the argument, while I’ve never been a fan of Lauryn Hill’s singing I can’t deny she is one of the coldest MCs to ever rock the mic and should have just stayed in that lane and joined a better cypher group or even teamed up with Rah Digga and just dominated the spit game for ten years. It’s a shame she wasted what could have been on the hip-hop side of things later on down the solo road. The three of them together to me was an oddball pairing that just didn’t live up to the buildup of this album or the Refugee Camp solo albums that would follow after this that didn’t cut the mustard.
While the lyrical delivery of two-thirds of the group just ain’t my cool drink of water on a hot day, The Score is by far the best produced sampled hip-hop album of its time. On one hand it almost makes the group feel like a one-trick pony, since the album’s biggest hits or rehashes of hit songs; Killing Them Softly of course is Roberta Flack’s nails on the chalkboard torch song, No Woman No Cry is Bob Marley’s tale of love pain butchered effortlessly by Wyclef Jean’s wailing, Ready or Not is a dark and brooding reinterpretation of The Delfonics’ pledge of love and Fu-gee-la is a rebranded product placement eclectic mix of Teena Marie’s signature Ooh La La La. On the other hand not many producers of the day could make a single killer beat off of interpolations from Cymande, Eric B. and Rakim, Afrika Bambaataa, and Dennis Coffey in one track like the Fugees do on the title track.
Some of the sample selections chosen for The Score are just mind blowing. Zealots features a blatant sample from I Only Have Eyes For You by The Flamingos, a doowop group. The Beast is rocking God Made Me Funky by Herbie Hancock’s group Headhunters, which was in a very experimental period at the time and wouldn’t necessarily be an easy sample. Even crazier is the same sample is intermixed on Ready or Not with Boadicea by Enya, serving as the musical bed for The Delfonics’ interpolation on the hook. Even with the dismal Killing Them Softly, Bonita Applebum by A Tribe Called Quest, The Day Begins by the Moody Blues, Fool Yourself Little Feat, and Memory Band by Rotary Connection are the foundation of a modernized cover that covers the entirety of Roberta Flack’s song. Nobody was producing like that in those days but Wyclef Jean. That type of hip-hop production had not been seen since the golden hip-hop era of the 1980s, and only through the skilled hands of DJs mixing the hell out of wax.
There is no denying that the Ruffhouse Records production team of The Score led by Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel were pioneers on the mid-1990s sampling. Wyclef’s musical taste in particular has always been off the beaten hip-hop path, as seen with his choice to sample Celia Cruz and The Fania All-Stars or The Bee Gees on his solo efforts instead of mainstays like James Brown or Funkadelic. And that’s not a bad thing; musical diversity outside of the American stratosphere in hip-hop is a good thing when done right. No one can take it away from The Fugees that their sound was international before RZA made it fashionable via Wu-Tang Clan and their infinite solo albums and spinoff groups, and even then RZA made most of his samples singular in nature.
The sky was the limit for sampling for the Fugees, bar none.
I can’t name a single hip-hop producer with the balls to sample Recuerdos de la Alhambra other than on Family Business and then throw one of the most over covered songs, Gypsy Woman on the end and use the version by Joe Bataan at that other than them. I also can’t name a hip-hop producer that would sample Rock Dis Funky Joint by Poor Righteous Teachers in the slayful masterpiece of Manifest except Wyclef Jean and company. Such a tragedy it is that Wyclef Jean didn’t just stay to production instead of trying to run into the lanes of his heroes and eventually ran off the road. One of the nastiest samples he has ever produced (and on the entire album) is Cowboys, which takes the weirdest part of Something ‘Bout Love by Main Ingredient and twists it into this wild west vibe type of hip-hop song that featured a slew of guest rappers including a relatively unknown Rah Digga before her Flipmode Squad days. The tit for tat she and L-Boogie had going on blows any dynamic duo rap team at the time to pieces, making it the highlight of The Score. I will take this any day over Gone Till November.
End of the day this album is drowned in hip-hop history, stoked in a code red of hype and resuscitation survival not for its lyrical content but its impressive creativity of sample magic. Due to a lot of self inflicted group wounds, inner turmoil within the Refugee Camp, and solo albums that set the bar too high for a group dynamic to work The Fugees will go down in history shrouded in doubt of possibilities. Try as they might to reunion and make a comeback they can’t because their group and sound are stuck in a time where their creativity conquered all. Sadly, twenty-eight years later The Score is a genie in the masterclass bottle of Fugees sampling that is all out of wishes.
