MUSIC: Haitian Rappers Take the Spotlight

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jun 25 1996 (IPS) - On the streets of New York, the song is unavoidable. From every corner, you can hear a woman’s voice croon out, “Strumming my face with his fingers,” while a loud hip-hop beat stomps in the background.

Roberta Flack’s ballad, ‘Killing Me Softly’, one of the more maudlin songs of the 1970s, has joined the modern era with a vengeance. And the group behind the song’s newfound popularity is comprised of two Haitian Americans and one U.S. rapper, ‘The Fugees’.

The Fugees (short for ‘Refugee Camp’) are perhaps the hottest musical group in the United States right now, with their new album ‘The Score’ (available on Ruffhouse/Sony) at the top of the charts. Two songs from that album – the bizarre rap ‘Fu-gee-la’ and ‘Killing Me Softly’ – are the choice of young rap fans and older soul music devotees alike. They have also been the highlight of a North American rap tour.

Not bad for a group that was ignored when their last album, 1993’s ‘Blunted on Reality’, came out. Until ‘The Score’ found its current success, rumours proliferated that the group’s sole U.S. member – Columbia University student Lauryn Hill – would split off from the two Haitians, Wyclef Jean and Prakazrel Michel.

For years, the Fugees were criticised by the music press as an eccentric outfit, combining folky Haitian guitar strumming and loping reggae basslines with the angry style of modern ‘gangsta rap’. Hill, who sang and acted in the Whoopi Goldberg movie ‘Sister Act 2’, seemed to be the one member able to connect with U.S. audiences.

For cousins Michel and Jean, that assumption was merely confirmation of a bias against Haitian immigrants – a bias with which the two, who have lived in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighbourhood nearly all their lives, were well acquainted.

But the Fugees, who describe themselves as being a close family, fought back against those assumptions. As Prakazrel rapped on the ‘Blunted on Reality’ album, “People say, ‘You’re Haitian, you’ll never get nowhere’/ But I swear on my mother’s grave we’d still be here.”

That positive stance has won them admirers with ‘The Score’, an album that is a breath of fresh air from the ‘gangsta’ mentality that has pervaded much recent rap music.

‘The Score’ criticises gangster life in the rap ‘Cowboys’, scolding the ‘Wild West’ mentality of young street gangs, and also takes on police brutality in ‘The Beast’. With their trademark wit, the Fugees mimic police sirens as the cries of deranged animals, while telling a story about police who plant drugs on youths to frame them for an arrest.

‘Ready or Not’, a boast of the rap group’s prowess, is highlighted by Hill’s powerful singing as she croons about the Fugee’s mystique: “Ready or not/ Here I come/ You can’t find me/ Gonna find you, and take you over.” And ‘Fu-gee-la’, the group’s first hit, combines Hill’s voice with, of all things, a snatch of Tchaivovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’.

The video for ‘Fu-gee-la’, where the group evades police who bear a suspicious resemblance to Haiti’s former Tonton Macoutes paramilitary, has also won them a spot on the video channel MTV.

The songs that have won them the most acclaim, however, are more closely associated with Roberta Flack and Bob Marley. The U.S. pop idol’s ‘Killing Me Softly’ has been revitalised for the hip-hop generation, especially in a reggae version featuring Jamaican DJ ‘Bounty Killa’.

‘No Woman, No Cry’, one of Marley’s signature songs, is also treated to a new version, in which the Fugees playfully relocate the song’s tale of love and perseverance from Jamaica’s Trenchtown to their own Brooklyn. By rewriting some of the lyrics, they turn the Marley tune into a story about the sort of exiles the Haitians know too well: “My drinks are my only remedy/ While I’m far away from family.”

Michel, Jean and Hill are all aware that their success may be fleeting: Similarly adventurous rap acts, like the jazz-influenced Digable Planets and progressive, feminist Arrested Development have foundered in recent years.

The Fugees’ own mix of Haitian musical styles, rap and reggae may also end up a novelty, as might the group’s melding of live instruments and gospel-style singing with the beats and rhymes of hip-hop. But for now, as one leading rap magazine, The Vibe, puts it, the Fugees are the group to beat. The Haitians have landed on top.