‘We must view each other as refugees already, because any of us could become refugees, and we have to know The Score.‘
-Broc Nelson
Release date: February 13, 1996 | Ruffhouse / Columbia | Website
It’s hard to overstate the influence Ms. Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Pras Michel had on hip hop culture as the Fugees. Putting a stranglehold on the airwaves with electrifying singles, the trio became a pop cultural powerhouse over the span of just two records before going their separate (successful) ways. The Score is widely regarded as their masterpiece, and it’s easy to see why, as it delivered authenticity, style, and righteous messages in spades.
Broc Nelson
It is hard to understate how important The Score by Fugees was to deepening my love for hip hop. It may contain the first hip hop song I ever liked. I was 10 years old when The Score came out and spent summer days staying at my grandma’s house, too old for the daycare, but too young to be left unsupervised. It was there that I discovered the joy of music videos, watching MTV and CMT waiting for Mom or Dad to get off work, and the video for “Ready Or Not” looks like an action movie opening with helicopters chasing a wave runner. I couldn’t look away, even if I didn’t fully comprehend what I was seeing or hearing.
It would be another 8 years before I truly got into hip hop, poking around at things magazines and friends recommended, trying to grasp what I liked and what I didn’t. Once I had a few albums in mind to check out, I would head to a used CD store and try to find them. I don’t know what I was looking for one day, but I know I left with The Score remembering “Ready Or Not” and became a massive fan of this album 8 years after it came out.
The trio of Ms. Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Pras Michel formed after Jean joined a group Hill and Michel had formed in high school in New Jersey. By the time they were signing to Ruffhouse Records with their debut album, Blunted On Reality they had settled on calling themselves Fugees as a reclamation of ‘refugees’ that had taken on a negative connotation from Haitian refugees that lingered from the Reagan administration’s designation of Haitian immigrants as one the 4 groups most likely to contract and spread AIDS. Pras and Jean both being Haitian themselves, and speaking to the greater African diaspora and resilience, Fugees were a statement in name and talent.
Jean could play piano and guitar as well as spit stories that were a street smart as they were politically tuned. Pras’s deeper voice added bravado and swagger to their sound along with his equally sharp lyrics. Lauryn Hill, however, is a natural powerhouse who not only can sing like an R&B star, but can out rap most any MC, and is so good at both that she remains in a league of her own compared to any other rapper/singer you could think of. Despite this combo, Blunted On Reality was not a major success, suffering from more aggressive production and delivery that was typical for the time. Their lyrics were politically conscious while maintaining street roots, as on The Score, but it is harder to catch all of their gifts when everything is shouted over Boogie Down-style boom bap. Their second album seemed doubtful, until they ran into producer Salaam Remi who remixed their song “Nappy Heads” chilling the mix down significantly and letting the lyrics shine through. This became a top 100 hit paving the way for the 7x platinum The Score and Grammy Awards.
The Score was carried by singles like “Ready Or Not”, Fu-Gee-La”, and the massive success of their cover of “Killing Me Softly”, but the whole album maintains the blend of boom bap, neo-soul, and Caribbean-inspired sounds and outstanding bars. “Zealots” is the quintessential synthesis of their sound, featuring a sample from The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You” while Wyclef Jean echoes an Island soul sound, Lauryn sings as well, while all three lash out against lesser MCs with complex rhymes. “The Score” is a self-referential centerpiece that features Diamond D and all four MCs firing on all cylinders over soulful guitar and snappy drum loops like a Refugee Camp posse cut. They also cover “No Woman No Cry” in a Wyclef counterpoint to Hill’s “Killing Me Softly”. “The Mask” has a jazziness that would fit in with Native Tongues’ artists while they dissect the different masks we all wear or encounter in different places.
30 years later, almost all of The Score holds up and inspires, save for the skit about getting Chinese food which has a cringey Chinese caricature, but you aren’t going to find much from ‘90s rap that stands as consciously aware and consistent as The Score. “Fu-Gee-La” is a reverb-drenched classic with vibes for days. “Ready Or Not” is a certified classic, and ironically, Barack Obama’s favorite song as if he didn’t deport and create innumerable refugees, and obviously “Killing Me Softly” is a timeless, generational classic at this point.
Sadly, this was the last we would truly hear from Fugees. Each member pursued solo careers with Wyclef Jean’s probably lasting the longest. Lauryn Hill, of course, released one more album in her legendary The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill and besides the occasional appearance seems to have little interest in the music world. Pras had a few more hits, but now is sentenced to 14 years of federal prison for an international money laundering scandal while also being an FBI informant, which is still just fucking wild.
Regardless, this album has to be one of my top 20 favorite albums of all time and was very close to ending up on my Noise That Made Us feature losing out to account for stylistic diversity and the fact that I bought Phrenology by The Roots first. Somehow, amongst most any other hip hop fans I know, I seem to be the only person who champions this album, but the way so much hip hop over the last 30 years has been shaped by The Score is inarguable. While they aren’t exclusively political, it is also remarkable that the video that hooked me turns migrants into heroes escaping militarized border patrols and features lines like, ‘if I ruled the world everyone would have a gun in the ghetto, of course,’ and, ‘I, refugee from Guantanamo Bay, dance around the border like I’m Cassius Clay.’ This all feels especially poignant, now, as it was 30 years ago; refugees and migrants aren’t going to stop in the face of global water shortages and climate change and imperialist governments and corporations. We must view each other as refugees already, because any of us could become refugees, and we have to know The Score.
