The Fugees: Leaders of the New Cool
“Oh, my goodness, Roy Rogers is gone!”
So exclaims Lauryn Hill as she swerves around a familiar corner near her suburban New Jersey neighborhood. It’s a sultry night in July, and the Fugees‘ singer is driving me back from Sony Music Studios, in midtown Manhattan, in her mom’s wheels, a brand-new sport utility vehicle with all the add-ons. The recent disappearance of a local landmark like the boarded-up fast-food emporium is yet one more reminder that life for Hill has been moving ahead at warp speed.
“We used to be No. 10, now we permanent 1,” boasts Hill’s band mate Wyclef Jean in a singsong, Bob Marley-style lilt at the start of “Fu-Gee-La,” the Fugees‘ theme song, cri de coeur and call to arms all wrapped in one. With its tough-talking raps, slack island beat and serpentine melodic refrain (“Ooh-la-la-la…”), “Fu-Gee-La” is as perfect an unofficial anthem for hip-hop’s future as anyone could hope for. That it also happened to be an accurate prophecy of the Fugees’ not-so-distant future is merely icing on the cake.
But it makes little difference to Hill, the svelte, soignée singer for the Fugees, that she has sold 5 million albums, toured half the globe and acted in a feature film, all by the ripe old age of 21. She remains most comfortable at home: more specifically, behind the walls of the modest frame house in South Orange, N.J., where she grew up.
Never mind that it’s just two nights before the first show, in New York’s Harlem, of Hoodshock, the free outdoor hip-hop charity festival that Hill conceived of and helped organize while touring Europe on the mammoth success of The Score, the Fugees’ second album. Never mind that this evening’s previous event, a Hoodshock summit meeting, didn’t let out till 10 p.m. Tonight, Hill – primed for summer in a snug-fitting orange top, a denim-and-Lycra miniskirt, and a neat, tufted hairdo – is bubbling over with energy as we trundle in the front door of her parents’ house.
We’re greeted there by a slim man of medium height with a neatly trimmed mustache and wire-rim glasses, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt, shorts, black wingtips and a baseball cap. This is Hill’s father, Mal, a computer consultant. Minutes later, a sweet-faced, bright-eyed woman in a print dress descends from upstairs to the middle of the neat but cramped living room and introduces herself as Valerie, Hill’s mother and a junior high school English teacher in Newark, N.J. Hill’s brother, 24-year-old Malaney, is splayed out on the sofa, watching baseball on cable.
It takes a few moments for it to register that Lauryn Hill – a.k.a. “L,” “L-Boogie,” or simply Lauryn – actually still lives with her parents. This is the honey-voiced chanteuse and rapper whose respectfully funkified cover of Roberta Flack’s 1973 hit “Killing Me Softly With His Song” recently charmed an unwitting nation and turned The Score into the biggest hip-hop sensation of the ’90s (the album has floated in the Billboard Top 10 for more than six months). And right now, Hill and her band mates – Jean, 26, and his cousin Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, 24 – are rap superheroes.
Although the Fugees have much in common with their hip-hop contemporaries – popular, cutting-edge acts like the Wu-Tang Clan, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest – they also belong in an increasingly unclassifiable group of artists that includes, among others, the Beastie Boys, Beck and Cypress Hill. Like these other pop nomads, the Fugees are pioneering a musical aesthetic as well as a cultural destiny.
This means that mixing the crackle of a needle touched to vinyl with live break beats and looped digital samples of the freshest “dub plates” – one-of-a-kind musical freestyles committed to black wax – is more than just the legacy of a group whose members regard Haiti and Jamaica, Africa and Brooklyn, N.Y., and the New Jersey hood and Hollywood as creative touchstones. It sounds cool, too.
Despite the Fugees’ success, Hill’s day-to-day existence continues to be a low-key family affair. From the matching chintz furniture to the magenta tulle window treatments to the graduation pictures smothering the mantelpiece, life in the Hill household appears to have been altered little by its youngest member’s achievements.
The way Hill tells it, her family gave up being fazed a long time ago. “Trust me, I was a performer since I was little,” she says. “I think I’m less of a performer now than when I was a child. I was such a ham, y’all. I was so dramatic.”
While her preteen friends were bopping to ’80s kiddie faves like New Edition and Duran Duran, the precocious Hill was wearing out the grooves on the old 45s by Gladys Knight and Curtis Mayfield that she found in her parents’ basement. By the end of high school, Hill had already appeared as an actress on the soap opera As the World Turns and in a featured role alongside Whoopi Goldberg, in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit.
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