After "The Score," I was sure the Fugees had made a deal with the devil. A lackluster 1994 debut, Blunted on Reality, made them near-laughingstocks – imagine Digable Planets lite, if that's possible. But with The Score, they served more than 11 million customers – them's Kenny G and Celine D. numbers, mom. In a lightning
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moment, the three Fugees went from being known as those two Haitian dudes hanging out with that cutie from
Sister Act II to being worshiped as musical genius Wyclef, beautiful songbird L-Boogie and moneymaking Pras. It was such a rapid and total metamorph that if it had happened in a movie, you'd say, "Oh,
please." There had to be help from below.
Just as Blunted gave no hint of the commercial dam buster to come, The Score, dotted with smart interpolations, left little hint of the creative earthquakes ahead. But with Wyclef's stunning The Carnival and, now, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Lauryn and her Fugee brother have established themselves as leaders in the genre of hip-hop soul. After pushing the commercial envelope, they've returned to push the aesthetic one.
Hip-hop soul is the music of Mary J. Blige, D'Angelo and Erykah Badu, a genre in which artists interpret this generation's experience through hip-hop's beats and outlook folded into soulful melodies and tenderness. Though some artists, like Clef and Lauryn, sing and rhyme, in hip-hop soul the singing and rhyming do not clearly demarcate hip-hop and R&B – hip-hop soul is fluid enough to largely escape simple definition, though you know it when you hear it, and, generally, what you hear is greater musical ambition and courage than in most traditional hip-hop.
The chocolate-skinned twenty-three-year-old working single mom named Lauryn Hill – blessed with a beauty that attracts the fellas without turning away the sistas – is that rare artist who can be righteous and not self-righteous, who thinks a lot of herself without ego tripping. That's partly because she's so very honest – "Every time I try to be," she says in the title song," what someone has thought of me/So caught up, I wasn't able to achieve" – and partly because within her self-love message you can hear her implicitly saying "Love yo'self." Her confidence – "You can't match this rapper-slash-actress/More powerful than two Cleopatras.... MCs ain't ready to take it to the Serengeti/My rhymes is heavy like the mind of Sister Betty [Shabazz]," from "Everything Is Everything" – makes you feel confident. She sounds like an artist you could, should, look up to, like Chuck D back in his heyday.
She sounds like that before you even realize what she's rhyming about, because the very timbre of her voice – that deep, oven-roasted sound when rhyming, the sweet, melancholy-tinged midrange she owns when singing, the way she always comes confidently from deep within her chest – it comm
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