Fugees: Ready or not, why we think it’s time for NJ hip-hop legends to reunite – Asbury Park Press

Ready or not, we believe the time has come for New Jersey’s next great musical reunion. What the world needs now are Fugees.

Jersey fresh artists such My Chemical Romance of Belleville, The Misfits from Lodi, New Brunswick’s The Gaslight Anthem and the Jonas Brothers out of Wyckoff have all made the rounds on the lucrative reunion circuit in recent years.

But the long-gone Essex County trio of South Orange native Lauryn Hill, the Haitian-born and Newark-raised Wyclef Jean and Irvington native Prakazrel “Pras” Michel were one of American music’s defining acts in the mid-1990s. It’s time to remind the world why. 

(Look back at the Fugees’ career in the photo gallery at the top of this story.)

They were far from prolific, releasing only two albums — 1994’s “Blunted on Reality” and 1996’s “The Score.”

That sophomore album had monster singles galore — the Roberta Flack cover “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” “Fu-Gee-La” and the haunting “Ready or Not” — as well as a cult favorite cover of Bob Marley’s cover of “No Woman, No Cry.”

While the bombastic “Blunted” didn’t make much of a sales splash, “The Score” soared; it was released in February 1996, and by October of ’97 it had moved more than 6 million units and reached the top of the Billboard 200, according to a 2016 Billboard retrospective.

Listening back to “The Score” now, it’s easy to see why it shook the world.

Nearly a quarter century after its release, the album still resonates as a vividly fluid sonic statement that defies constraints of genre and time, as Brick City rhymes flow seamlessly with samples from The Flamingos and Enya to create a lush, cinematic tapestry of sound.

If anything, the group has only become more timely; their name, an abbreviation of refugees. served as “a reference to the diminished status that poor emigrants from countries such as Haiti encounter in the United States,” according to a 1996 Rolling Stone profile.

Decades later, the American government’s changing policies toward refugees from around the world entering the country remains a topical, contentious issue.

This was a beautiful North Jersey musical melting pot which earned a pair of 1997 Grammys — Best Rap Album and Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for “Killing Me Softly With His Song” — and also was nominated for Album of the Year (it lost to Celine Dion’s “Falling Into You,” co-produced by Roy Bittan of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band).

Their too-brief body of work made an undeniable impact. Rolling Stone named “The Score” one of the best albums of the 1990s and one of the best albums of all time, while the Asbury Park Press dubbed them the second-greatest hip-hop act to ever come out of New Jersey (behind only Naughty by Nature).

Following “The Score,” each of the Fuguees found massive solo success.

The 1997 album “Wyclef Jean presents The Carnival featuring Refugee Allstars” boasted the hit “Gone Till November,” and the following year Pras dominated the airwaves with the “Bulworth” soundtrack single “Ghetto Superstar (That is What You Are).”

Then there was the juggernaut of early solo-era Hill. “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1998 had the hits “Doo Wop (That Thing)” and “Everything is Everything,” and won five Grammy Awards, becoming the first rap album to ever win the Grammy for Album of the Year.

In the 20-plus years since the Fugees’ cultural domination, Jean in particular has remained a highly in-demand producer and collaborator, working with the likes of Whitney Houston (1998’s “My Love is Your Love”), Santana (1999’s “Maria Maria,” the basis of DJ Khaled’s “Wild Thoughts”), Destiny’s Child (1998’s “No, No, No Pt. 2”) and Shakira (2005’s “Hips Don’t Lie”). 

The next generation of New Jersey musical talent event benefited from Jean’s wisdom when he visited Asbury Park in 2018 to work with the youth of the Asbury Park Music Foundation and performed at that year’s Asbury Park Music and Film Festival.

But they’ve only been heard from sporadically as a unit during this millennium; there was a 2004 Brooklyn show filmed for the 2006 documentary “Dave Chapelle’s Block Party,” then in 2005 a BET Awards appearance, a European tour and a single, “Take it Easy.” 

As recently as 2018, Pras told New York hip-hop radio station Hot 97 FM that the group had been offered $90 million for a 15-month tour, but both Jean and Hill were non-committal.

Each member has experienced troubles and controversies in recent years. Hill served three months in a Connecticut federal prison in 2013 after failing to pay taxes while Jean’s charity, Yéle, was scrutinized in a 2012 New York Times article.

Earlier this year, Pras was charged by U.S. prosecutors with making donations to former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign as a proxy for Jho Low, who served as an adviser to former Malaysia prime minister Najib Razak.

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Commercial hip-hop was born in New Jersey, thanks to the Sugarhill Gang’s landmark 1979 recording of “Rapper’s Delight” for Sylvia Robinson’s Englewood-based Sugar Hill Records.

The artform’s rich, shared history with New Jersey was in the spotlight when MTV brought its Video Music Awards to the Prudential Center in Newark in August 2019.

Several of the state’s hip-hop luminaries shared the stage together, including Queen Latifah, Naughty by Nature, Redman and Fetty Wap.

Wyclef was there, too, guitar in hand, to perform a verse and chorus of “Gone Till November” and some of “No Woman, No Cry” and then jam out as part of the grand finale on Naughty by Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray.”

The celebration couldn’t help but feel a little hollow; a singular commemoration of New Jersey’s place in hip-hop history deserved more direct Fugees representation than a bit of a Bob Marley song that they also covered.

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New Jersey’s musical reunion boom in recent years has been great for representing the state’s rock ‘n’ roll and pop history, reminding folks around the world that the Misfits were more than inspiration for a T-shirt line and proving that Gerard Way had a pretty good gig going before he created “Umbrella Academy.”

Now it’s time to do the same for Jersey’s hip-hop legacy. 

In their prime, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel created a whole that was somehow greater than the sum of its considerable parts.

The Fugees’ lush, boundary-pushing universal sound would hit just as hard today as it did back in 1996, the artists and audience once again vibing on a truly global frequency.

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