One of the intriguing properties of the brain is its ability not just to detect patterns, but to complete them, even where none exist. Think of the famous optical illusion of the false triangle – all you actually see are three circles with slices taken out of them, arranged facing one another like a meeting of pac-men with angles in between. But they are arranged to suggest a triangle, and they more than suggest it – the brain fills out the triangle sides, “seeing” a shape that isn’t there.
And so it is that after knowing the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly” for 17 years I could sit down and think to myself, “I’ll just check who does which verse on it”. “Killing Me Softly” is a hip-hop record, by a hip-hop group, with a hip-hop beat and hip-hop adlibs, so my memory hallucinates rapping where none exists.
In the Fugees context this makes perfect sense – arresting stylistic shift, showcase for Lauryn Hill’s vocals, LP centrepiece – and obviously it made excellent commercial sense too, as a crossover move to introduce the group to a wider audience. (Though even in the UK, distracted by its Britpop brouahaha, we’re almost at the point now where hip-hop is the presumed grammar of pop – providing the musical and stylistic cues hitmakers of any stripe, backroom or front-of-house, instinctively reach for.)
“Killing Me Softly” is a stark record – you have to go back a long way, maybe to the early rock’n’rollers, to find a number one that gets this much atmosphere out of just beat and voice. The kind of atmosphere that’s created weighs the song down for me, though. In the non-specialist (meaning indie-specialist) music press of the time, the go-to phrase when talking approvingly about hip-hop was “head-nodding” – a description which landed for me halfway between being lost in the rapture of the groove and dozing off in a long afternoon meeting. “Killing Me Softly” suffers from a particularly head-nodding beat – it sits at the crossover point where cool becomes snoozy.
Luckily, it also has Lauryn Hill’s performance. By structuring a soul song like a rap, the Fugees make “Killing Me Softly” more vivid – the illusion the ad-libs and beat create is that Hill isn’t singing a song, she’s being passed the mic at the start of each verse, working through how she feels about the experience in real time, even as she tries to capture it in song. On the “read each one out loud” verse, three layers of time – the feelings the singer exposed, his performance exposing them, and Hill trying to find her own words for it – telescope into one moment that catches the uncomfortable intimacy of music and what it can do for us. It’s powerful enough I almost forget this is a cover of a song that’s probably about Don bloody MacLean.
Score: 6
[Logged in users can award their own score]
Didn’t feel I could show my face on the Between Christmas And New Year Pub Crawl without a Popular update http://t.co/jtl2BuCt3y
+8 points for Lauren’s performance -3 points for Wyclef’s lazy, pointless ad-libs, which (I’m sad to say) managed to put me off hip-hop for a couple of years.
Lauren’s vocal is beautiful, and beautifully recorded with the harmonies and all. It’s certainly superior to Roberta Flack’s, which I like well enough now but was a big disappointment when I heard it first after this.
But listening to the vocal specifically makes me curse the ad-libs. I suppose I get that some hip hop signifiers are useful, but these ones are kinda crap (‘L-Boogie up to here’ doesn’t improve any record), and the beat has that covered more than adequately. (8)
How many times did my friends and I take the mickey out of Wyclef’s ad-libs? Was it ONE TIME? Or was it TWO TIMES?
Wyclef aside, I quite like this version, but it was a pretty decent song anyway. I’ve not heard Lori Lieberman’s original, but I’m familiar with Roberta Flack conveying the power of an emotionally affecting performance from the audience perspective. I had no idea she was singing about Don MacLean. How very weird. Which song was it? “Vincent”? “American Pie”? Neither seem likely, do they?
Back in the summer of ’95 (or was it ’94? And does it really matter for the purposes of the story I’m about to tell?) I was spending time between university terms sleeping in the spare room of my parent’s house, as usual. Before I came back home, my mother informed me that one of our neighbours had recently lost her husband to cancer. He was in his forties, which seemed unfairly young to me at the time, and even more so now I’ve reached that decade of existence myself.
Now she was alone, among the many things my neighbour eventually did to try and get her life back on some sort of track (or perhaps just to give her some positive things to aim towards) was take singing lessons. That summer, I used to open all the windows of my bedroom to try and get some air in, as did she, and you could often hear her completely acapella, practising – and actually sounding wonderful – just beneath the ambient noise of my parent’s street. “Killing Me Softly” was one of the songs she used to practice a lot, and it may have been for personal reasons or it may have been for practical ones. At the time I always imagined that the song must have meant something to her personally following her husband’s death, but I now acknowledge that it might just have been something her teacher just gave her to work on. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding her regular renditions, though, I do know that the first time I heard her do it I found the performance (which I wasn’t supposed to hear) incredibly moving.
That caused me to go back to Roberta Flack’s version of it, and not that long after I’d begun to develop a relationship with the song The Fugees seemed to bomb into everyone’s lives with this one. And I say this purely to try and be fair and to underline the fact that my opinions of this song are coloured by an incredibly absurd and unique set of circumstances. That’s the problem with cover versions which become big hits – it doesn’t matter how well they’re executed, if the song has already taken on a certain resonance for you in some strangely personal way, they feel rude, intrusive almost.
To me, this one always felt like a showcase for Lauryn Hill, a slightly cynical exercise to highlight the fact that The Fugees weren’t just another hip-hop act, they had a proper, old-school, superstar singer in their ranks who could hold everyone’s attention even with a minimal backing. It felt like a bid to get the Mums and Dads onside, a crossover tactic. And Hill does a pretty good job of it, it’s just Wyclef who stinks out the room, sounding as if he’s pointing towards Hill with giant foam hands every time he interjects. In fact, there’s an air of studied cool about the record generally, a kind of pouting bid for authenticity I find very hard to take to. I can hear skill in Hill’s performance, I just don’t believe in it.
The Fugees released far better singles than this, so I’ve never fully understood why this always seems to be the track people refer to most.
I also initially thought that Tom was going to say something about the brain filling in the gaps in the instrumentation when I read the first paragraph! My brain definitely does that with this track, but it doesn’t remember a rap where there isn’t one.
Like the prior commenter, I’d find this song a lot more likeable within Wyclef’s interjections. But by the same token I wonder, would it have been as big of a hit without them?
I was ten when this was out, and both then and now, the eminently spoofable ‘One time! Two time!’ shout out was THE hook for this record. I’m sure as many people remember it for that as for Lauryn’s genuinely soulful lead vocal.
So, a very strange number one for me. Obviously far too emotive to be an outright novelty record, but the ad-libs feel like they create a barrier preventing you from taking it too sincerely either. Awkward alchemy indeed, but the song was massive, so it worked.
Does nobody do the #2 watch any more, by the way?
This had five non-consecutive weeks on top, interrupted by a resurgent Three Lions. It kept Peter Andre’s Mysterious Girl off number one (for the time being, anyway) and, perhaps more regrettably, Born Slippy by Underworld.
You’ll be fighting Don “bloody” Maclean’s corner when we get to a certain ill-advised 2000 cover!
Born Slippy – Underworld’s only ever top 10 hit, something that eventually came in massively handy for me at my first ever music festival twelve years later when to my absolute dismay I couldn’t initially get into the tent to see the band live as it was full. At least until they played ‘Born Slippy’ mid-set, after which half the crowd left to go Deadmau5 on the other stage and I caught the rest of their set, having the best rave OF MY LIFE to the supremely underrated ‘Moaner’ and other classic and much lesser-known tracks. The same thing happened a year later when everyone left The Streets after they played ‘[BUNNY]’ so they could get a good spot for Dizzee Rascal, much to a very pissed-off looking Mike Skinner who still had about three songs to go.
Sadly I have nothing interesting to say about The Fugees, no memories of it from ’96 and probably discovered it sometime in the early noughties. Two #1s to go until my era begins…
there’s a bit of a Soul II Soul vibe about this – but whereas they at least they hit number 1 with an original (and better) tune, this coasts along with a familiar soul classic spruced up with some lazy interjections which may have encouraged folk to think they were getting down with the new music. Lauryn Hill’s voice is the redeeming contribution
There are two good things about this: Lauryn Hill’s very fine vocal (especially the unaccompanied introduction), and the one or two places where it combines with the sparse arrangement to make something which actually works. Otherwise it’s spoiled by the unimaginative drum-machine backing and the unnecessary interjections throughout, and when it reaches its uninspired fade you realise it hasn’t actually gone anywhere. FIVE.
I recall a late Saturday night, disembarking from the Oxford Tube and walking back up Hythe Bridge Street towards home, hearing loud teenage girls tumbling in and out of the Park End nightclub, shrilly trilling the song – and this was the Saturday before it was released as a single. Laura and I looked knowingly and resignedly at each other; the common conclusions being (a) it would go straight to number one; (b) these kids wouldn’t even know it was a cover version.
But the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly” is so much more than a cover, and it is a tribute to their genius that they succeeded in making such an imperishable record from such unpromising material, as indeed did Roberta Flack a generation earlier. For the song itself is calculated hokum, written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox – otherwise best known here as the authors of the Happy Days theme tune – as a response to seeing Don McLean performing live. Not Tim Buckley, or Judee Sill, or Karen Dalton, but affable cabaret folkie shyster Don McLean. It reflects on Flack’s immense talents that via her performance and vocal arrangement she turns the song into the spellbound reverie which it didn’t really deserve to be converted into (it was originally offered to and recorded unremarkably by one Lori Lieberman) with her gradual disorientation (“I prayed that he would finish/But he just kept right on”) into a state of mind where art and reality become interchangeable and interdependent (“Singing my life with his words,” “I felt he’d found my letters and read each one out loud”).
The brllliance of the Fugees’ interpretation lies in the fact that it sounds entirely improvised with its endless asides, cues and comments. In its album version it is prefaced by a mock pirate radio DJ (“We don’t play with soundclash!”) giving way to Lauryn Hill’s rather ominous paraphrasing (“Killing a soundboy with this sound”), echoing through illicit airwaves. Then the song proper begins, with Hill’s solo voice over earnest church organ. This in turn is succeeded by a jerky twitch of a sitar sample, and as the beats come in the group chats while Hill warms up in the background before Wyclef cues her in with “Hey, yo, L, you know you’ve got the lyrics.”
Hill’s voice is slightly deeper and somewhat rougher than Flack’s but it radiates so comprehensively throughout the record that she is accompanied only by beats in the song’s verses, with the bass and harmonies joining in on the chorus, her own backing vocals not straying too far from Flack’s original arrangement but becoming more choral with each entry, climaxing in the wordless psychedelic shimmer of “Aaaah-ah-aaah-ah-aaaaah” before the final chorus. Throughout Wyclef and Pras cheerlead her from the sidelines (the pop puncta of “One time, one time” and “Two times, two times” per chorus) and at the end, or at any rate the fadeout, they applaud each other, thank the listeners and make their cheerful way into the distance (“Watch out for the crooked lawyers signing the deals!”).
The record is so great because of its unalloyed naturalness, its street chat (again, very ’67) and its organic, improvisatory flow; they sound as though they want to recast this song rather than cynically cover it. In that sense, as well as many others, they form the bridge between Arrested Development and subsequent acts like the Roots, Solillaquists of Sound and the Strange Fruit Project, songs and thoughts connected, passive theorising turned into active ideas; and their improvised live TOTP performance of “Killing Me Softly” was one of the finest ever broadcast, as though the Watts Prophets had finally made the charts a quarter of a century later; words, scats, songs and in-jokes cutting across each other, reflecting an image of how good music can sound when allowed to grow and develop naturally, and by extension a better society. Certainly it helped to assuage much of the pain and exhaustion which that summer otherwise necessitated – and you can’t ask much more of, or from, music than that. 10
“The Score” wasn’t a #1 album, so here is my Popular comment on its (and 1996’s) biggest single: http://t.co/mEReY4EBMV
Bravo, that’s great. I marked it too low.
A lovely performance of a lovely, though slight song. The “ad-libs” (hmm) don’t hold it back for me, although the shortness of material might – 4:50 is tough on a song with two verses and a chorus, however memorable the latter might be. The saving grace here is the grand cascade of Lauryns piling up for the wordless climax, which is all I really listen to it for anymore.
As a Lauryn Hill showcase it now feels kind of like a preview of her much-lauded solo album. As a Fugees cut it seems underpopulated, like “Yesterday” if John Lennon had stopped by just to chime in “Oh, what a day!” Have to say I much prefer “Fu-gee-la” and this one’s bunnied followup. Wyclef and Pras’s other achievements, of which I’m surprised to find no trace in the bunny-list, also hold my ears a bit closer, but we might get to those when we return to the Fugees…
love the sparseness, a sorta midpoint between young marble giants and lumidee. it seems a little crazy now since this is only three years after the chronic owned radio/mtv but by 96 even ppl who weren’t ‘will someone think of the children?!!!’ were getting kinda sick of gangsta and the fugees benefited heavily from that (outkast did also w/ ‘elevators’ and ‘atliens’ being hits but obv nothing on the scale of fugees). ‘fu-gee-la’ still the jam and the follow-up (president obama’s favorite song) is fantastic as well but this was the huge unavoidable smash and though i don’t mind clef’s interjections their uninventiveness does take away from what lauryn does w/ the song, it makes what’s a very clever cover seem obv. still the moment mattered and the next year you had missy (and puffy going pop) and then outkast and eventually kanye so that a certain kind of hip-hop that was a huge part of the genre’s initial crossover appeal (eg ‘me, myself, and i’ scoring on radio in ways that few rap singles had to that point) and that might’ve seem relegated to backpackers (cf dj shadow’s yawnsome ‘why hip-hop sucks in 96’) instead became pop again. clef and lauryn broke up so the fugees broke up and clef released a pretty great and now underrated solo album in 97 and then lauryn released an all time great solo album in 98 that erased clef from the public’s memory (or radios at least) and then effectively disappeared in a manner similar to sly stone, her most musically relevant moment this century coming via a proxy in a kanye song. 7.
Multiple things to comment on here:
1) The song itself. Of course, there’s the “one time, two time” thing. At least once or twice when this has come on the radio, I’ve started singing along with Wyclef, except continuing through the whole song, ending up at something ridiculous like “23 time, 23 time”. Silly I know. Anyway, I’ve said before in this blog, hip hop isn’t really my thing, but if it is, you could do a lot worse than this. 6/10 is a fair score I think.
2) As stated by Marcello, this was the UK’s biggest single in 1996. I discovered this years after the fact and was surprised as I’d always assumed that 96’s biggest UK hit was two bunnies after this. I doubt I’m alone here.
3) Despite being the year’s biggest seller in the UK, it sold precisely zero copies in the US. This of course since it was never officially released in the US as a way to drum up album sales. Apparently it worked as The Score was US #1 for four weeks and went 6x platinum (perhaps not coincidental it was slightly less successful in the UK?). This practice was increasingly common in the US at the time and was extremely frustrating for me as a chart watcher as it took a potential massive #1 and rendered it officially a non-hit as Billboard wouldn’t let unreleased singles onto the Hot 100 no matter how much airplay they got. Which is why the Hot 100 of the mid-90s has to be taken with a huge grain of salt as so many well known songs were absent. Although modern rock songs were the most common victims of this, it was “Killing Me Softly” that was perhaps the most glaring individual example. Although a chart policy change in 1998 at least allowed unreleased singles to appear, and occasionally even hit #1, it wasn’t until the MP3 era and the corresponding re-emergence of a viable singles market, that the Hot 100 became fully unskewed and a far more accurate indicator of what’s actually popular.
4) Finally, for such a famed big-selling group, the Fugees were surprisingly short lived. Just two albums, of which The Score was the second. Lauryn would of course have a well received album (including a properly released US#1 single with “Doo Wop”) before a spectacular self implosion. As we know, Wyclef is still around and would predictably achieve a US #1 by piggybacking on someone else’s hit (a bunny BTW). Pras is still waiting for his #1, although I always thought “Ghetto Supastar” deserved to be a bigger hit than it was – a rare hip hop single I really liked at the time.
Oof, thank you for finally explaining why everybody and their brother seemed to own [i]The Score[/i] (and why it was ubiquitous in used bins despite good buzz). I knew about the late 90s chart goofery, but never quite connected it to this particular record. [i]Miseducation[/i] on the other hand seems to have justified the album purchases; the big(gest) single was, I guess, technically available (in order, I suspect, to permit that #1 spot) but the other singles were good and more importantly people connected with the album cuts. Though, in the spirit of groaning at Wyclef interjections, I’m sure that its star would shine brighter today if not for the tedious skits and interludes sprinkled throughout. The same can be said for [i]The Carnival[/i] although that also suffers from being plain old Too Long. Still, all told, the Fugee lineup produced a pretty impressive collection of recordings between 1996 and 1998…
Some excellent comments here – thanks all.
Are they still (were they ever?) the only hip-hop act to score a legit licensed ABBA sample (on “Rumble In The Jungle”)? Not that the rap world were keeping Funkmaster Bjorn up at night with requests, I guess.
@mapman. My understanding is that the Hot100 has recently seriously diluted its claims to measure popularity proper by including youtube views in its calculations not just of the primary video for a song but also those for any related parodies, notoriously/virally awful live performances, and the like. I believe that Miley Cyrus returned to #1 recently strictly on the popularity of successful parodies of her wrecking ball/sledgehammer-licking vid.. That has to be wrong!
As for KMS, well, for some reason, Lauryn Hill’s voice has never worked for me, and since that’s about all this track has going for it, I find it hard to get through and a natural channel-changer. But that’s *my* problem so I won’t say anything further.
Popularity is popularity though – 2013 popularity doesn’t look like 1996 popularity (doesn’t look like 1952 popularity)
#20 so would Lily Alleen’s parody vid count twice, once for her and once for Bunnied Lines?
@Mark G, 22. If Billboard were consistent then it would.
@Anderw F, 21. Yeah, maybe. Certainly the use of youtube video views as a measure of popularity is a poisoned chalice given that many people hate-watch videos etc., so if *that* poor proxy for sales (or even any sort of pro-attitude) is allowed then it can be hard to see why explicit parodies, vids of live debacles, etc. shouldn’t be able to go proxy too. Anyhow, go here for Billboard’s own coverage of Miley’s return to #1 after an absence of 9 weeks because of video parodies.
#20 Heh heh. But a good point that’s worth addressing. The fact is since the Hot 100 has always included airplay, it makes sense to include “self-driven” airplay as well. It’s the primary way a lot of people consume music these days, including myself (you don’t think I actually *bought* those Robson & Jerome songs did you? ;))
In a way the inclusion of Spotify, Youtube, etc is the 21st century return to the original three-pronged Hot 100 which included jukebox play in addition to radio and sales. The question though is how to do it right, especially wrt Youtube. Official music videos should certainly count, and official lyric videos as well. But what about fan-made videos, parodies, and viral videos that just coincidentally have a certain song playing in the background? The Miley song you mention is far from the worst offender, since at least it was the entire song being played, and not just a 30 second clip like the ridiculous “Harlem Shake” phenomenon whose #1 status made me wonder if the chart had finally jumped the shark for good.
And of course, there’s exactly to mix three disparate measures into a logical balance. In the UK, it’s simple: 1 sale = 1 chart point. In the US, it’s a mysteriously nebulous process that is constantly changing. In 2013, the fact that “Harlem Shake” ended up as the year’s 4th biggest “hit” despite a thankfully quick flameout means they got it wrong (and I suspect Billboard knows it, too).
So, I’d say simply changing the formula to only allow videos with the entire song, as well as reducing the points impact of said plays would go a long way to addressing the problem. Fortunately the Youtube inclusion hasn’t skewed the chart as much as you think, but when it does, it can do so quite spectacularly as we saw last February and March.
@22 & @23: Actually, I don’t think so. I just did a quick flip through of the video I think you’re referring to, and it should only count for Lily Allen, since I didn’t catch any audio clips of the other song (although maybe I missed them).
Agree about hate-watching. I was reluctant to listen to “Harlem Shake” even for the morbid curiosity factor, since I realize I’d then be contributing in a tiny way to its absurd chart position.
So it wasn’t just me who found this soporific. The review has basically spoken for me this time – vivid vocals by Lauryn Hill and yes I suppose it was bravely minimalist amongst the hyper-kinetic sounds of summer 1996, but my indifference remains.
With the original Flack cut indelibly imprinted on my brain I couldn’t help but compare and found the Wyclef interjections intensely irritating. Not so much my younger colleagues who seemed to enjoy the ‘one times’ but didn’t take the track seriously at all. Lauryn Hill’s voice is ok and annoyingly this could of been so much better as a straight take but that’s obviously not what they were aiming for. The fact it’s not played much now or rarely referred to says it all.
It’s a defining, and bestselling, song of the year: a year which has been retrograded into its own “Britpop Heaven”. So I think it’s important to consider it on its own merits, rather than that of the awful later solo careers.
Lauryn plays a blinder. Sings the hell out of this. Far, far better than Roberta’s version (which I love): this is connecting.
There’s a bunny upcoming which I enjoyed more but the Fugees version was a nation-uniting number one. Difficult to dislike.
Re: 7, 9 – There are at least three #2s of the mid-nineties which, though I considered them all terrific, iconic and rapier-sharp, made the artists misunderstood as purveyors of drinking songs only. Born Slippy, A Design for Life, and yes, I’m so, so sorry to completely fuck up beyond all reason any chance of artistic credibility with the Popular literati, but always liked Tubthumping.
In short, a good example of what a cover version of a track that some regard as something of a minor classic should be: not just different in style to Flack’s version, but arguably, also better (or: if not certainly that, less introverted) : using a very distinctive vocal style and clever arrangement to really bring out the meaning in the lyrics and the song. A well-deserved best seller of the year: it seems incredible now actually how few singles the Fugees released as a group (incredible, too, that the acts they, to my ears at least, followed most closely in the footsteps of, were mostly British – Soul II Soul, of course, but also early Massive Attack or even Smith and Mighty). In short, they promised a lot: what they delivered was mostly pretty good, in some cases first rate, but there was a lot less of it than we might have hoped for.
An 8 from me, all told.
All this Wyclef bashing is predictable but I have to disagree. Tom is right about how his contributions frame the track as hip hop rather than a boring and redundant soul cover. Where else in music does a four word contribution turn a song from black and white into colour?
Looks like I’m the lone dissenting voice here. I always found this one of the weaker tracks on the Score and really all a bit unnecessary. Unlike the superior, bunnied follow up it’s not anywhere near different enough from its original and falls close to being hip hop karaoke. At a push 5, but no more.
I reviewed The Score for Select, having really liked one track (Temple) on the first album. I heard it as fairly standard non-gangsta hip hop, totally failing to hear the monster crossover potential, especially of Killing Me Softly. This should be no surprise – my inability to spot a winner has been lifelong.
(Re 30: yeah, I was going to mention Smith & Mighty).
Four scores of ‘6’ in a row. Dont think it’s happened before.
I found KMS a bit of a bore. It seemed a very lazy and slow record at the time and this wasn’t helped by becoming a radio favourite back in 1996.At least the weather was good if I recall.Nobody Knows by the Tony Rich Project was also around the same time and I would prefer that myself.
I’m not as sick of it as I once was but it’s not one I’d be rushing to Youtube to listen to.If its a cover chart topper ‘Jealous Guy’ or ‘Always on My Mind’ will do.
It’s hard to believe how massive the Fugees became in such a short space of time and how quickly it all ended. The one thing they had in their favour over other hip hop acts was sense of PG rated hip hop. Will Smith another example beforehand and a quite gaudy group in the 00’s would benefit further.
Tom commented back in ‘Geno’ how dexys midnight runners had one untouchable chart topper and one overplayed milestone.The Fugees also have to deal with this a bit but for me KMS isn’t the untouchable chart topper.5
Anyone want to put money on that run of 6s continuing? Anyone? Thought not.
ciaran @34: “It’s hard to believe how massive the Fugees became in such a short space of time and how quickly it all ended. The one thing they had in their favour over other hip hop acts was sense of PG rated hip hop.”
To be fair, they also had Lauryn Hill! A very strong singer I think, and working a vein that was very popular at the time. If memory holds, I’m pretty sure most of the girls in my school’s various soul/choral ensembles were all over her, and this.
They also had a strong narrative going, though some of this might have been cemented in the following two years – PG rated, yes, but also creative, multitalented genre-crossing masterminds, which played well in the record criticism of the time which favored fusions, hybrids, genre-splicing, etc. (A bit of implied cross-racial redemption was probably also folded up in this, not of the Fugees’ own doing.) [i]Rolling Stone[/i]’s cover asked if they were the “future of rock and roll,” a line Wyclef would take up in “Gone ‘Til November.” Indeed he got the benefit of this narrative first, and a lot of the goodwill towards [i]The Carnival[/i] stemmed from this I think. It’s still a pretty good record, not as good as [i]Miseducation[/i] by any means. Since then he seems to have taken up a proto-will.i.am role halfway between Corny Party Guy and cause-supporting Thoughtful Guy. But for a minute he was getting celebrated in the same terms as, I dunno, Beck at that date.
There was some sexism involved in how this all played out; I remember a great, later Hill interview where she recalled interviews with the Fugees: Pras asked to comment on the situation in Haiti, Wyclef prompted to reflect on hip-hop’s status as an industry – and Hill solicited for her shade of lipstick. Again, [i]Miseducation[/i] wiped some of that out – but it probably should not be ignored that they were also a conventionally [i]good-looking[/i] group who made a lot of magazine covers, and not just in the music press. I had at least a brief high-school crush on Hill, myself. Her later treatment by the press would be a whole discussion in itself. But I think there was a lot to find in “The Fugees” as a listening experience, and an idea.
Marcello Carlin on Fugees’ ‘Killing Me Softly’: http://t.co/hvTK4xaiGv
Accessible PG rated hip-hop it may be, but even I, someone that wasn’t a fan of the genre, knew what an inaccessible soap opera (east vs west coast etc, which we’ll get to in time) the mainstay of hip-hop and rap was to the casual listener at the time, so the Fugees were more than welcome.
In Denmark this is known as the ‘Chicken with ice cream’ song thanks to a track by the band Shu-bi-dua (The Danish Barron Knights??) In Danish ‘Killing me softly’ and ‘Kylling med softice’ have near identical homophones, the Two Ronnies would be proud.
Sample watch: The “sitar” part, and other elements, are from Bonita Applebum by A Tribe Called Quest
Sorry, not buying. I never quite got the fuss over Lauryn Hill anyway; I didn’t care at the time and reading later about her inability to follow up Misadventures didn’t affect me in the slightest (Doo Wop was vaguely interesting for about a week but I knew immediately that Ex-Factor was doing nothing for me). So, One Time, Two Times, and that horrible sitar-y riff hurled this straight into indifference at the time and relistening now gives me nothing more. 5.
I barely even remember the tug-of-war this had with Three Lions, a song that stuck in my memory far more; and someone up top mentioned Born Slippy, which was okay but surely their true masterwork came a lot more recently than that (Born Slippy is good and all, and shouting lager lager lager is always good for a laugh – it worked for Chumbawamba anyway – but dear christ, And I Will Kiss is astonishing).
I think Marcello has about the right of this, though I perhaps wouldn’t stretch all the way to 10. Maybe an 8. Lauryn Hill is brilliant on the track, though I suspect that without the flourishes and sampled bits on it that he identifies, it might not have been as popular as it wound up being – and in this I guess I also agree with James at 31. Count me in though as another fan of “Miseducation”, a record, which despite its length, I found pretty flab free; a rarity for a 13/14 track record with no song under the 4:15 mark.
#17: I found Ghetto Superstar to be memorable for two reasons, neither of which (I think) have much to do with Pras. There’s the use of “Islands in the Stream” which has me really struggling to remember anything from the rap sections of the record, though ODB is on there somewhere. And the second thing was that it was on the Bulworth soundtrack, so I remember it from that. Bulworth was actually a pretty decent film I thought – there were a number of mid/late 90s American political films that I’ve enjoyed, now I am thinking about it – Wag The Dog and Primary Colors being two others. Anyway, Pras doesn’t seem to have done that much since.
#29: I think that the idea that, in particular, A Design For Life pigeonholed the Manics as purveyors of “drinking songs only”, if it ever were true, can only have been true for a pretty ignorant set of people, unwilling to listen to the lyrics of Kevin Carter or Small Black Flowers or who didn’t have the intellectual curiosity to look up who Willem de Kooning is (now was, given he died in 1997).
I’d give 8+ to both ‘Nappy Heads’ and ‘Fu-Gee-La’ (and also the Salaam Remi remix of their next hit in fact). This gets 5 for quite predictable reasons. Just not what I wanted from three very entertaining MCs (particularly as I was still waiting for a hip hop #1 I really liked…), however lovely L Boogie could sound.
On TOTP I recall Hill singing this over an instrumental of Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Can It Be All So Simple?’ which felt pretty unusual (similar to how The Shamen opted to perform to a minimal techno version of ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ as its popularity reached saturation point).
#49: but in that pre-Internet age looking up who Willem de Kooning was would have required a reasonably substantial wodge of effort, and caring about lyrics is hardly mainstream practice.
Yes, people would’ve had to go and get up off their lazy, complacent, entitled arses and…read books! Look up art histories and encyclopaedias! Go to exhibitions (there was one of de Kooning’s paintings at the Tate in 1995)! Too much to ask in this reduced age, obviously, as is asking anyone to listen to or read the lyrics of “A Design For Life.” The world is not your butler, deal with it.
Also I don’t think you meant “#49.”
#42: Perhaps bad examples then. But you’d have to be pretty weird to look at the sleeve of your record, see Willem De Kooning’s name and think “must be the brewmaster at Heineken”. Or, ignoring the album tracks, be singing along to A Design For Life as many will have done – lest we forget, the opening line of which is “Libraries gave us power” (and also a good place to find an encyclopaedia to look up who Willem De Kooning was) – and thought, these guys are all about the booze.
I realise I am marking myself out as somewhat of a snob here but who cares? The Manics in particular were never seen as “a drinking band” from what I can remember – indeed the press played up their intellectual aspects – and all the people that I met at Manics gigs were well aware of what they were singing along to. If there was a drinking band knocking about in the 90s, it was Oasis.
Edit: Beaten to the punch, as ever.
The ADFL = Beer Monster Anthem argument is slightly belied by the fact that it kickstarted a period of sustained success for the Manics rather than being their only big hit (a la “Tubthumping”). The ADFL audience wanted the Manics to write arena rock, and that is what they by and large did afterwards – but there’s no real evidence that they wanted the Manics to write STUPID arena rock. There’s a pretty wide middle ground between “I like this song when I’m bevvied, fuck the lyrics” and “Ah, nice de Kooning reference” and band and fans were both happy to occupy it. If most people don’t listen to the lyrics, they do generally respond to the mood of music, and “ADFL” is no “Born In The USA” on that front.
More on this in a while, obviously.
Furthermore: “We don’t talk about love/We only want to get drunk.” You’d have to be pretty dense to think it was still a drinking song after hearing/singing along to that, but again that’s distinct from the armies of people who got into the Manics at this stage, relieved that they were now a “normal” rock band.
I’ve been to see The Manics live more times than any other band and at certain shows the split in the audience has been identifiable to an uncomfortable degree. I recall one show in Manchester where as the band hit the stage a group of lads, possibly already a bit tanked-up rushed forward and straight in front of me (I was about four rows from the front) and began moshing in a most agressive fashion elbowing and crowding a girl who was standing to my left, so much so in fact that she turned my way and mouthed ‘help me’. At 5ft10 and 130 pounds I’m not exactly bodyguard material and I was finding it hard to keep my own balance so the best I could do was throw out my left arm to keep a barrier between this girl and the moshers.
Thankfully they had calmed down after about 2 or 3 songs and spread out a bit. In spite of such experiences I would never accuse the Manics of pandering to a beery audience, far from it. One of the reasons I regard them as major favourites is because of their commitment to the idea of a rock band as a kind of alternative education system. If that’s pretentious then I think it’s the good kind of pretentious.
#43: The point I was making is that ‘people who would go to the library to look up something mentioned in an arena rock anthem* they kind of liked’ is probably a minority group. But you are of course entirely correct, everyone in Britain is as interested in music as you are and it was foolish of me to suggest differently.
*or ‘on the sleeve of an arena rock anthem’
It would be perfectly lovely if the majority opinion did lie that way, if people did go “yes! I must look up this Willem de Kooning IMMEDIATELY, he sounds like a fascinating bloke” – but I really don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that that isn’t the case.