Remembering the Quiet Perfection of The Score's Bonus Tracks
25 years after The Fugees' second and final album, its closing stretch remains as endearing as ever.
Among all the hip-hop classics from the mid-’90s, The Score has its own peculiar charm. The Fugees’ sophomore album, released in February 1996, is a cypher-rap masterpiece that feels like an anthology of hip-hop’s parent influences. Lauryn Hill, Wyclef and Pras would blend eras and genres in fresh and unexpected ways, channeling R&B, doo-wop or reggae with generous ease. It’s an album of timeless hits, with liner notes that read like a secret hip-hop Hall of Fame. Yet the one thing that makes The Score a unique experience, at least to me, remains its ending. Or rather, its lack of a definite ending.
The Score has 13 tracks, but the best-known version of the album, dubbed the “Expanded Edition” features an encore. As the outro closes, album-host-slash-radio-legend DJ Red Alert comes back for a frantic tirade, shouts out the album personnel, screams to an unseen character to “GET OUT OF HERE”, draws a round of applause and leaves again. Then starts The Score’s final movement: a 17-minute suite of bonus tracks, with “Fu-Gee-La”, the album’s lead single, as a pocket universe of vibes and ideas.
There are four beats to that movement: a first “Fu-Gee-La”remix featuring Fugees inner-circle partners Jerry Wonda and John Forté ; a second, dub-infused remix by reggae masterminds Sly and Robbie ; “Mista Mista”, a stark Wyclef ballad on drug addiction ; plus a third, final take on “Fu-Gee-La”, with a multi-language “Refugee Camp Global Mix”.
In the original “Fu-Gee-La”, the group defied enemies and poseurs with effortless wordplay, biblical threats and left-field pop references. In The Score’s bonus sequence, “Fu-Gee-La” becomes a shape-shifting entity, by turns playful, pensive and hazy. The Ooh-La-La-La hook, borrowed from a 1988 song by R&B songstress Teena Marie, gets repeated like a mantra, and a little miracle happens: instead of burdening the album with exhausting codas, those repetitions take The Score into a higher, almost dreamy realm. It’s like “Fu-Gee-La” was taking on a life of its own and decided to carve out its own album within the album.
The Score offers plenty of great moments, but there is something particularly rewarding in that finale. For a group already well-versed in the art of the cover song, the ending of the The Score is a brilliant exercise in nuances and variations, one that somehow brings closure to the record while leaving it opened to new inspirations.
Blunted On Reality, the Fugees debut released three years earlier, was, by all accounts, a misfire. Lauryn Hill, Pras and Wyclef had been dabbling in music for a while, all with their own singular passions. Hill was a soul enthusiast, Pras a Brooklyn-born hip-hop head, while the slightly older Clef, who grew up in Haiti, was walking in the footsteps of his reggae heroes. All of these influences hadn’t fully gelled at the time. Wyclef and Pras would aim for high-octane rapping, in the obnoxious vein of New York hardheads Onyx. It’s Salaam Remi, ever the providential producer, who would advise the group to tone it down, gently showing the way towards the less hurried, more casual style of The Score.
The album’s closing stretch is a testament to The Fugee’s newfound confidence. Using “Fu-Gee-La” like a canvas, each member of the group adds their own brush strokes, from Clef’s half-sung verses to Hill’s angelic harmonies. Their boundless creativity is reflected in the travel vignettes dispersed through the lyrics. From Japan to the Kalahari desert, from Paris to Pras “sitting in the cool breeze in the West Indies”, the whole thing sounds like the group is coming back from many world explorations—refugees empowered by encounters and experience. One could almost forget that, at this point, all of this was still coming from the basement of Wyclef’s uncle in East Orange, New Jersey (and that the song remained a put-down to whoever wants to test).
These bonuses condense the Fugees’ appeal: an unmatched melodic sensibility, uncompromising hip-hop ethos, plus a flair for the universal. Somewhere in the Sly and Robbie mix, there’s even a young, uncredited Akon, in what could be his first-ever appearance on a record. His “Call Mr Martin” bridge is irresistible and prescient. Akon’s embryonic presence, next to Wyclef, sounds like a teaser of their future breakthroughs as global pop socialites.
By the time the third remix cruises by, the vibe is so laid back, it’s hard to notice that the song really is the final Fugees song. During recording, Wyclef and Lauryn Hill were going through the ups and downs of a messy relationship. As The Score would become a Grammy-winning, multi-platinum success, it would also predate the implosion of the group. Based on the music alone, that was hard to guess. In the final remix, on a acoustic guitar and a spare drum beat, the rough edges of the original lyrics mellow into joyful esperanto (Wyclef: “Like ichi ni san shi go roku shichi hachi / Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir, baby?”). “Fu-Gee-La” is now a comfort zone, the group’s own refuge, or their way back home. Lauryn Hill sings the hook one last time, her voice relaxed, with only a hint of bittersweetness.
As the song closes, the group produces one final detail that gets more poignant as years go by. The same way the first remix opened with a long fade-in, the last one ends with a slightly overextended fade-out, while the song’s titular flight attendant, named Sania, thanks us all for our presence. In the very last seconds, she’s barely audible when she says, in French, “So I hope we’ll see each other next time, on that Refugee Camp International Flight”. This may not be standard aeronautical phraseology, but the serenity in her voice makes it perfect. For The Fugees, despite a few extra collaborations and late touring, there won’t really be any next time. The quiet landing of The Score will forever remain their long goodbye, gracefully concealed in a promise of things to come.
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