READY or not, here they come, you can't hide ... Fugees gonna find you, if you haven't found them already. The global hip-hop sensation of 1996 are playing their first gig in Ireland, at Dublin's Point Theatre, and whaddaya know, it's completely sold out already. Who are these Fugee people, and why has the world gone ga-ga for their mix of hardcore rap and soft soul.
Their full name is Fugees (Refugee Camp), they come from New Jersey and Brooklyn via Haiti and, like refugees of rap, they seemed to suddenly fetch up on our shores, skipping the usual immigration channels to take up residence in our consciousness.
The Fugees are Lauryn Hill, Prakazrel Michel and Wyclef Jean, but we can call them L, Pras and Clef. The band formed when Lauryn and Pras got together in high school in East Orange, New Jersey, influenced by everything from Stevie Wonder to Big Daddy Kane, from Eric B. & Rakim to, er, Duran Duran. The pair were joined by Pras's musically gifted, Haitian born cousin, Wyclef, and the Fugee threesome was complete. The next thing was to go out there and bring some hard hip-hop to the kids in the hood.
Trouble is, things didn't work out that way for the Fugees, and in the summer of 1996 the group's hip-hop rending of Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly became a worldwide hit, catapulting the underground trio smack dab into the mainstream. This was not according to the original plan, which was to rewrite Killing Me Softly as a ghetto anthem, with streetwise lyrics and a tribal sensibility. However, the composers wouldn't allow the song to be so radically altered, so the band recorded a version with the original lyrics, and this went on to sell seven million copies around the globe. Not bad for a cover version.
But fame has brought some sinister baggage with it, and the Fugees have been dogged by rumour and innuendo from the moment they hit the big time. The biggest and most damaging rumour stems from the trio's professed desire to make music for their own people, and their belief in black self determination. This has been interpreted by some sections of media to mean that Lauryn, Pras and Clef are militant anti white racists, an accusation which they have repeatedly refuted, saying that they have been grossly misinterpreted.
Lauryn blames white racists for spreading scurrilous rumours about the Fugees's political stance, and this is not so far fetched when you realise that they are now one of America's biggest pop phenomena, and that they've done it without betraying their roots, and without stooping to gangsta tactics. The Fugees are for real, and they tell it like it is they care about the black community, and they feel solidarity with the dispossessed and deprived of society in general. No wonder the supremacists hate them.
And if you need further proof that the Fugees have been wrongly maligned, the global gossip machine went into even more bizarre territory last week, with rumours appearing on the Internet that Lauryn had committed suicide. Sometimes the information superhighway can become a worldwide web of deceit.
Back in the real world, the Fugees's album, The Score, is still doing the business chartwise, and the single, Ready Or Not, has shown that the band can come up with some killer songs of their own. At the tender age of 21, Lauryn Hill is fast becoming hip-hop's pin-up girl, and her talents extend to acting (she starred in the US soap, Days Of Our Lives and in Sister Act II with Whoopi Goldberg), writing (she almost became a journalist) and speaking articulately and uncompromisingly about social issues. The band have just produced and provided the backing vocals for Simply Red's current single, Angel, proving once and for all that they don't mind white people buying their records. The Fugees may not be ready for stardom, but it's found them, and they won't be able to take it slowly any more.
