Fugees - Blunted on Reality

Pitchfork 76

Pras Michel first came to Wyclef Jean at his dad’s church in New Jersey looking to join a band, not a rap group. Wyclef was already something of a local celebrity in the mid ’80s, writing raps in a session produced by Kurtis Blow for a group called Exact Change (on a single recording that was never released), and picking up the nickname the Rap Translator. Pras sought out Clef to play trumpet in the church band. As Wyclef tells it, Pras was a dreadful trumpet player, but he introduced Wyclef to two young musicians from his Newark high school: the mononymously known “Marcy” and a choir singer named Lauryn Hill. Even then, Hill was preternaturally talented, with a deep-rooted knowledge of R&B and Motown soul. Pras was an instrumentalist who was privy to rap as a kid but blocked from listening to it, instead spending long afternoons scanning the dials of his family radio for hard and soft rock. And he sought out Wyclef, who was already adapting the music of the Caribbean to fit his own, to add more reggae flavor into the mix. When Marcy abandoned the group after a few sessions, the trio adopted the name Tranzlator Crew, then later, Fugees.

The Fugees, as many have come to know them, appeared fully formed in 1996 on “Fu-Gee-La,” the lead single from the trio’s ground-breaking, major label opus, The Score. But “Fu-Gee-La” predated the polished, finished project, starting as a raw loosie produced on the fringes of a session for a “Vocab” remix. It was created in the early-mid ’90s when the group was still experimenting, on a beat Salaam Remi originally made for Fat Joe. In those moments, before The Score was even conceived, the Fugees were slowly coalescing into a unit. Under the direction of Kool & the Gang co-founder Khalis Bayyan (then Ronald Bell), they were working on their debut album called Blunted on Reality.

Each member had a unique musical history, leading to a sonic information trade of sorts—capitalizing on Lauryn’s internal soul music archive, Pras’ hard- and soft-rock reference points, and Wyclef’s reggae reworks. The smorgasbord of sound registered as rap but only when stripping several layers of context away; the Fugees packed reggae-flecked, raucous romps and remixes into 18 tracks, and attempted to package it as traditionalist hip-hop. The result was a commercial flop, selling (literally) 12 copies, and sending the group back to the drawing board.

For all its eclecticism, Blunted on Reality is still a relic of its era—heavily indebted to rap’s elite samplers and sound-bending maestros De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Main Source, and even Digable Planets—and it's a bit raw and rough around the edges, a mostly croon-free ragga rap opus that’s far less explicit with its social and political ideals than The Score but twice as enthusiastic. The album scans as a style sampler of early ’90s alt hip-hop. But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s a fun, low-stakes gambit straddling the margins of boom bap, jazz rap, and reggae fusion without pause, and it’s a transformative experience for its MCs.

The trio have said in the past that they let producers wrestle away creative control of the record, creating a product they didn't recognize, and they carefully distanced themselves from it during the press junket for The Score. But Blunted on Reality is essential to the myth of the Fugees and to the sonics of their seminal album. Without this commercial misfire, there is no colossal comeback story, no extra push to silence naysayers who wrote the album off as a failure, and they couldn’t have made something as refined as The Score without making this record first.

Despite its status as the underwhelming precursor to a classic, Blunted on Reality is a marvel of pure energy and noise that musters up rage and exuberance in equal measure. It’s clearly a response to racial injustice, xenophobia, and inner-city violence, but the album never wages war with any of these topics directly. Instead, there are one-off references to shootings, to the Klan and black oppression, and to intolerance, amid a party pack. Its zeal is sadly as timely as ever. “Hide nigga hide, flee nigga flee, run nigga run/For I’ve got my hood, my cross, my tree, my gun/My rope, and it’s a long one,” Lauryn recites in the intro. Seconds later, Wyclef puts it even more plainly: “You maintain to put a negro in pain.”

Blunted on Reality sits squarely at the intersection of New York City and Croix-des-Bouquets, mixing big-city swagger with an outsider’s mentality (ideas best articulated by interludes “Harlem Chit Chat” and “Da Kid From Haiti”). The reggae influence lines the seams of songs like “Temple” and “Refugees on the Mic,” which forgo heavy boom-bap for more leisurely, island-friendly tempos. The accents disappear on the shout-rap tracks, but sneak out for the hooks on “Recharge” and “Boof Baf” and in the opening moments of “Giggles.” It’s a triumph of black American immigrants, constantly mixing cultural cues. The breakbeat on the roughneck rousing “How Hard Is It?” is almost New Jack Swing-like, while “Nappy Heads” makes an escapist anthem out of an Earth, Wind, and Fire ballad.

Slowly but surely, the Fugees find their voices on Blunted on Reality, taking turns with bludgeoning verses that do most of their damage with sheer force. Lauryn often sounds MC Lyte-ish in her inflections, less assured and measured in her pronunciations than she would become on later albums, but she is still clearly the group’s X factor, with raps that burst at the seams and a standout solo cut (“Some Seek Stardom”). When the dust had settled, the trio had three hit singles and a platinum album to their name, and Blunted on Reality had been reduced to an asterisk in the Fugee story, Lauryn would later tell Ebony in November ’96 that “kids need to know there’s more to life than a five-block radius,” that the Fugees spoke for the disenfranchised. The Score delivered that in its messages, but before that, Blunted on Reality proved it with an uncompromising sound.