Pop Music Review : Breathing Life Into Hip-Hop

It happens every four years. Right when hip-hop seems to be on the verge of losing its creative momentum, fresh talent emerges from the underground to remind us of the genre’s brilliance.

The wonder of Sunday’s bill at the House of Blues was the presence of three outstanding hip-hop acts, all with the potential to redefine the boundaries of the music: the Fugees, the Roots and the Goodie Mob.

Though the first two acts have been through town before, they have gained much higher national profiles since their last visits--and they lived up to the added prominence with standout performances.

As the Fugees’ Wyclef Jeanstood on stage playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on guitar with his teeth a la Jimi Hendrix, the capacity crowd looked mystified.

You could tell from their expressions what they were thinking: Rappers aren’t supposed to be great instrumentalists. That’s why they rap.

Once past the puzzlement, however, the audience exploded with enthusiasm as the Fugees’ deejay kicked in the strains of Run-DMC’s 1984 classic “Rock Box,” with Clef playing live guitar variations, thus putting the forceful live music of the Fugees within traditional rap context.

The core of the Fugees may be simply Jean, Lauryn Hill and Prakazrel Michel, but the red-hot New Jersey-based group also employs a live band (rather than simply recorded samples) to add to the raw ambience of the music.

The Fugees, whose new “The Score,” is one of the nation’s Top 5 sellers these days, offer on stage and on record a blistering combination of stirring vocals, sociopolitical themes and earthy musical textures. In its best moments, the group easily leapfrogs past the once-promising Arrested Development and Digable Planets to assert a future as glowing perhaps as the early Sly & the Family Stone.

The outfit helps expand the parameters of live hip-hop, bringing together generations of urban black musical history in a completely spontaneous format.

The remarkable thing about Sunday’s bill was that the Fugees weren’t the only thing fans went home talking about.

By riffing over rap and funk standards, all three groups, at many points in their sets, were reminiscent of jazz musicians weaving into their new material, live instrumental variations of rap standards. The Goodie Mob, for instance, drew on such landmark works as Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead” and Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain.”

The Roots, one of the spearheads of the organic rap movement, upped the stakes even further with their performance. Stirring versions of their originals were well received, but they scored best with a medley of golden age rap hits, including “Sucker MC” and “The Bridge Is Over.”