Give Him Time to Regroup

“So, what do you want to know about the Fugees?”

The question from Wyclef Jean is unexpected. You’d think that the last thing the hip-hop star would want to talk about as he sits in West Hollywood hotel room is his strained relationship with his old group--especially when he’s in town to talk about his new solo album.

As a member of the Fugees in 1996, the Haitian native helped shape what is not only the biggest-selling hip-hop album ever (an estimated 17 million copies worldwide), but also one of the most acclaimed. By mixing R&B;, rap and reggae and other Caribbean touches, “The Score” greatly expanded the musical boundaries of hip-hop.

Though Jean co-wrote and co-produced most of the album, Lauryn Hill, the other principal in the trio, became more famous because she was the voice on the most popular track, a remake of the 1973 Roberta Flack hit “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”

To compound things, Hill’s subsequent solo album, 1998’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” was a far bigger commercial and critical success than Jean’s first solo album, 1997’s “Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival.” Some of the darker moments in “Miseducation” have even been widely interpreted as reflections on her former romantic relationship with Jean. (Hill declined to comment for this article.)

The issue of the group’s future is such a widespread topic in the hip-hop world that Jean, 30, even opens his freewheeling new album, “The Ecleftic--2 Sides II a Book,” with a skit about it.

In the sketch, he plays the new album for some Sony Music Entertainment executives, including Thomas D. Mottola, the company’s high-profile chairman and chief executive. Mottola is delighted at first to see Jean, but then is disappointed when he realizes the album is a solo project.

“What’s this ‘ecleftic’ stuff?” the Mottola character growls. “You gotta get in touch with your group. . . . Call me back when you’ve got another Fugees record.”

Jean follows that skit with a mocking song that also explores the Fugees hoopla: “All I hear is Fugee this/Fugee that/Where Fugee at.”

In the hotel room, an upbeat Jean explains his eagerness to discuss the Fugees.

“Well, why not talk about it?” he says. “I knew that people were going to ask me about the Fugees anyway, so I decided to have fun with it on the album. But I also wanted to create this positive vibe toward Lauryn and Pras [Prakazrel Michel, the third member of the group]. I want them to hear the song and for them to give me a call so that we can start getting back together.

“I believe the Fugees are like the Lakers. I believe Shaq and Kobe Bryant may argue a lot, but when it’s time to play basketball, they definitely go out and play as a team. I’m a positive person. The communication isn’t good between us now, but I think the [reunion] will eventually happen.”

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Taking the offensive about the Fugees is an entertaining and attention-getting tactic, but it’s also a dangerous one. It could reinforce the notion that what the pop world really wants is another Fugees album--and that Jean on his own isn’t all that rewarding a musician.

He even comes close to fueling that argument when he talks about the richness of the Fugees’ music.

“If you look at the kind of records that Lauryn makes and I make, they are different. Lauryn [writes and produces] ‘A Rose Is Still a Rose’ for Aretha Franklin. I do ‘Maria Maria’ for Carlos Santana. She is coming from a soul point of view. I’m coming from a Caribbean point of view, mixed with a soul point of view. When you mix those two fusions, you’ve got something unique. You’ve got the Fugees.”

Jean is able to talk about the Fugees because he is confident of his own abilities. Even without the Fugees, his accomplishments over the last three years are remarkable--a mix of entertainment and message that is both inviting and touching.

Jean sang at a memorial service last year for John F. Kennedy Jr., and he stole the show at a Johnny Cash tribute concert. On record, Jean co-wrote and/or co-produced three Top 10 hits: “Maria Maria” for Santana, “My Love Is Your Love” for Whitney Houston and “Ghetto Superstar” for Pras. His own “The Carnival” contained a dazzling mix of musical flavors that expanded on the multicultural elements of “The Score.”

“Wyclef is the whole package,” says Will Botwin, vice president and general manager of the musician’s label, Columbia Records. “He is irreverent, funny, entertaining, serious. He’s someone with staying power, someone who is consistently growing and challenging himself and his audience.”

The new album, due in stores Aug. 22, is a bit more hip-hop-minded than “The Carnival,” but is still a wildly eclectic affair that includes such guest vocalists as country veteran Kenny Rogers, pro wrestler the Rock, Mary J. Blige and Houston.

The Rock is included in the lively “It Doesn’t Matter” to catch the ear of the young wrestling audience, and he seems clumsy in a song that attacks the materialism of the rap world.

But Jean more than makes up for that commercial grab (and a few other eccentric asides) with the thoughtfulness of “911,” a duet with Blige that shows a vulnerability that is rare in hip-hop, and with “Diallo,” a reflection on the unarmed West African immigrant who was shot 41 times by New York police in a controversial 1999 incident.

Rolling Stone has already called the hyperactive work the “most pleasingly direct yet musically adventurous hip-hop [album] that you’re likely to hear all year.”

As if all this wasn’t enough to keep him busy, Jean, who acknowledges his workaholic tendencies, says he’s writing an off-Broadway play and plans to star in a movie.

Jean’s manager, David Sonenberg, says the musician would play the son of the character portrayed by reggae star Jimmy Cliff in a sequel to Cliff’s classic 1973 film “The Harder They Come.” Sonenberg said he has not made a deal with a studio yet, but he hopes to begin the film next summer. He said the script is almost finished and that he has already lined up most of the financing independently.

Sonenberg first saw Jean as an actor (in an off-Broadway play) rather than as a musician.

“He was charismatic, very spontaneous,” the manager recalls in a separate interview. “He must have been 17. I didn’t even know he wanted to be in the music business, but I remembered him two years later when he came into my office with a tape. He was doing some recording at a studio in New Jersey that I once represented as a lawyer, and I believe they recommended me.”

Although Sonenberg liked the tape, the music was heavily reggae-flavored, and he knew from representing Cliff that it’s hard to get airplay in the U.S. for the Jamaican style. But Jean mentioned that he also rapped, and he came back a few days later with the group that evolved into the Fugees.

“They in effect auditioned in my office and I thought they were terrific,” Sonenberg says. “I told them I didn’t know anything about rap, but that I would try and get them a deal.”

To the manager’s surprise, there was zero interest in the Fugees from hip-hop talent scouts in the early ‘90s--until he contacted Ruffhouse Records, a division of Columbia whose small roster also included Cypress Hill.

“The thing they didn’t like was that it was live music, not just samples and a turntable, which was what most hip-hop was about in those days,” Sonenberg says. “The Fugees were playing real instruments and writing real songs. To me, it was just an outgrowth of R&B;, but to the hip-hop world, it was a different style, and I realize now how revolutionary it was.”

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The grandson of a voodoo priest, Jean is a natural storyteller, and he enjoys describing how he’s protected by the spirits.

Earlier this year, he told England’s Q magazine that his mother was having a difficult time during his birth, so Jean’s father, a preacher in the Nazarene sect, tore Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd . . .”) out of a Bible and boiled it in some water. His mother drank the water and it helped ease the delivery, and Jean believes the action gave him special powers.

Sitting in the hotel room, he is quite animated as he tells about another incident--this one set in the Brooklyn housing projects, where Jean’s family moved from Haiti when he was around 9. It was a tough, crime-infested neighborhood, and he claims he found a dead body one day on the building’s roof. It was the spirits and his parents’ strict spiritual views, he says, that protected him and kept him in a positive direction in life.

He tells about a time when he got so upset at a group of neighborhood toughs that he went up to them and warned them that there was going to be trouble if they ever bothered him again. It was a crazy thing to do, he suddenly realized--but to his surprise, the gang just stood there and let him lecture them.

“Well, the next day this kid in the clique comes up to me and he says, ‘Yo, who was that big cat at your side when you were talking to us?’

“I told him that there wasn’t any cat with me, but the kid says, ‘Of course there was. Why do you think we just stood there and let you talk to us like that?’

“I believe it was my spirit . . . and it is why I believe I was sent to Earth for a reason, which is to bring people together, which is what I try to do with my music.”

Jean’s mother noticed his early interest in music and bought him a guitar when he was about 12. Because his parents were so devout, they didn’t let him play secular music in the house. By the time his family moved to New Jersey in the early ‘80s, however, Jean started listening to pop music, especially rock and the emerging hip-hop, at relatives’ or friends’ houses. An ally in his musical search was Jerry Wonder, a cousin who now works with Jean on various projects and co-wrote “Maria Maria.”

Jean was soon playing in bands at high school and in parks, doing customized versions of such pop hits as Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.”

After high school, he was experimenting with music and acting when his cousin, Pras, told him about a group he had put together.

“He said he had this group with these two girls, and the first thing that comes into my mind is how do the girls look, you know what I’m saying?” Jean says. “So I went over to the studio. . . . My plan was to see how the girls looked, do this little vocal part for them and then leave.”

But Khalis Bayyan, a producer who had worked with Kool & the Gang, thought he heard something special in the combination of voices, and he urged Jean to join the group, which became the Fugees. (The group ended up a trio after the other female singer quit to go to college.)

The group’s first album, “Blunted on Reality,” was released in 1993, but it didn’t stir much interest. Jean says the collection, which was produced by outsiders, didn’t capture the individuality or musical diversity of the group. So the Fugees insisted on producing their next album themselves. The result was “The Score.”

The album was received so well throughout the pop world that it landed the group on the cover of Rolling Stone, with the teasing headline, “Are the Fugees the Future of Rock & Roll?”

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Jean is such a born entertainer that it’s hard to know whether he actually believes in the protective spirits he talks about or whether he thinks it’s a nice addition to his playful persona.

But there is a clear spiritual and inspirational edge to some of his music, both with the Fugees--whose name is a play on “refugees,” symbolizing solidarity with people from Haiti and elsewhere who have come to the U.S.--and on his own.

For all his success, Jean, who lives in East Orange, N.J., with his wife, Claudinette, tends to maintain a fairly low public profile. If he’s not in the studio, he is usually “chillin’ around the house,” watching movies on TV.

(One controversial moment in Jean’s life came when he was accused in 1998 of pointing at gun at the editor of Blaze, a hip-hop magazine, during an argument over a review. Jean denied having a gun and no charges were pressed.).

“I think back on my life and how we didn’t have shoes and we used to rely on rainwater for a bath, and I want to inspire kids, both here and in Haiti,” he says.

“That’s what [the new album’s] ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ is all about. It’s about the real values. All too often kids are only getting one story [in music], and that’s the diamonds and the big cars in the video. What I’m trying to say is, that doesn’t matter.

“I sit back and watch guys with so much money they don’t know what to do with it. Every day they’ve got a different car, a different coat, a different house, and they are the most miserable people in the world. You’ve got to find something else in life, something that can always give you strength.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.