Jun 3, 2018 - After dropping a respectable debut album in 1994, Blunted On Reality, The Fugees returned in with their classic The Score—arguably the best. Feb 1, 1994 - Name: Fugees – Blunted on Reality Genre: Rap Hip-Hop Year: 1994. Label: Ruffhouse Producers: Pras, Wyclef Jean, Khalis Bayyan, Salaam.

Pras Michel first came to 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 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. 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,. 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,. 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 It was created in the early-mid ’90s when the group was still experimenting, on a beat Salaam Remi originally made for. Building the dream gwendolyn wright pdf free download. In those moments, before The Score was even conceived, the Fugees were slowly coalescing into a unit. Under the direction of 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,,, and even —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.