Time Machine: The Score (Side B)

From the 11th and beneath of Duraqib, this is Time Machine, the score. Side beat, interlude, home. I was only 10 when the score came out. It was 96, so I was 12 years old. When the score was released, I was about 12 years old, living in Miami and little Haiti, actually. Being Asian at that time, it was not cool. Not in the least, y'all eat cat, and y'all do voodoo. And I remember always doing my best to try to assimilate, it's just one of the other black kids. Then all of a sudden, it shifted, and yeah, the score, that's what changed. The score is what happened. We'd always ask the bus driver to put music on, listening to that in a group of other black kids and other kids of color, and other white kids around us. That was really empowering. If you listen to really in music, that white cleft, or pros, or doing, they'd love to drop a lot high. You know, we're just hearing those words here and there, it was like, "Was that Creole?" To be in that group and to have references that were like Haitian words, even on how many mics when they come out and it's like, "How many mics?" and it's like, "Me saying many, me saying many, many, many." How many mics do we rip on the deli? Send me, send me, me, me, money, send me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me." No, and Creole and Haitian Creole. Many is like here they are, here it is, here it is, and so it's kind of like a play on words too, that, you know, as a young kid, I could hear and appreciate. White cleft does things that you hear in compa music a lot. The way he sings his vibrato, it's different. That's how they scream, that's how they like belt out music, like you don't got to be the best singer here in White cleft, Jean, we feel like we made it, like we're gangster now, like we can ride with the rest of them, like nobody can touch us. There are kids in school who were Haitian, I didn't know where Haitian until after he was okay. And we were all hiding, we were all like, you know, and of course now it's like, "Oh, I should have known that Jean Pierre was Haitian." It didn't like switch things overnight, but I can definitely tell like that was the moment where it was a little more cool to be Haitian, a little less hard. Track 5 on Haiti. By the spring of 1997, the score was a hit. In its primary architects had become household names. The Fougies went to play a concert in Haiti. There's this documentary MTV made in 1997. You see the Fougies on a plane, they've just landed in Port of Prince. They're about to play a show to some 70,000 people. The cameras follow them as they make their way onto the tarmac with an excited crowd waiting for them behind a yellow security ring. Then Wyclef suddenly drops his bags and his guitar and runs into the crowd. When I was young, I loved the group but didn't think much of the name. Fougies was fun to say. It sits well on the tongue and bounces off of it smoothly, but I was too young or too oblivious to consider the full name. Even when it was shouted in songs, even when it was worked into album liner notes. Refugees. The Refugee Camp. Wyclef Jean immigrated to the United States from Haiti in 1978. Prague's first gen, his parents were from Haiti. The producer Jerry Wanda is from Haiti. Lauren isn't Haitian, but that never really mattered. The album that made Fougies famous was about claiming your place, no matter where you came from in the diaspora. Haiti was the first black-led republic. They fought for their independence from the French and won, but they had to pay for it. Literally. They had to pay the French who had enslaved them on the island. They took 122 years. An era of instability ensued, and it continues today. The violence came after a day of jubilation in the streets. Haitians were celebrating a promise change of power as top US members. Political fractures, natural disasters, clues and CIA puppets. Outsiders flooded the country with aid after each disaster, both natural and man-made. And ultimately, many Haitians fled their country, and the Haitian refugees who showed up on America shores were not welcome. Don't blame the Haitians for what they do not do. We got fucked over in the 80s, man. Like 80s was bad for us. Chris X is a music writer. He was born in Haiti in the 70s and immigrated to New York in the 80s. Oh man, it was horrible. Yeah, we got beat up, we got chased down. We got called HBO Haitian body older. We was the one that bore AIDS. We were the niggas of the Caribbean. Everyone could shit on us. This is part of the long memory of whiteness in that it will not forgive Haiti for becoming free. And it's done everything in this power to empower Haiti and to make Haiti the butt of every bad statistic and joke and everything it can. This is the context in which the Fuji is formed, the context in which they recorded the score, with images on the news of folks who looked and sounded like Wyclef in prize in their families, fighting their way to the shores of a country where they would then face new discrimination. There's plenty to debate when it comes to the commercial success of the score. Was it due purely to Lauren's talent as an MC? Was it Praz's production acumen or clefs ability to market the group? But it's this other success. This reclamation, which I think we can fairly credit to Wyclef and to Praz. They were Haitian, a hard thing to be at the time, and they wanted to make sure everyone knew it. Here's Wyclef in the MTV documentary. Well, basically, the country got its independence in 1804. But what's important for people to know is we have been struggling ever since then, is you have poor people, rich people. There's no such thing as middle class at all. You know what I mean? And it's not like, you know, Clef is the first Haitian hip-hop artist. Dream Hampton is a film director and writer. It just wasn't something that you claimed, you know? And it's not like biggie or bust that were claiming to be Jamaican. They were claiming Brooklyn. So these are like, you know, first generation kids who really, you know, may have an experience to going back to the island for summers or once in a while. But they're claiming their burrows. Haitians tend to be in Queens or New Jersey, which were places that you necessarily claim. But Clef came in and, you know, he claimed all of that. When I think about the Fuji's and Haiti, I think about this moment in 1997 at the Grammys. And the best rap album is The Fuji's. The score just won rap album of the year and the Fuji's walk on stage. At this moment, let's not forget the refugees in Zaire going through this bad situation right now, nor the refugees in Haiti. And why Clef has a giant Haitian flag wrapped around his body? Let's not file out the hip-hop. He knew what he was doing. That wasn't a mistake. Yeah. I remember, you know, and that S.Doc Carter record with J.C.'s, like, you know, I went on MTV with Durags, I made them love you. That's the attitude that I feel like Clef had, like he was very aware that Haitians were the butt of many jokes that we were the notes on the totem pole and the Caribbean, that our accomplishments through history had been untold or diminished or hidden. The act to flight is seen as a shameful thing, right? Lucia Aquanga is a writer and musician. His parents both led Uganda and in 1996, he was coming of age in England. The score as an album to me created a framework for that to be like, look, there's nothing wrong. It's dignified, actually, to escape. to get out of here. you have to. So that was incredibly political for me. There's always a Haiti. There's always a Haitian American, you know, in in a different country, different context, it could be the Bosnian Muslim, or it could be the Roma community in Italy, you know, and so every country has a Haitian American. And I think what was so powerful was describing that experience in such a specific way, made it resonate all the more. Yeah, think about the scores. I can such a pro black fucker record. Chris X, but this is about the rebirth of everything, everything. It was like a second coming. It was just like a planting of the flag and unapologetically so, you know. For some people, the score was a political work, a black resistance album. And that music was the same music that soccer moms played in their minivans, bopping along to killing me softly, easy listening. And for a lot of refugees, Haitian or not, the message from the score was like an anthem. They heard themselves in the album. They heard "Home." Track 6. On Miss Lauren Hill. When I was young, on the days I would hear Roberta Flax killing me softly, wafting out of a stereo, or a car speakers, I always assumed it to be a sad song, a song of longing, a song of anguish. I didn't yet hear what Lauren Hill heard until I heard its ringing forth from her own voice. The song could also be a song of joyful, pleasurable release, a song of giving into the inevitability of your affection. When Lauren Hill sang, I heard it for the first time as a pure love song. On killing me softly, Lauren is defying gravity. She glides over the harmonies, over a beat that dares you not to move. It was a single with staying power, performed to this day whenever a vocalist wants to stop time to make a moment. It was Lauren, the star, singing a powerful, gently moving spectacle of a song. The thing I want to talk about today is Lauren Hill's voice, how she used it, and how she was expected to use it. If you were in school and the era I was in school, you might understand the delight that comes when a substitute teacher wheeled the large, bulky TV card with a VCR into the room. I first saw Sister Act 2 in what I think was an art class in middle school. We had a substitute teacher for a whole week, and by Thursday, he brought in a TV in a few movies. I remember sitting in a room and collectively marveling at Lauren Hill with people who were young enough, and eager enough to marvel at a star in the making. She was 18 years old when the film came out in 1993. It must be said too that the final act, the performance of Joyful Joyful, is almost irreconcilably corny to watch now. It's kind of a fever dream of 90's aesthetics, haphazardly slapped onto a sonic and visual landscape, but at the end of that scene, where she emerges from the crowd of singers and briefly takes her place at the center of the stage, something turns, the mood and point of propulsion shift. To me, just the narrative of Black women in music is basically you should just sing, girl. The narrative is like, be our R&B girl, like, sing soul, sing the blues. This is Danielle Smith, culture journalist, and former editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine. So it seemed very strategic to me, even back then, that either the Fujis as a group would make a decision, or Columbia, or whoever would push Lauren into singing more than interlapping. I mean, the numbers would just spell it out that she had a better chance of becoming a superstar as a singer than as a rapper. I mean, that's still just true today. The first time you hear Lauren rap will sing, you know. Lucia Aquanga, writer and podcaster for the ringer. You just, you knew, you knew the way that she entered a track. You know, the one of the things underrated as an MC is how you come on a track, and the way that Lauren entered. It's like coming through this saloon door. Like when Lauren drops the first bar, you don't need to hear the next 15. You know, you already know. How many mics she kicks off with the verse that is potent and surgical, and then, you hear her on "Ready or Not." Singing the chorus and then delivering one of the best verses of the album. I could do what you do, easy. Fronteniggas give me PBGB's. It's scathing, boastful, comical, and then, just like that, she's back to the chorus. And then there's Fujila. Look at the opening of her verse. There's not much wiggle room on the sound she plays with at the end of those bars. It's kind of like she's running full speed and just darting into whatever small opening she could find. She's a novelist, actually, like all the best MCs are novelists, right? There's some Silvia Plath, there's some Tony Morrison. It's all in there. So Lauren Hill could say in two lines, what other rappers would say in two minutes. That is what made her deadly. That's what makes her an Andro 3000 and Doom and a couple of others really like absolutely lethal as MCs. The ability to drop two bars of like timeless knowledge. It's like Esop's fables, if that makes sense. I mean, a lot of guys couldn't hang with her. Writer Karen Goodmarble. Her lyrical game was treacherous. Some people called her arrogant, but I'm like, she's an MC. Of course she's arrogant. Of course. You need to come out swinging. And I wasn't mad at it. I think that she should have been. She's in the tradition of MC like. She's in the tradition of Latifa. She's in the tradition of Moni Love. She's in the tradition of Bahamadiya. Philly rapper Bahamadiya supported Fuji's when they are on tour with the score. Specifically, I remember the impact it started to have on Lauren. Going for one face like we started out, you know, you're energetic, you're going on stage, you're doing what you need to do, you know what I mean? It seemed like it became like a little overwhelming because it all started to happen like a flood day just open. It doesn't hit you at first and then all of a sudden the people around you are adjusting to the illusion that fame creates or the celebrity creates. It's not easy to hold on to yourself and an industry that commodifies you but isn't really for you. A space where thousands of strangers are projecting things on you that you can't reasonably carry. It's funny how money changes situation, miscommunication leads to complication. In 1998, Lauren released her first solo album, a miseducation of Lauren Hill. It was a masterpiece. It was an album about loving your blackness, it was about stepping out on your own. And it was a reaction to all the ways her life had changed since 1996. Good and bad. This is the category, album of the year. This year, all five nominations feature a female vocalist. Whitney Houston and Sting had the job of announcing the album of the year on stage at the Grammy Whitney Houston peers over Sting's shoulder reads the winner's name and starts cheering before the words are out of Sting's mouth. Pumping her fist in the air like that's my girl Danielle Smith again. I know it's very difficult to imagine but there hadn't been like a black person a rap album to win anything and to see her up there with all those Grammys I could literally cry right now thinking about it and she looked so great and she was so strong and we all just were so proud of her it was like it was just like happiness on top of happiness it was like we all won the Grammys and we could sit up and say well you know forget the Grammys you know the Grammys are flawed the Grammys don't like black music the Grammys are segregated and yes all of that is true it is a flawed metric and but it is the metric that we had and we were proud of her man and we still are. This moment was the height of Miss Lauren Hill's fame for reasons we can guess but never really know she started to pull back she seemed less invested in selling a commercial version of herself and catering to a mainstream audience from the outside it seemed like she was invested in living her life and reclaiming herself and being more than just the Lauren Hill that people saw on stage. It's kind of heartbreaking to me honestly it's very hard sometimes to speak about the journeys of black women and music because so much of it is wrapped up in pain and so much of it is wrapped up in romantic relationships that go awry or to appear in bitter betrayals in the part of creative partners and it also is wrapped up in the perception that white Americans have of black women being these vessels of emotion that always have to show up and carry everybody's blues and translate everybody's sorrows and punctuate everybody's joys and et cetera et cetera and that shit gets really hard excuse my language and it's a load. Lauren has been on stage from a very young age she performed at the Apollo in 1987. She was booed and it is hard to watch this young black girl hair pressed hoop shining nerves jittering and being booed by people who look like family but it's in the way she doesn't back down how she takes command of her voice and the song and by the end has the audience cheering watching this video from the Apollo now I am grateful to once again witness the power the strength of Miss Lauren Hill and I'm so grateful for what she would go on to do from there for the connection I'd have with her career that would linger and loom large over so many memorable moments in my life that her songs and her rhymes would be in the background during basketball games or first kisses or first day of school bus rides. Lauren Hill is someone I would return to for a soundtrack not for the sake of nostalgia as much but for the sake of feeling all while knowing that I'm also greedy with those feelings constantly craving more do I wish there was more from her do I wish that she performed more do I wish that she recorded more God wish that she told more of her stories do I wish that we just knew more if she do I wish she just talked more about her process and her genius and things like that absolutely but that's for all black women track seven on death and rebirth my oldest brother had a treasure chest full of cassette tapes hundreds of them collected over nearly a decade to that point most of them rap albums in my worst childhood dreams they would all be gone overnight someone would come in and take them away and that would be the end of the music as I knew it to box your core dead at the age of 25 of gunshot wound sustained Saturday night September 7th in Las Vegas police still have no leads on suspect or motive some rapper the green saying the only way to make things better is to get hip hop back to its original state before the advent of lyrics that glorified death and violence it's a black old awful but it was made for the whole world to listen to and if we as the creators do not take responsibility for what this is it's gonna be gone it's gonna be gone the consensus was that everyone knew two pop was going to die my brothers claim they knew everyone on my school bus claim they knew he'd flown too close to the violent son for too long it was 1996 this was in an era before news could be disseminated through social media and there was a week between two pox shooting and two pox dying within that week hope had started to grow and then rapidly dwindle among my circles and so when the news of his death hit what was there to do but shrug heavily and say you knew it was coming insist that you prepared yourself for specifically this the big news came six months later on a Sunday it was 1997 I was up early watching my usual Sunday smorgasbord of television then the MTV news break hi I'm Serena I'll show with an MTV news special report rapper Chris Wallace better known as notorious B.I.G. was shot and killed in Los Angeles early Sunday morning you know how miserable everybody was like people we were miserable yeah Daniel Smith culture journalist informer editor in chief of live magazine grown people who weren't even fans of rap who thought that rap was negative and she'd be banned from the world like people's grandparents don't nobody wants to see people shot down in the street it was terrible it was terrible I like to remain as calm about these kind of things as I can but it was terrible when I was twelve two pox and biggie were adults to me in the vagus sense possible I didn't know how old they were when they died just that they lived lives that seemed grown up I think sometimes you maybe got to live past 25 to understand how young 25 is you have to find yourself stumbling through the uncertainties and fears of the ages to know that you still don't know shit I didn't understand how young pockin big where when they died and I didn't understand how young the few people I knew who got murdered or beaten on around my block were I just told myself they were adults that they'd lived full in generous lives one of the many denials projected onto my youthful self I mean when you ask about that era I mean it was just I don't know it's just still very painful I did not know biggie but I did know two pox so what's not like just a superstar died it was a person that I knew very well and my family knew well so it was a very painful time I was a kid but I felt this it was hanging in the air I felt afraid of what would happen to rat music if its stars kept getting killed especially through gun violence the score was my companion during this time I'd put in my headphones and find a sense of solace the foodies floated above all this loss I remember I take my walkman my dubbed cassette of the score tucked safely inside and listen to ready or not on repeat rewinding each time I reached the end counting the exact seconds of rewinding until I knew to stop landing exactly at the songs opening it was a ominous song for a ominous time both anxious and palpably unafraid, offering a warning for and against whatever was coming. And then, there's this image from that time that's burned in my mind. Michael Jordan was crying on the floor of the United Center locker room on Father's Day. He'd won his fourth title, his first since returning to the game, meaning his first since 1993, meaning his first since his father had been murdered. And a emotional moment for Michael Jordan, the tears are flowing. So much of the Jordan aesthetic and mythology to that point, had been built around structured and concentrated moments of performance, of image building. This was not one of those moments. Jordan fell apart on the floor of the United Center, holding a basketball and trembling with loud, gasping sobs. The iconic 23 on the back of his jersey, pulsing with each he. I remember being 12 years old and not entirely understanding this. I hadn't lost anyone yet, but his father had been dead for three years, I remember thinking foolishly. Why is he still crying about it now? Almost a year later, to the day, my mother was gone. I was 13 years old. The morning I got the news, I didn't cry. I didn't cry in the weeks that followed, even though I could hear my father crying through the house's thin architecture. I didn't cry at the funeral, and I didn't cry when people brought meals to the house. I thought that this was some kind of failure of emotional expression, until the first week of the new school year. My first year going to a different school than my brother, which meant that I had to walk to and from the bus stop alone. The batteries had died in my walkman, which was a real bummer, because I had no money. The trick was that I'd scour the house to find a remote I could swap the batteries out of, or even just one battery. But I'd had no luck. I walked home with headphones on anyway, just to avoid talking. There was no music to distract me, no melody lingering in my head. I found a bench at the back of a familiar park. I sat down and cried for what felt like hours, but was maybe only minutes. And when I finally stood up, everything made sense. A hard thing to understand when you experience loss as a young person is that grief is not just something you let go of and move on from. It is harder and more humbling to understand that so often, grief decides when it is done with you and not the other way around. And, so often, the heaviest grief is never exactly done with any of us. It just finds a new way to carve itself into our interior makeup. It builds a home, which it makes its way out of every now and then, to remind us that it is still here, still humming as a vital part of our machine. We had been to the funerals and everything, we had been mourning, and all the talk was in hip-hop circles and cultural circles was that hip-hop was over. It was dead, it was dying with Tupac and Biggie, and hip-hop was over. I mean, Lord knows the mainstream press had been telling us it wasn't going to last since the moment it was invented. So we all started thinking that maybe, you know, they were right. There was a song out called "Stomp" from Kirk Franklin and the family. I had a remix with Salt from Salt and Pepper. I was like, "There hasn't really been a number one R&B song that's a gospel record since Orita." I was like, "This is the repast." This is the second line. This is the part where we realize that we're going to be all right to quote one of hip-hop's newest and best. I don't find myself listening to the score much now, but not because it isn't great. In a way, for me, it stings. My childhood fears about hip-hop vanishing never came to fruition. No one swept in and took all of my cassettes and CDs away from me. But I never got another album from the Fuji's. I have forced myself to make peace various times over, with being grateful for what an artist gives when they give it, and not feeling owed anything beyond that. But with the score, I find myself foregoing that natural impulse in becoming a bit more petulant. It is unfair, of course, to feel like something was taken away from me when the group went their separate ways. The score is singular. But when I hear the album now, it's hard not to spiral into what could have been. What might still be? Maybe. I've become so well-versed in letting go and so many ways during my life. When I hear almost any part of the score, I'm transported to an era. To a moment that I understand as the architecture for who I am now. And when I consider that, I don't need anything more. But Fuji's gave me everything I needed. Sometimes, something beautiful and nearly perfect comes into the world, and there's no second act. There isn't more. Sometimes things break and don't get repaired or reborn. And understanding that is important. It's part of growing up. [Music] Time machine, the score, is a project of the 11th from Pineapple Street Studios. It's written and produced by Hennie Fodorikib, Eric Mennel, Chloe Prasinos, Kristin Torres, Janelle Piper, Joel Lovell and me, Alexis Moore. We were edited by Lila Day. Our executive producers are Max Linsky and Jenna Weissberman. Original score, sound design and mixing by Raj Makija. Additional music from Blink Forms, Blue Dot Sessions, Tracklib and of course, The Fuji's. Additional mixing by Hannah Sprang. Legal support by Bianca Grimshaw, Becca Theodore and Donaldson Calip Perez, including Sarah Swartzman and Matthew Morrentis. Fact checking by Isabel Christo. Additional recording at Shock City Studios in St. Louis. Sales and marketing by Cadence 13. Artwork is by Jonathan Konda. Production support from Grace Chen. Special thanks to Himia Freeman, Steven Key, Dina Kleiner, Yinka Rickford Anguin, Mustafa Abdul Rahim, C. Hunter Zuly, Yang Wang, Jasmine Flot, Terry Fonsewa, Rook Esteban, Gilda Faye, John Asante and the East Side Writers' Bike Club. I also want to thank my mom and my dad and Shani's in Janelle for their support in this project. And some special thank yous from me, everyone at Pineapple Street who helped to tell this story and bring it to life. Joel, Eric, Janelle, Alexis, Chloe, Kristin, Raj and Lila. And also, special thanks to Sarah Galbaz for your percussion expertise. Thanks to everyone who took time out of their days and their lives to talk to me for this. Jeff Weiss, Sly Dunbar, Havik, Danielle Smith, Mark Baptiste, Karen Goodmerable, Brian Freeman, Estelle Chilla, Chris Swartz, Chris X, Jerry Wanda, Dream Hampton, Moussa Aquanga and Bahamadiya. And finally, of course, thanks to the Fujis themselves, Ms. Lauren Hill, Wyclef and Pros. Thanks for listening. See you next month on the alert.