FUGEES – "Killing Me Softly"

+8 points for Lauren’s performance -3 points for Wyclef’s lazy, pointless ad-libs, which (I’m sad to say) managed to put me off hip-hop for a couple of years.

How many times did my friends and I take the mickey out of Wyclef’s ad-libs? Was it ONE TIME? Or was it TWO TIMES?

Wyclef aside, I quite like this version, but it was a pretty decent song anyway. I’ve not heard Lori Lieberman’s original, but I’m familiar with Roberta Flack conveying the power of an emotionally affecting performance from the audience perspective. I had no idea she was singing about Don MacLean. How very weird. Which song was it? “Vincent”? “American Pie”? Neither seem likely, do they?

Like the prior commenter, I’d find this song a lot more likeable within Wyclef’s interjections. But by the same token I wonder, would it have been as big of a hit without them?

I was ten when this was out, and both then and now, the eminently spoofable ‘One time! Two time!’ shout out was THE hook for this record. I’m sure as many people remember it for that as for Lauryn’s genuinely soulful lead vocal.

So, a very strange number one for me. Obviously far too emotive to be an outright novelty record, but the ad-libs feel like they create a barrier preventing you from taking it too sincerely either. Awkward alchemy indeed, but the song was massive, so it worked.

You’ll be fighting Don “bloody” Maclean’s corner when we get to a certain ill-advised 2000 cover!

there’s a bit of a Soul II Soul vibe about this – but whereas they at least they hit number 1 with an original (and better) tune, this coasts along with a familiar soul classic spruced up with some lazy interjections which may have encouraged folk to think they were getting down with the new music. Lauryn Hill’s voice is the redeeming contribution

I recall a late Saturday night, disembarking from the Oxford Tube and walking back up Hythe Bridge Street towards home, hearing loud teenage girls tumbling in and out of the Park End nightclub, shrilly trilling the song – and this was the Saturday before it was released as a single. Laura and I looked knowingly and resignedly at each other; the common conclusions being (a) it would go straight to number one; (b) these kids wouldn’t even know it was a cover version.

But the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly” is so much more than a cover, and it is a tribute to their genius that they succeeded in making such an imperishable record from such unpromising material, as indeed did Roberta Flack a generation earlier. For the song itself is calculated hokum, written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox – otherwise best known here as the authors of the Happy Days theme tune – as a response to seeing Don McLean performing live. Not Tim Buckley, or Judee Sill, or Karen Dalton, but affable cabaret folkie shyster Don McLean. It reflects on Flack’s immense talents that via her performance and vocal arrangement she turns the song into the spellbound reverie which it didn’t really deserve to be converted into (it was originally offered to and recorded unremarkably by one Lori Lieberman) with her gradual disorientation (“I prayed that he would finish/But he just kept right on”) into a state of mind where art and reality become interchangeable and interdependent (“Singing my life with his words,” “I felt he’d found my letters and read each one out loud”).

The brllliance of the Fugees’ interpretation lies in the fact that it sounds entirely improvised with its endless asides, cues and comments. In its album version it is prefaced by a mock pirate radio DJ (“We don’t play with soundclash!”) giving way to Lauryn Hill’s rather ominous paraphrasing (“Killing a soundboy with this sound”), echoing through illicit airwaves. Then the song proper begins, with Hill’s solo voice over earnest church organ. This in turn is succeeded by a jerky twitch of a sitar sample, and as the beats come in the group chats while Hill warms up in the background before Wyclef cues her in with “Hey, yo, L, you know you’ve got the lyrics.”

Hill’s voice is slightly deeper and somewhat rougher than Flack’s but it radiates so comprehensively throughout the record that she is accompanied only by beats in the song’s verses, with the bass and harmonies joining in on the chorus, her own backing vocals not straying too far from Flack’s original arrangement but becoming more choral with each entry, climaxing in the wordless psychedelic shimmer of “Aaaah-ah-aaah-ah-aaaaah” before the final chorus. Throughout Wyclef and Pras cheerlead her from the sidelines (the pop puncta of “One time, one time” and “Two times, two times” per chorus) and at the end, or at any rate the fadeout, they applaud each other, thank the listeners and make their cheerful way into the distance (“Watch out for the crooked lawyers signing the deals!”).

The record is so great because of its unalloyed naturalness, its street chat (again, very ’67) and its organic, improvisatory flow; they sound as though they want to recast this song rather than cynically cover it. In that sense, as well as many others, they form the bridge between Arrested Development and subsequent acts like the Roots, Solillaquists of Sound and the Strange Fruit Project, songs and thoughts connected, passive theorising turned into active ideas; and their improvised live TOTP performance of “Killing Me Softly” was one of the finest ever broadcast, as though the Watts Prophets had finally made the charts a quarter of a century later; words, scats, songs and in-jokes cutting across each other, reflecting an image of how good music can sound when allowed to grow and develop naturally, and by extension a better society. Certainly it helped to assuage much of the pain and exhaustion which that summer otherwise necessitated – and you can’t ask much more of, or from, music than that. 10

Bravo, that’s great. I marked it too low.

love the sparseness, a sorta midpoint between young marble giants and lumidee. it seems a little crazy now since this is only three years after the chronic owned radio/mtv but by 96 even ppl who weren’t ‘will someone think of the children?!!!’ were getting kinda sick of gangsta and the fugees benefited heavily from that (outkast did also w/ ‘elevators’ and ‘atliens’ being hits but obv nothing on the scale of fugees). ‘fu-gee-la’ still the jam and the follow-up (president obama’s favorite song) is fantastic as well but this was the huge unavoidable smash and though i don’t mind clef’s interjections their uninventiveness does take away from what lauryn does w/ the song, it makes what’s a very clever cover seem obv. still the moment mattered and the next year you had missy (and puffy going pop) and then outkast and eventually kanye so that a certain kind of hip-hop that was a huge part of the genre’s initial crossover appeal (eg ‘me, myself, and i’ scoring on radio in ways that few rap singles had to that point) and that might’ve seem relegated to backpackers (cf dj shadow’s yawnsome ‘why hip-hop sucks in 96’) instead became pop again. clef and lauryn broke up so the fugees broke up and clef released a pretty great and now underrated solo album in 97 and then lauryn released an all time great solo album in 98 that erased clef from the public’s memory (or radios at least) and then effectively disappeared in a manner similar to sly stone, her most musically relevant moment this century coming via a proxy in a kanye song. 7.

Oof, thank you for finally explaining why everybody and their brother seemed to own [i]The Score[/i] (and why it was ubiquitous in used bins despite good buzz). I knew about the late 90s chart goofery, but never quite connected it to this particular record. [i]Miseducation[/i] on the other hand seems to have justified the album purchases; the big(gest) single was, I guess, technically available (in order, I suspect, to permit that #1 spot) but the other singles were good and more importantly people connected with the album cuts. Though, in the spirit of groaning at Wyclef interjections, I’m sure that its star would shine brighter today if not for the tedious skits and interludes sprinkled throughout. The same can be said for [i]The Carnival[/i] although that also suffers from being plain old Too Long. Still, all told, the Fugee lineup produced a pretty impressive collection of recordings between 1996 and 1998…

@mapman. My understanding is that the Hot100 has recently seriously diluted its claims to measure popularity proper by including youtube views in its calculations not just of the primary video for a song but also those for any related parodies, notoriously/virally awful live performances, and the like. I believe that Miley Cyrus returned to #1 recently strictly on the popularity of successful parodies of her wrecking ball/sledgehammer-licking vid.. That has to be wrong!

As for KMS, well, for some reason, Lauryn Hill’s voice has never worked for me, and since that’s about all this track has going for it, I find it hard to get through and a natural channel-changer. But that’s *my* problem so I won’t say anything further.

#20 so would Lily Alleen’s parody vid count twice, once for her and once for Bunnied Lines?

#20 Heh heh. But a good point that’s worth addressing. The fact is since the Hot 100 has always included airplay, it makes sense to include “self-driven” airplay as well. It’s the primary way a lot of people consume music these days, including myself (you don’t think I actually *bought* those Robson & Jerome songs did you? ;))

In a way the inclusion of Spotify, Youtube, etc is the 21st century return to the original three-pronged Hot 100 which included jukebox play in addition to radio and sales. The question though is how to do it right, especially wrt Youtube. Official music videos should certainly count, and official lyric videos as well. But what about fan-made videos, parodies, and viral videos that just coincidentally have a certain song playing in the background? The Miley song you mention is far from the worst offender, since at least it was the entire song being played, and not just a 30 second clip like the ridiculous “Harlem Shake” phenomenon whose #1 status made me wonder if the chart had finally jumped the shark for good.

And of course, there’s exactly to mix three disparate measures into a logical balance. In the UK, it’s simple: 1 sale = 1 chart point. In the US, it’s a mysteriously nebulous process that is constantly changing. In 2013, the fact that “Harlem Shake” ended up as the year’s 4th biggest “hit” despite a thankfully quick flameout means they got it wrong (and I suspect Billboard knows it, too).

So, I’d say simply changing the formula to only allow videos with the entire song, as well as reducing the points impact of said plays would go a long way to addressing the problem. Fortunately the Youtube inclusion hasn’t skewed the chart as much as you think, but when it does, it can do so quite spectacularly as we saw last February and March.

So it wasn’t just me who found this soporific. The review has basically spoken for me this time – vivid vocals by Lauryn Hill and yes I suppose it was bravely minimalist amongst the hyper-kinetic sounds of summer 1996, but my indifference remains.

It’s a defining, and bestselling, song of the year: a year which has been retrograded into its own “Britpop Heaven”. So I think it’s important to consider it on its own merits, rather than that of the awful later solo careers.

Lauryn plays a blinder. Sings the hell out of this. Far, far better than Roberta’s version (which I love): this is connecting.

There’s a bunny upcoming which I enjoyed more but the Fugees version was a nation-uniting number one. Difficult to dislike.

In short, a good example of what a cover version of a track that some regard as something of a minor classic should be: not just different in style to Flack’s version, but arguably, also better (or: if not certainly that, less introverted) : using a very distinctive vocal style and clever arrangement to really bring out the meaning in the lyrics and the song. A well-deserved best seller of the year: it seems incredible now actually how few singles the Fugees released as a group (incredible, too, that the acts they, to my ears at least, followed most closely in the footsteps of, were mostly British – Soul II Soul, of course, but also early Massive Attack or even Smith and Mighty). In short, they promised a lot: what they delivered was mostly pretty good, in some cases first rate, but there was a lot less of it than we might have hoped for.

An 8 from me, all told.

Looks like I’m the lone dissenting voice here. I always found this one of the weaker tracks on the Score and really all a bit unnecessary. Unlike the superior, bunnied follow up it’s not anywhere near different enough from its original and falls close to being hip hop karaoke. At a push 5, but no more.

Four scores of ‘6’ in a row. Dont think it’s happened before.

I found KMS a bit of a bore. It seemed a very lazy and slow record at the time and this wasn’t helped by becoming a radio favourite back in 1996.At least the weather was good if I recall.Nobody Knows by the Tony Rich Project was also around the same time and I would prefer that myself.

I’m not as sick of it as I once was but it’s not one I’d be rushing to Youtube to listen to.If its a cover chart topper ‘Jealous Guy’ or ‘Always on My Mind’ will do.

It’s hard to believe how massive the Fugees became in such a short space of time and how quickly it all ended. The one thing they had in their favour over other hip hop acts was sense of PG rated hip hop. Will Smith another example beforehand and a quite gaudy group in the 00’s would benefit further.

Tom commented back in ‘Geno’ how dexys midnight runners had one untouchable chart topper and one overplayed milestone.The Fugees also have to deal with this a bit but for me KMS isn’t the untouchable chart topper.5

ciaran @34: “It’s hard to believe how massive the Fugees became in such a short space of time and how quickly it all ended. The one thing they had in their favour over other hip hop acts was sense of PG rated hip hop.”

To be fair, they also had Lauryn Hill! A very strong singer I think, and working a vein that was very popular at the time. If memory holds, I’m pretty sure most of the girls in my school’s various soul/choral ensembles were all over her, and this.

They also had a strong narrative going, though some of this might have been cemented in the following two years – PG rated, yes, but also creative, multitalented genre-crossing masterminds, which played well in the record criticism of the time which favored fusions, hybrids, genre-splicing, etc. (A bit of implied cross-racial redemption was probably also folded up in this, not of the Fugees’ own doing.) [i]Rolling Stone[/i]’s cover asked if they were the “future of rock and roll,” a line Wyclef would take up in “Gone ‘Til November.” Indeed he got the benefit of this narrative first, and a lot of the goodwill towards [i]The Carnival[/i] stemmed from this I think. It’s still a pretty good record, not as good as [i]Miseducation[/i] by any means. Since then he seems to have taken up a proto-will.i.am role halfway between Corny Party Guy and cause-supporting Thoughtful Guy. But for a minute he was getting celebrated in the same terms as, I dunno, Beck at that date.

There was some sexism involved in how this all played out; I remember a great, later Hill interview where she recalled interviews with the Fugees: Pras asked to comment on the situation in Haiti, Wyclef prompted to reflect on hip-hop’s status as an industry – and Hill solicited for her shade of lipstick. Again, [i]Miseducation[/i] wiped some of that out – but it probably should not be ignored that they were also a conventionally [i]good-looking[/i] group who made a lot of magazine covers, and not just in the music press. I had at least a brief high-school crush on Hill, myself. Her later treatment by the press would be a whole discussion in itself. But I think there was a lot to find in “The Fugees” as a listening experience, and an idea.

Accessible PG rated hip-hop it may be, but even I, someone that wasn’t a fan of the genre, knew what an inaccessible soap opera (east vs west coast etc, which we’ll get to in time) the mainstay of hip-hop and rap was to the casual listener at the time, so the Fugees were more than welcome.

In Denmark this is known as the ‘Chicken with ice cream’ song thanks to a track by the band Shu-bi-dua (The Danish Barron Knights??) In Danish ‘Killing me softly’ and ‘Kylling med softice’ have near identical homophones, the Two Ronnies would be proud.

Sorry, not buying. I never quite got the fuss over Lauryn Hill anyway; I didn’t care at the time and reading later about her inability to follow up Misadventures didn’t affect me in the slightest (Doo Wop was vaguely interesting for about a week but I knew immediately that Ex-Factor was doing nothing for me). So, One Time, Two Times, and that horrible sitar-y riff hurled this straight into indifference at the time and relistening now gives me nothing more. 5.

I barely even remember the tug-of-war this had with Three Lions, a song that stuck in my memory far more; and someone up top mentioned Born Slippy, which was okay but surely their true masterwork came a lot more recently than that (Born Slippy is good and all, and shouting lager lager lager is always good for a laugh – it worked for Chumbawamba anyway – but dear christ, And I Will Kiss is astonishing).

I’d give 8+ to both ‘Nappy Heads’ and ‘Fu-Gee-La’ (and also the Salaam Remi remix of their next hit in fact). This gets 5 for quite predictable reasons. Just not what I wanted from three very entertaining MCs (particularly as I was still waiting for a hip hop #1 I really liked…), however lovely L Boogie could sound.

On TOTP I recall Hill singing this over an instrumental of Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Can It Be All So Simple?’ which felt pretty unusual (similar to how The Shamen opted to perform to a minimal techno version of ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ as its popularity reached saturation point).

Yes, people would’ve had to go and get up off their lazy, complacent, entitled arses and…read books! Look up art histories and encyclopaedias! Go to exhibitions (there was one of de Kooning’s paintings at the Tate in 1995)! Too much to ask in this reduced age, obviously, as is asking anyone to listen to or read the lyrics of “A Design For Life.” The world is not your butler, deal with it.

Also I don’t think you meant “#49.”

I’ve been to see The Manics live more times than any other band and at certain shows the split in the audience has been identifiable to an uncomfortable degree. I recall one show in Manchester where as the band hit the stage a group of lads, possibly already a bit tanked-up rushed forward and straight in front of me (I was about four rows from the front) and began moshing in a most agressive fashion elbowing and crowding a girl who was standing to my left, so much so in fact that she turned my way and mouthed ‘help me’. At 5ft10 and 130 pounds I’m not exactly bodyguard material and I was finding it hard to keep my own balance so the best I could do was throw out my left arm to keep a barrier between this girl and the moshers.
Thankfully they had calmed down after about 2 or 3 songs and spread out a bit. In spite of such experiences I would never accuse the Manics of pandering to a beery audience, far from it. One of the reasons I regard them as major favourites is because of their commitment to the idea of a rock band as a kind of alternative education system. If that’s pretentious then I think it’s the good kind of pretentious.

It would be perfectly lovely if the majority opinion did lie that way, if people did go “yes! I must look up this Willem de Kooning IMMEDIATELY, he sounds like a fascinating bloke” – but I really don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that that isn’t the case.