The Fugees’ beautiful 1996 landmark album The Score went six-times platinum, numbers only racked up within the world of hip-hop by people like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. During an era when JAY-Z and Nas made early career statements and 2Pac and Biggie were murdered, the Fugees presented a wide path for the future of hip-hop. Missy Elliott and TLC had already drawn plans for some of the genre’s pop futures; the Fugees corroborated and ran with them. In three interplayed voices, they were cooly courageous instead of reactionary. They rose Roberta Flack from the past, covered Bob Marley at the Grammys, and won two of them.
In The Score’s wake, Wyclef Jean, the multi-instrumentalist producer, was the first to go solo. He recorded The Carnival on the road as the Fugees traveled the world. The album was born in the summer of 1997: Bill Clinton was president again, before the Lewinsky scandal, the economy was booming, and the Gap was playing the Roots, Jamiroquai, and Sublime on the same in-store playlist. The executives at Wyclef’s label, Columbia, were not shy about their hopes for The Carnival’s success. One marketing VP told Billboard that their goal was for the record to achieve “total global saturation,” picking up where The Score had left off, introducing rap to listeners that hadn’t traditionally embraced it. That potential audience wasn’t explicitly described as nonblack, but the implication was strong. The album was intended to be understood as universally accessible, and to be taken seriously as high-concept pop theater.
Those expectations weren’t unmerited. Years before the iPod revived the singles market and trained listeners to shuffle their favorites into new contexts, The Carnival gathered an ambitious array of personalities into 24 disco-roots-creole dance tracks. Lauryn Hill, Pras, the Neville Brothers, Celia Cruz, Funkmaster Flex, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra all play on this 74-minute thing. One single’s music video has a Bob Dylan cameo, another song samples the Bee Gees. There are eight skit interludes, several of them acting out a court case in which Wyclef humorously frames himself as someone whose character is on trial. “He’s a goddamn revolutionary!” a prosecutor yelps. In response, Wyclef presents The Carnival as proof he is the kind of winking populist rascal who can make a home anywhere and thrive. “Feel the excitement, taste the culture, know who you are!” extols an announcer on the album’s infomercial-styled intro. Wyclef ups the ante: “We are not stopping for no red lights tonight!” An hour later, a skit called “Closing Arguments” seems like it’s going to end the album. Instead, it’s followed by another interlude, and three more songs. This is a party with enough endurance to actually replace the everyday, not just help you temporarily escape it. If the runtime seems exhausting in hindsight, the premise holds up. At The Carnival, anything can happen.
You could look at The Carnival as a craven ploy by record companies seeking to further mainstream black music ahead of the millennium’s turn, but even that wouldn’t betray the remarkable history of how its particular hybrid sound came to be. Wyclef’s move from Haiti to Brooklyn (and then New Jersey) was part of a large migration of Haitians to the U.S., prompted by the repressive Duvalier regimes of the ’70s and ’80s. With the Fugees, he fused his immigration story with the DNA of New York’s housing projects and Caribbean sonics. The Carnival is an equally proud transcultural product, attesting to how dislocation and intersection mix people up. Its songs sung in Creole celebrate and affirm Haitian identity, but the album also indicates that most people have claim to multiple heritages, are the inheritors of multiple pasts.
Since his debut, Wyclef has been effectively called on to cross artists over. He produced a radio hit for fusion guitarist Carlos Santana, and re-gifted his song “Dance Like This” to Colombian idol Shakira as the double-platinum breakout “Hips Don’t Lie.” With “My Love Is Your Love,” he provided Whitney Houston’s early aughts comeback a contemporary reggae canvas. He wasn’t the first to sidecar substance in the name of style, but all-embracing, rap-rooted albums like Puffy’s No Way Out were made more thinkable by Wyclef’s contributions. “It’s an algorithm, dog, when you put cultures together. That kind of music is no longer music. It becomes just a cultural phenomenon,” Wyclef said of this winning strategy, on the Drink Champs podcast this year. “As much as I’m Haitian, no one can’t tell me I ain’t Latin, no one can’t tell me I ain’t African… If you close your eyes and I start to play piano, you be thinking I’m from Cuba.... They separate us or whatever, but for me, I know I got family from Cuba, from Jamaica.”
Can we recognize this as the same kind of strategic anti-essentialism that’s been familiar since Lil Wayne boasted that he wasn’t a human being? Or that people like Future and Lil Yachty now invoke when they plead to be considered more than rappers? Music has always been inhabited by people whose lives defy tidy paths, and what people embrace as their own can be as powerful as where they come from: American Jazz heroes had classical chops, and Western classical music was inspired by Turkish trends. DJ Khaled and Rihanna’s omnipotent 2017 smash “Wild Thoughts” revives “Maria Maria,” the song Wyclef was inspired to write by a Sondheim musical, which takes its guitar line from both “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit” and a popular gypsy scale. The eclectic future The Carnival broadcast was always real, and it still is.
At the time of The Carnival’s release, critics reckoned with Wyclef’s dual appetites for social change and pop stardom. In an issue of SPIN with Ani DiFranco on the cover, reviewer Sia Michel argued that even if he thought of himself as a revolutionary, he was more a savvy politician. “It was once hip-hop tradition to crown yourself a leader, but armchair gangstas have made it uncool to care about anything you can’t smoke, fuck, or spend,” she wrote. “Wyclef emerges from the vacuum less a public enemy than a dreadlocked diplomat... He’s for cohesion, not confrontation.”
Translating stories and combining styles is a powerful, important tactic, but one perhaps more easily employed in music than outside of it. When Wyclef took his appealingly unpreachy social conscience into actual politics in 2010, mounting a campaign for the presidency of Haiti, he was disqualified for living in the U.S. Around the same time, the expenditures and tax filings of a charity he founded, Yéle Haiti, were scrutinized in the wake of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. The organization was closed in 2012. Speaking with The Daily Beast in 2014, Wyclef said: “Within every foundation, will there be mistakes and errors? Yes. If you’re in the middle of a crisis and there’s an earthquake and you’re trying to help 250,000 people, you’re just trying to get them water. That’s what I was thinking. It’s not my job to be filing paperwork.”
Recently, a streaming service served me an artificial-intelligence playlist of songs it speculated would be meaningful to me, with The Carnival’s “Gone Till November” at the top. There’s something fundamentally bittersweet about this; having your memories pandered to by a machine. But I’m pleased by the crowd-supported recognition that the songs I engage with most now—rap music from unsinkable personality Cardi B, Latin trap prince Bad Bunny, and grime singer Not3s that draw inspiration from far-flung locales and imagine a world not dominated by any nation’s taste—have identifiable roots in an album that captured my attention at a formative time. And I’m not surprised. In the streaming era, the dream of reverse engineering culturally resonant megahits is alive; in Wyclef’s words, they’re almost algorithmic. We can learn a lot about big audiences and what they might like. Global scale has arguably never been more alluring, or attainable.
