Sunday Book Review: An Immigrant’s Story of Love and Struggle with Wyclef Jean

Sunday Book Review is a recurring feature devoted to bridging the gap between music fans and music books. We aim to give you a taste of new and classic books that dive deep into the psyches of musicians. Tweet requests @nmcalone.

In 2009, Wyclef Jean was no longer impressed with hip-hop. “All I heard from the youth on the streets were soundtracks fit for strip clubs. Instead of raw humanity there were only synthesized voices, instead of real-life street tales, only insincere bragging.” He felt hip-hop had been born of protest in the '70s and that this spirit had completely gone out of it. Since then he hasn’t seen it get much better.

Wyclef himself has always been able to walk the line between pop and conscious music, with some of his biggest hits, like 2007’s “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)," lighting up the charts while at the same time being undeniably thoughtful. His work with the Fugees especially can be seen as an an archetype for how this kind of music, music with a “purpose,” can be achieved. Perhaps hoping to inspire other hip-hop artists to choose this path, Wyclef decided to collaborate on a memoir with Anthony Bozza, journalist and author of an Eminem biography we reviewed in a previous column. It Books published Wyclef’s memoir in September 2012 with the title Purpose: An Immigrant’s Story.

The book is both moving and incomplete. Wyclef spends almost half the book on his childhood, and his recollections succeed in transporting the reader to his village in Haiti and new life in New Jersey/York in a way few musicians-turned-authors have ever been able to. He does it by retaining the unique storytelling charisma and warmth of his songs throughout the book. But the book remains incomplete because of his ego, which is most apparent when he speaks of his time in the Fugees, and seems to bar him from a completely honest examination of certain events. That said, hearing Wyclef's own opinions on events like the Fugees breakup, even if they seem to be a bit airbrushed, makes for fascinating reading. We’ve read the book with an awareness of the image Wyclef is trying to craft for himself, and have brought you ten of the most intriguing moments. Read on.

If there’s one thing we can say with certainty about Wyclef Jean, it’s that he’s a talker. The charm that pervades this book is the charm of a preacher, full of equal parts expansive warmth and performance. It’s something that’s in his blood. Wyclef’s grandfather was the Vodou priest of his Haitian village, and Wyclef’s father rebelled by becoming a Nazarene Christian priest. When Wyclef was born, his mother had an agonizing time giving birth, and his father responded by opening the Bible to Psalm 23, tearing the paper into small pieces, boiling these pieces in water, and then making Wyclef’s mother drink the concoction. There is an element of drama in this act that perhaps passed through to Wyclef, who cites religion as a driving force in his own music, however earthly it’s considered by some (his father included).

Wyclef’s parents named him Jeannel Wyclef Jean, which honors two rebel leaders. John Wycliffe was a reformist preacher in 1320s England who clashed with the Roman Catholic Church over the idea of the clergy in general. Wycliffe wanted all men to be able to interpret the Bible as they wished and even translated it into “everyday English” in pursuit of this goal. Wyclef’s second namesake is Toussaint L’Ouverture, a slave who led Haiti to freedom in the 1700s, although he doesn’t make it clear exactly which part of their names overlap (but maybe he was actually named after L’Ouverture’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines? Perhaps I’m missing something in the French-English translation).

Whatever the case may be, Wyclef believes it is no accident he was named after these men, and has always had a rebellious nature. When he was in Catholic school he got beaten and then suspended—damn you, Father Sheen—for making the astute theological point that the Devil wasn’t always bad, that at one time he was an angel, Lucifer, before he decided he wanted to reign. Wyclef thinks his father was proud of that moment.

Wyclef also had a falling out with his father over hip-hop, which his father called “bum music” pretty much up until he saw Wyclef perform at Carnegie Hall (and maybe even then). It was a similar generational conflict to the one Wyclef’s father and grandfather experienced a generation earlier when his father chose Christianity over Vodou. It seems the Jean men are all rebels at heart.

Wyclef devotes an enormous amount of this book to his childhood (almost half the pages), and it was clearly incredibly influential in his life. His parents emigrated to the United States from Haiti when he was very young and for the first ten years of his life, he was raised by his aunt, Mama Filomen. One of the most memorable stories Wyclef relates about his childhood revolves around the idea of Santa Claus. Wyclef’s parents would send him gifts every Christmas from America, but in the inverse of what happens with most children, he wouldn’t believe the presents were from them. He told his brother Sam that they were from Santa, that Santa couldn’t bring his sleigh to their house because they didn’t have a chimney so he dropped their gifts behind the hut as he flew over.

It’s a story that’s sweet for its innocence, but also intensely heartbreaking. Another story of Wyclef's that shares this quality is the tale of his first plane ride to the United States. Wyclef thought the stewardesses made the plane fly using magical powers and that the lights of New York City were diamonds. He told his brother Sam they would bring the lights back to their village. “That is a good idea,” Sam said suddenly serious. “We need lights in the village.”

Lauryn Hill looms large in Wyclef’s life, perhaps larger than any other single person besides maybe his father. Wyclef and Hill had a tempestuous romance throughout almost the entirety of the Fugees’ recording career, one that didn’t stop after Wyclef married his current wife, Claudinette. When Wyclef writes about Lauryn Hill, you can tell just how smitten he was then, and probably is to this day. His writing drips with love, lust, and loss, but it also (problematically) tries to paint Wyclef as blameless.

If you, the reader, could have been there, he seems to say, you would understand that there was nothing else I could do. He was making intimate, soulful music with the most alluring woman he’s ever met. Though he sometimes says he takes blame for certain aspects of their romance and the mess that ensued, his tone tells a different story, one of complete abdication of responsibility. It’s not his fault. He views the album The Score as a recorded testament to their passion, and he is proud of it.

Wyclef has always had a supernatural ability to take an existing song and mold it into his own creation. Some of the most iconic Fugees songs are covers the band re-crafted with their own sensibilities. In his love of improvisation and experimentation, he has also pulled influences from every corner of the music world. When relating his experience recording The Score, Wyclef says he’s since figured out why he was “so noisy.” It was because he was listening to a lot of Metallica at the time, with special attention paid to their “intensity and their phrasing.” Elsewhere in the book, he says that he was “definitely” into house music growing up because when he lived in Jersey they would go dancing in clubs that bumped house music nonstop. Wyclef describes himself as the P.T. Barnum of the Fugees, the ringmaster, and in this role he tried to pull together all of the influences and elements that made up the band into a cohesive unit.

There was a time when people were wary of letting the Fugees open for them, not because they bombed, but because they were unrepentant showoffs. Wyclef tells a story about when the Fugees were opening for KRS-One, and after their last song they dropped the instrumental for “The Bridge is Over”—one of KRS-One’s biggest hits—and freestyled over it. KRS’ DJ promptly ran onsage, grabbed the Fugees’ DJ by the shirt, threw him away from the decks, and stopped the record.

Looking back Wyclef says it was “cocky and tasteless,” but also that it showed how “hungry” they were. Soon word got around that the Fugees were show-stealers as an opening act, mostly because their style lent itself to an incredible vibe with the crowd. When they played with Biggie, he approached them before the concert and broke it down. “Hey yo, here’s how it’s gonna work tonight. We’re going on before you.” When Wyclef reacted incredulously, Biggie explained himself further. “What you think is gonna happen after you come out with all these cheap tricks and cymbals and shit and get the people excited running around making noise like you do? I’m gonna just stand there and do my songs? You’ll be banging on all that shit and take the crowd with you. I’m going first.” Wise words.

Pras is, unfortunately, often referred to as the dude who rode Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean’s coattails to the top. That, or “the other dude in the Fugees.” Though Wyclef goes out of his way to praise Pras’ role in creating the Fugees sound and says Pras was the glue that held them together, it’s easy to sense Wyclef’s underlying feelings of superiority towards Pras. Pras blames Wyclef for breaking up the Fugees when his affair with Lauryn Hill turned sour. Wyclef repeatedly (to a borderline compulsive degree) claims that Pras would have done the same thing if he would have had the chance (or presumably the MAN PROWESS). Wyclef says, “if [Pras] were the one in my shoes, would he have thought twice about doing as I did? Would he have resisted being with her? He’s never answered that question, but I don’t care what he says. He’d do the same thing I did, and I wouldn’t blame him for it if he did.”

This gets us to perhaps what’s one of the most predictable yet unnecessary aspects of the book: how defensive Wyclef feels about his musical legacy. He needs the reader to know he could have done it without the L word. Oh, that’s funny, most people don’t know I actually had a solo deal before we formed the Fugees. He needs the reader to believe The Score was mostly him. When he speaks about critics who say Lauryn Hill was the true talent in the band, he says, “That’s always bothered me, because in terms of composition and production, that album [The Score] was mostly my doing.”

He then goes on an almost incomprehensible rant about questioning The Source’s “rating system.” He says, “We got five mics for The Score, but what I’m saying is, considering that I came up with the ideas for most of the music and a lot of the hooks, shouldn’t I just get five mics just for myself?” Oh, I get it Wyclef, you want The Source to somehow go back into the recording studio and rate everyone in the group’s contribution to the album individually? So that everyone will know you were totally the musical genius behind The Score? With the outstanding solo success Wyclef has had (The Carnival is nothing to sneeze at), one hopes someday he’ll be able to move beyond the insecurities he clearly still feels about his role in the Fugees, but perhaps the formidable specter of Lauryn Hill will continue to follow him for the rest of his days.

Did I mention Lauryn and Wyclef’s love affair didn’t end well? Though the brazenness of their extramarital affair makes the reader cringe at times on behalf of Claudinette, Wyclef’s wife, the destruction of Lauryn and Wyclef’s romance is a poignant part of the book. Wyclef says what finally “broke the spell” of him and Lauryn was that she “led him to believe” her first son Zion was his before the child was born. That was something Wyclef says he “couldn’t forgive.” He tells a story of watching Lauryn, visibly pregnant, performing in Haiti and being proud because he thought they were “playing a concert for my people with our child growing inside her.” It turns out it was Rohan Marley’s baby, with whom Lauryn Hill would go on to have five children. After Lauryn Hill gave birth, Wyclef said they both saw they were going in separate ways.

Yéle is Wyclef’s Haitian charity and it’s something he’s intensely proud of. He begins and ends this book with discussions that include Yéle as their primary topic. Though there have been many controversies about it’s finances (some resolved and some not), Wyclef asserts that there has never been any wrongdoing. One of the controversies comes from his charity contracting television ads from a company he owns. Wyclef responds that in Haiti, a country whose economy is so stagnant, there isn’t the same conception as in the U.S. of “conflict of interest.” He implies there weren’t any other options to get that ad campaign done, that the video production company he owns is the best in Haiti by a considerable margin, and that they actually gave Yéle a deal. Like many things in this book, it seems that the truth is somewhere in between.

It’s hard to know what Wyclef actually believes. He’s such a masterful storyteller you get the sense that at points of this book, he’s spinning a tale as much to convince himself as to convince the reader. At one point, he tells his Dad that his music is essentially "Bible stories." The way Wyclef explains it, it seems like he truly believes it. Maybe if a deranged scientist sat him down and forced him to recite his lyrics line by line, he’d say, “okay, okay, maybe they aren’t MOSTLY Bible stories,” but that this is besides the point, that in his heart he feels the Bible when he sits down to write a verse. It’s similar to the way he explains his relationship with Lauryn Hill. Wyclef would be the first to ostensibly admit that he isn’t “blameless,” and yet you can tell by the way he unfolds the story that he didn’t feel he could have done anything else. Or at least he has convinced himself to think so.

The question of honesty is a tricky one in this book because Wyclef is brutally honest about so many things, including actually trying to poison his grandma (yes, you read that right) and stealing repeatedly from his family. In the end, it seems that Wyclef has made a story out of his life, and that he will be completely honest about anything that fits into that story, but won’t examine parts that do not. He will admit mistakes, he just reserves the right to tell his story how he wants to tell it.