Cropped Jeans biography
Source (Google.com.pk)
Born Nel Wyclef Jean around 1970 in Haiti, son of a Nazarene preacher, Gesner Jean. Family moved to Brooklyn, New York, when Wyclef was nine years old; moved to Newark, New Jersey, early 1980s. Married Claudenette.
Education: Vailsburg High School, Newark.
Religion: Raised Nazarene.
Career
Rapper, guitarist, successful recording artist, producer, 1993-. With Prakazrel "Pras" Michel and Lauryn Hill, formed group Tranzlator Crew, early 1990s; group changed name to Fugees, 1993; with the Fugees recorded Blunted on Reality, 1993 and multiplatinum The Score, 1996; released solo album The Carnival, 1997; achieved multiplatinum sales levels.
Life's Work
Rapper, producer, and guitarist Wyclef Jean, after ascending to hip-hop stardom as one third of the wildly successful and artistically ambitious group the Fugees, emerged as a major solo artist with his 1997 debut release entitled The Carnival. Tapping into rap music's deep traditions of omnivorous musical mixture and of Caribbean American fusion, Jean carried them forward in new and exciting ways. Critically well received and a hero on the streets both in the United States and in his native Haiti, he was one of hip-hop music's brightest lights at the end of the 1990s. In the words of Time magazine critic Christopher John Farley, "The Carnival puts Wyclef up there with Billy Corgan, Trent Reznor, and Tricky as one of the most creative people working in pop music."
Jean was born Nel Wyclef Jean (his songwriting credits still list him as "N. Jean") in Haiti around 1970. In any event, when Jean was nine, his family left Haiti for the United States, landing in Brooklyn's tough Marlboro housing project, not far from Coney Island. "When I got to America," Jean told Ebony, "I was expecting to see money falling from the sky." Brooklyn fell short of these expectations, but offered the Jean family opportunities that were nearly unthinkable in their poverty-stricken homeland. Wyclef, who spoke the Haitian Creole dialect of French, knew no English at all, but learned quickly from the rap music that was beginning to flourish on New York's radio stations.
Wyclef's father was a Nazarene preacher, and several years after coming to Brooklyn the family moved to Newark, New Jersey so that Gesner Jean could assume a post at the city's Good Shepherd Church of the Nazarene. Wyclef's mother, noting her son's refusal to follow in his father's footsteps, had already given him a guitar with the intention of diverting his interest from their neighborhood's rampant gang activity. The first song he learned to play, he told Guitar Player, was Steve Martin's "King Tut." At Newark's Vailsburg High School, Jean flourished, majoring in jazz, learning to play more than 15 instruments, and gaining a grounding in the fundamentals of the music business. Hungry for expensive studio time, he earned money by working at McDonald's. Some rappers would hesitate to admit to such employment, preferring to project a gangster image, but as Jean put it to Ebony's Melissa Ewey, "Anybody that did that [deal drugs], I don't know if they're still around. I had a vision, and nobody was going to mess that up."
Jean hooked up with his cousin Prakazrel "Pras" Michel--who also lived in northern New Jersey--and with their friend Lauryn Hill, they began to create and perform hip-hop music. Jean, who had already been honored for his compositional skills at a national choir festival, encountered opposition from his father--"as far as he was concerned, if it didn't talk about God, it was devil music," Jean told Ebony--but the trio made distinctive music and was noticed in Newark almost from the start. They formed a group called the Tranzlator Crew (an earlier incarnation had been notable for its collective ability to rap in six different languages), and by 1993 had been signed to the Ruff House/Columbia label and began bringing together music for an album.
After encountering legal trouble from an alternative-rock group called Translator, Jean, Michel, and Hill changed the name of their group to the Fugees, a shortened version of the word "refugees." Their debut album, 1993's Blunted on Reality, enjoyed mixed critical reviews and moderate sales, but it was the Fugees second release, The Score, that catapulted them to the top ranks of popular music in 1996. The album sold over four million copies in the United States and at least 15 million worldwide; it sold well in Jean's native Haiti, in France, where Jean's French-language skills have made him extraordinarily popular, and in Caribbean and African countries where rap had earlier made few inroads. Jean and his fellow Fugees also did a benefit concerts in Haiti and Miami to help Haitian refugees. Musically, the album was stamped by Jean's adventuresome and eclectic tastes: it featured samples of Caribbean music, rock, and black pop, among other styles, and became best known for its hip-hop remake of Roberta Flack's 1970s hit "Killing Me Softly."
The Fugees remained together and planned future releases as a group as of the end of 1998, but each member also embarked on individual projects. Jean planned a modest album of music in the Creole language to capitalize on his popularity in Francophone countries, but his creativity stretched the boundaries of the project, and the album, The Carnival (full title Wyclef Jean presents The Carnival featuring Refugee Allstars), ended up as a full-fledged solo release. Several of the Creole tracks survived and appeared on the album, which featured a spectacular mixture of styles and elements. Although he was joined by his Fugees bandmates, Jean was the primary creative force behind The Carnival, producing the album and composing most of its tracks.
The sampling and incorporation of other styles of music is integral to hip-hop, but The Carnival used such techniques with unusual imagination and variety. Guest artists on the album included Puerto Rican salsa queen Celia Cruz (on a humorous, subtle recasting of the 1960s hit "Guantanamera"), New Orleans soul stars, the Neville Brothers, the reggae group I Threes, and members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. One of the album's hit singles, "We Trying To Stay Alive," took the Bee Gees' disco hit "Staying Alive" as a point of departure, taking it through a complex yet infectious series of musical and poetic twists and turns. The recording harked back to rap music's earliest days, when DJs would improvise rhymes over disco records in New York nightclubs. Yet it also showcased the music's new virtuosity. Jean's creativity was rewarded with two Grammy award nominations in 1998, and the album took only a few months to reach the one-million sales mark.
Many of the album's sales were made to fans of rock music attracted by the sound of Jean's guitar playing. The guitar has been an uncommon instrument in hip-hop music, and its incorporation into a raw hip-hop sound is one mark of Jean's uncommon mastery of stylistic mixture. "Wyclef's strengths like in his ability not just to deftly cop the feels of calypso, reggae and rock, but to layer those styles and tones in the studio," Guitar Player noted admiringly. On several of The Carnival's songs, complex raps surround a quoted melody in long notes, with Jean adding a rhythmic groove or humorous percussive notes on guitar.
At the end of the 1990s Jean seemed to have the talent, training, and imagination to become a major lasting force in hip-hop music. "The only artists who are going to last the next five to 10 years are those people doing original music," he told Billboard. "I've got a 50-year plan for this business." Already much in demand as a producer from high-profile artists such as Tevin Campbell, Gloria Estefan, and rapper Canibu, Jean was slated to star as the son of reggae legend Jimmy Cliff in a sequel to the 1970s film The Harder They Come. Fans of many musical stripes await future releases of his own.
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