Elsewhere in the world, it was available only on the album but promoted heavily on radio, a tactic that is credited with helping achieve a significant proportion of the many million sales of The Score. The request was denied, so a straight cover version was released on the album, and as a single in the UK, where it sold more than a million copies. Under copyright law this was considered a rearrangement, which meant permission was required from the songwriters before it could be commercially released. The idea came from reggae sound-system culture, where the champion DJs get stars to re-record a well-known track, rewritten to make the lyrics refer to the sound-system battle (Clef would later pull the same trick on David Rodigan, after getting Whitney Houston to record a dub plate for him ahead of a reggae festival appearance in the UK). The group’s first tilt at it was a collaboration with the Jamaican dancehall artist Bounty Killer, in which Hill sings the hook and the vamp in the middle eight, but changes the lyrics (“Killing a sound boy with his sound”), and the rest of the track bears no relation to the original. Killing Me Softly, best known in its 1973 version by Roberta Flack, would be pivotal to the Fugees’ career: but the straightforward cover version that turned them into stars was not the one they’d originally planned. 3 Killing Me Softly (Sound Barrier Remix featuring Bounty Killer) Nothing quite like it had been heard before, and there’s an argument to say that even Hill has never topped. Her delivery takes it into the stratosphere, as Hill raps, scats and sings her way from one vignette to the next. It’s illuminated by occasional lightning bolts of otherworldly insight and evocations of biblical stories, Hill’s gift as a writer being to ensure she allows the listener to focus on every layer of the picture all at once (“Check Jimmy cuttin’ hair at the barber shop / He plays the bass guitar like David plays the harp / His knowledge name is Greek ’cos whenever he speaks / He’s got the wisdom of King Solomon, bags in his eyes from no sleep”). The lyric is a meditation on social responsibility, hypocrisy and poverty hidden inside a narrative about artists who fail to remember where they come from and those whose craving for the limelight means they lose touch with the everyday. It was clear from day one that Hill was special, and Some Seek Stardom remains among the finest moments of her career. Watch the video for Tranzlator Crew: Nappy Heads 2 Some Seek Stardom Over a pugilistic backing track built from Albert King and Earth, Wind and Fire samples, each rapper gives a bravura performance, Clef bouncing through a Louis Armstrong impression during an opening verse that rains syllables on the naysayers, while Hill’s first appearance – four lines inserted in the middle of a longer verse from an animatedly belligerent Pras – hints at the greatness to come. The record sold poorly but plenty on it is excellent: in particular, the second single, Nappy Heads, is a treat. The debut laid out the Fugees’ singular stall, several tracks tackling the racism Pras Michél and Wyclef Jean experienced in New York, with Brooklyn-born Lauryn Hill talking about how her American friends were prejudiced against her Haitian-refugee bandmates. It was solid and occasionally spectacular music, yet possessed as much globe-conquering star quality as that of their similarly politically outspoken labelmates, the Goats.

When the Blunted on Reality album arrived in 1994 the initial impression it gave was of a group following the emerging traditions of post-golden-age “true-school” rap. It took the erstwhile Tranzlator Crew two years to get their first album released.

Fugees the score time ranking