22828: Ayiti Libere: Wyclef gets heavy in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Ayiti Libere <ayitilibere@yahoo.com>

Source: The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040729/WYCLEF29/TPEntertainment/TopStories

Wyclef gets heavy in Haiti

With a new Creole album set to drop, the eclectic
rapper talks to ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN about a
clandestine trip home and a possible Fugees reunion

By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Thursday, July 29, 2004 - Page R3

Wyclef Jean has just made an album for people who are
too poor to buy it retail -- way too poor, since most
Haitians survive on less than a dollar a day. But
Wyclef (which is what everybody calls him), who was
born in Haiti and recorded most of his latest record
in Creole, has no doubt that everyone who wants a copy
will get one.

"They're going to get it from the bootleggers, no
matter what," he said. "I was just in Haiti, and my
record was all over the street," even though it isn't
available legally until this week.

A blatant, nationwide rip-off would put many recording
musicians into an angry sweat, but not Wyclef. Far
from ruing the intervention of bootleggers, he was
counting on it.

"I am a heavy businessman," he said, in his usual
boastful yet genial way. "And if you are a heavy
businessman you understand that bootlegging is part of
promotion. . . . If bootleggers are putting your music
all over Haiti, eventually the people who can afford
the record with the artwork and everything will go to
the store and buy it."

In any case, Wyclef has been giving away his music in
Haiti for years. Like Shaggy, Sean Paul and other
Caribbean stars who have made it big in the United
States, Wyclef regularly records singles for use by
DJs and radio programmers in his country of origin.

"I've been doing that since The Score," he said,
referring to the 1996 Fugees album that first put him
in the spotlight, along with cousin Prakazrel (Pras)
Michel and Lauryn Hill. He hopes that his Creole album
will go much farther than the streets of Port au
Prince, into regions of Africa, South America and the
United States where Creole is still spoken, as well as
to places where Haitian rhythms remain largely
unknown.

"When you're dealing with rhythm, there are no
barriers," he said. "The beat of Haiti includes 32
different rhythms, all of them coming from compas,"
the thumping, swaying beat that has adapted elements
from many kinds of Latin music, including meringue and
salsa.

"Even when I do La Bamba, I flip it into compas. It
wasn't hard, because there are a lot of Spanish words
in Creole."

The album's full title is Welcome to Haiti Creole 101,
and it's the first disc on Wyclef's Sak Pasé label of
Haitian recordings. His ambitions for the imprint,
which will be distributed by BMG, are summarized by
the name -- Creole for "What's happening?"

The disc fuses the political and the personal in ways
familiar from Wyclef's previous solo albums. It's a
series of anecdotal reflections on Haitian life, the
expatriate communities in the United States, and
Wyclef's own experience growing up in New York after
his family emigrated when he was 9.

"It's a reflection of Haiti, which reflects the whole
world, because some of the things that Haitians are
going through, Iraqis and Americans and Canadians are
going through. Especially the fear. A kid is afraid to
walk outside, because he doesn't know whether the
shots are going to ring out from the right or from the
left. . . . After 9/11, we in New York get alarmed
over any little shit -- it could be a building on fire
or a car alarm."

Some tracks give the impression of a free-floating
linguistic identity, as Wyclef's rapping flows between
Creole, French and English. Haitian Mafia, with a
cameo turn by Foxy Brown, is Wyclef's strongest
portrayal yet of the sound of Afro-Caribbean street
life in America, though even The Score had traces of
Haitian beats.

He had been working for some time on a Creole album,
but the project really took off after he did the film
score for The Agronomist, a Jonathan Demme documentary
about Jean Dominique, a Haitian activist who was
assassinated in 2000. Dominique appears on the album
in a spoken-word introduction, affirming Haiti's pride
in being the first black republic to gain independence
-- a bittersweet achievement, given the troubles of
today.

But the disc is also about having fun, even when the
fun has a defiant accent. Party by the Sea, which also
appeared on his 2003 release, The Preacher's Son,
describes a beach party thrown by Haitians who have
been deported from the U.S.

Wyclef participated in a more dangerous gathering
during his most recent trip to Haiti, earlier this
month. It was an undercover journey taken to redeem a
promise he made to the leader of a Haitian gang that
had carjacked a friend's vehicle on the island.

"I called him from New York, and said, 'This is
Wyclef.' And he said, 'Which Wyclef? Not my Wyclef.'
And I said, 'Yes, your Wyclef.' . . . I said to him,
'If you give back the car, I'll come and talk with
you, but I won't tell you when.' So he gave back the
car, and a little while later I snuck into Cité
Soleil, which is one of the most dangerous sections of
the country.

"I couldn't even tell my mom I was going. I had a
meeting with some of the gang leaders there about the
guns and the violence. And after I left, the papers in
Haiti said Cité Soleil was quieter."

Wyclef kept a more visible date in the United States
recently, as one of the performers at a contentious
concert in New York to support John Kerry's bid for
the American presidency. But as in Haiti, Wyclef is
ready to engage in street-level action, and was once
arrested for participating in a demonstration against
municipal funding cuts to New York's public schools.

His career prospects are at a delicate point,
commercially if not artistically. The Score sold over
11 million copies, a record number for any hip-hop
album. The Preacher's Son sold only 175,000 in North
America, and left many critics suggesting that
Wyclef's eclectic one-offs (including recent duets
with Kenny Rogers and Tom Jones, and covers of songs
by Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan) were hurting his standing
in the hip-hop world without helping him anywhere
else. Everyone agrees that a Fugees reunion would be a
very good thing for him right now.

"I think that there will be another Fugees album,
because we're all talking," he said, referring to
negotiations with Pras and especially with Hill, who
vanished into a fog of personal crises after a hugely
successful solo debut five years ago. "Lauryn has good
energy -- she has a record coming out next year."

Even with no Fugees, Wyclef is too talented a producer
and promoter of music to stay on the sidelines. He and
his partners (who are mostly family members) are
banking a lot on the young talent he is signing to his
own Clef Records.

"You wait and see," he said, winding up for another
soft burst of self-promotion. "I'm telling everybody
that in 2˝ years I'm going to be the mini-Def Jam."

Wyclef Jean plays Toronto's Caribana Festival on July 31.

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