Funky President
You may have heard that Wyclef Jean of the Fugees is running for president of Haiti. (Other musicians who have gone on to have political careers include Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil in Australia, Ruben Blades of Panama, and Dave Rowntree of Blur in the UK. Rowntree did not succeed in his run for Parliament; so far as I know, the only musicians to become members of Parliament were also members of Funkadelic.) At any rate, this seemed like a fine time to add my long feature on Wyclef to the archives; it’s from 2000, when he was releasing his second solo album. If he’s looking for possible campaign slogans from his quotes in this piece, he’ll have to choose between “The Lord is sending an angel through Wyclef. The sword is death, the book of life is peace” and “Caribbean people love country music and Eighties music.”
posted 10 August 2010 in Archives, Articles and tagged Haiti, Wyclef Jean. 2 comments
August 10th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Okay, I’m only partly through reading this, but I just had to state the obvious: the mention of HMV made me ache with nostalgia for 2000 and the height of the chain record store (and the music business in general). I’ll bet The Ecleftic went platinum despite not producing any serious hit singles (the Mary J. duet, I recall, did just okay at R&B radio), because in 2000 you could drop an album and shift a million like that.
August 10th, 2010 at 11:38 am
I know! It was not that long ago that it was a big, exciting deal to have a shiny new record store opening up in your neighborhood.