Marcia Chatelain remembers that it was almost impossible to turn on the radio in 1996 and not hear the Fugees’ smooth cover of “Killing Me Softly With His Song.” That remake transformed the group’s sophomore album, The Score, which dropped on Feb. 13 of that year, into a decade-defining juggernaut.
But The Score was more than just that chart-topping single. For Chatelain, 46, the album delivered the thrill of recognition. Consisting of East Orange, New Jersey, rapper and singer Ms. Lauryn Hill, Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean, and Haitian American rapper Pras, the Fugees offered a kind of visibility that was new to the daughter of Haitian migrants. The album marked the first time Chatelain, who was a high school student in Chicago at the time, saw people with her background reach that magnitude of fame.
“On one of the tracks, they say a few words of Creole,” Chatelain, an Africana studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Capital B, referring to an interstitial on “No Woman, No Cry.” “And I was like, ‘This is wild.’ I had never seen my culture represented outside the confines of my community. That was just so cool.”
Chatelain wasn’t alone in that feeling. On its 30th anniversary, The Score — ranked among the greatest hip-hop albums of all time — still resonates with Black listeners across geography and class. The Fugees hail from working- and middle-class families, and their background, unusual in some hip-hop circles, shaped identities, especially in the New York and New Jersey areas, home to so many Caribbean migrants.
Whether Caribbean-rooted or New Jersey-bred, fans continue to appreciate that The Score gave them a sort of home — an album that centers the Black diaspora and that makes space for a fuller range of Black sounds, stories, and selves.
This appreciation was on full display at the Grammy Awards earlier this month. Backed by an all-star ensemble that included Chaka Khan, John Legend, and Jean on guitar, Hill led a rousing tribute to neo-soul great D’Angelo and Roberta Flack, whose 1973 rendition of “Killing Me Softly With His Song” hit No. 1. Both artists passed away last year.
By the time the performance slid into the Fugees’ beloved reimagining of the track, the members of the audience couldn’t help but dance along, their bodies caught in a current of joy and reverence.
The Fugees helped redefine 1990s hip-hop by fusing rap, soul, and Caribbean sounds, leaving a lasting cultural imprint. (Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Kids on the train
Adam Carnegie, 44, commuted an hour each way between his house in Brooklyn and his high school in the Bronx. On one of those commutes, a Trinidadian American friend leaned in with a question: Had he heard this new track, “Killing Me Softly With His Song”? Carnegie hadn’t. But a couple days later, the track floated out of his radio, turned to Hot 97 — and that was that. From then on, he was a Fugees acolyte, buying The Score first on cassette, then again on CD.
What hooked Carnegie, who’s Jamaican American, was the refreshing sense that the Fugees were speaking from a world he already knew through his life in New York City — their entire vibe “just felt like home,” he told Capital B.
“These were kids I might’ve been on the train with,” Carnegie said. “I definitely would have been crushing on Lauryn if she had been on my train. She was this whiz kid who later got into Columbia University. And I learned that Wyclef grew up in Brooklyn for a little bit. It felt like I was gonna see them on the path, like I was gonna come across them at some point.”
But the familiarity Carnegie felt wasn’t only tied to the possibility of chance encounters. It extended into the religious.
Carnegie grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist home. He describes the denomination as more restrictive than others, though his parents were “on the more liberal side of things.” Knowing that Jean’s father was a minister — and hearing The Score’s spiritual undercurrents as the Fugees wrestle with faith — made his connection to the music feel even more intimate.
“‘Manifest’ was really big for me, with some of the themes on there,” Carnegie said, referring to lyrics such as “Crooked cops pulled up, they offered him thirty pieces of silver / All he got to do is deliver the Savior.” “It was like, ‘Oh, wait, these are religious kids. They really know their stuff.’ That resonated with me.”
When The Score earned an Album of the Year nomination at the Grammy Awards in 1997 — and ultimately nabbed Best Rap Album — Carnegie experienced the moment as a communal win for Black New Yorkers with Caribbean ties. “Killing Me Softly With His Song” secured a Grammy Award, too.
“There was this sense of pride that they blew up like that,” he said. “They were talking about their lives and being true to themselves.”
Outside the hip-hop power centers
Denene Millner, 57, is from Long Island, New York, but she spent the peak Fugees years in South Orange, New Jersey, where Hill’s family settled. At the time, Millner was an entertainment reporter. And she lived right next door to people in Hill’s orbit: “She had these two aunties, and they were raising a few kids — very, very sweet,” she recalled. “They were a lovely family.”
Watching the Fugees rise from a place so often treated as peripheral in hip-hop was like seeing a community claim space — and recognition — on a national stage.
“Knowing that Lauryn [and Pras] went to the local high school, and seeing this Black girl from the neighborhood go on to create this phenomenal music and be a part of this popular group, and thinking about the kind of music they were making — it was an incredible thing,” Millner told Capital B. “It just made all of our hearts bigger, knowing that she came from this place.”
In that way, Millner said, the Fugees offered something quietly radical: permission. Their success suggested that hip-hop didn’t have to emerge from Los Angeles, New York City, or some other accepted power center of the genre to be real, resonant, or authoritative.
She heard that sensibility echoed in a 1996 lyric by De La Soul: “Not from the PJs, yet I still got something to say.” That, she said, was the tone and timber of the Fugees’ music, particularly on The Score. The album shaped how Millner imagined her place in the world.
“Lauryn, a woman, was leading the charge,” Millner said. “She was letting people know: ‘We have something to say. I might be from a middle-class neighborhood in Jersey, but I can be just as funky, just as fresh, and I can put these lyrics down on you and make you move your ass, even if what we’re doing doesn’t track with what you think hip-hop is supposed to be.’”
One of her favorite lyrics is from “Ready or Not.” On the song’s second verse, Hill says: “So while you imitatin’ Al Capone / I’ll be Nina Simone and defecatin’ on your microphone.”
“I just love that they made you think, and made you dig,” Millner said. “If you didn’t understand something, you were moved to go figure it out.”
Doubling down on diaspora
Mark Anthony Neal, 60, was putting the finishing touches on his dissertation at the State University of New York at Buffalo in February 1996. He knew of the Fugees, but at the time, his music diet consisted mostly of A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, and Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth. When The Score dropped, however, it was impossible to ignore: The Fugees were doing something different.
That difference, Neal said, was anchored partly in the Fugees’ commitment to place in the broadest sense, captured in a name that riffs on “refugees” and evokes displacement, survival, and Black resilience. This ethos came fully into focus on The Score.
“They were about groups of people finding community,” Neal, an African and African American studies professor at Duke University, told Capital B. “It didn’t really matter whether they were in Haiti or New York or New Jersey. There was this diasporic vibe that was central to the music.”
It’s true, he said, that hip-hop has always been a multiethnic Black art form with Caribbean influences. But when hip-hop became big, many of these influences largely disappeared. For instance, Biggie Smalls, who was the son of Jamaican migrants, played around with these influences, Neal explained, but he didn’t foreground them.
Then along came Hill, Jean, and Pras, among others.
“What made the Fugees different was that, on their second album, they doubled down on the idea of diaspora,” Neal said. “They doubled down on: ‘This is who we are. We’re in the U.S., we’re Black, and we also have this rich tradition that we’re pulling from.’”
With a touch of wistfulness, he remembered that, when he first heard The Score 30 years ago, there was an unspoken understanding: Fans would never get another Fugees record. Hill’s light was simply too bright — too explosive — to remain contained within the group.
“And two years later, we got The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, with its five Grammy Awards,” Neal said, referring to Hill’s debut solo album. “But it’s incredible to me that, in 2026, I still hear people talk about The Score as if it just dropped last week.”
Check out our Spotify playlist spotlighting the Fugees, their musical influences, and their contemporaries who also defined the era.