Wyclef Jean - Fugees

Full transcript: Wyclef Jean on London Real

5:38 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Wyclef Jean, the renowned musician, rapper, producer, activist and actor who first achieved fame as a member of the hip-hop mega group The Fugees. You’ve won three Grammy Awards, sold over 31 million albums and have produced and collaborated with artists like Beyonce, Shakira, Santana, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Mick Jagger, Lil Wayne, the list goes on and on and on. They say if you’re famous, Uncle Clef most likely touched you.

6:08 Rolling Stone magazine has named you one of the world’s top 50 hip-hop players, and this week you release your new album, Carnival 3: The Road to Clarification, exactly 20 years after your first solo album debut. Wyclef, welcome to London Real in Paris. Thank you, man, I’m glad to be back. Thanks for getting me here, because I forgot how beautiful the city is. It’s kind of a slower pace than London.

6:31 London, everyone’s it’s like New Yorkish, it’s like everyone’s trying to get, get, get better than ours. They like laid-back. Yeah, like I will get there. Yeah. What was it, first time you came here, and what’s the city feel like to you, because you got all sorts of history and everything makes it in here?

6:50 The first time I came here was with my group The Fugees. We were like kids there, I was like 19 years old. We started like in the States and because we was very bad orientated, it was totally different. The whole idea of The Fugees, Fugees is short for refugees, and when we started out in the hood and, um, in Jersey, the idea was like, we don’t want to do music, we want to do a movement. And the idea of like, and it’s funny because when I look back, the first Fugees album is called Blunted on Reality, and ain’t even The Score.

7:29 The Score was the album that came afterwards. And so can you imagine, like, you coming out of the hood, you’re getting a corporate check and you’re talking about these issues like right from the gate in front of me so far for us. When we got to Paris, I remember, because we always trying to find our way, we was doing was on a radio and it’s so funny because so in history my mom teaches us Haitian history, and so the French history has so much to do with the Haitian history with the revolution.

8:13 So what happened was, so when we learned about Napoleon and so I, the young, is like, yo, that was this ruler, he called Napoleon, he basically messy old country of Haiti and now so my mama, she speaks English and in the house there’s Creole, and Creole is a language which is it has a mixture of like French, you can hear a bit of Spanish in it and every island has their forms of Creole, so in Jamaica it’s called patois. So it was very interesting but the native language is Creole but the national language is French. Man, I was like, man, I never gonna speak no French, not after what Napoleon did to us.

8:57 Wayne speaking French and then so when we get to France now it’s the reality. Now I’m in Paris and you have all these kids and you’re just cool with them, you know what I mean, and it’s like you then you go out, I guess, man, Napoleon town was like what, a thousand years ago, we’re good, and you start to learn the language, the culture, the food, and then you just start to fall in love with what is part of your generation, you know what I mean? Do you see the influences on Haiti when you’re here?

9:29 Oh yeah, big time. I see the influences in the whole, like, Europe, like when I’m in Haiti, like I understand, like, you know, why the French would have wanted Haiti, you know, understand to you or why the English would want to make either of them sanity. It was sort of like, I mean, that islands at the end of the day are the most beautifulest places, the most surreal place, like, and it’s very mystical, like naturally. You know how you like think about, like, you in London, man, you gotta go to the mud spot, you don’t gotta do that in Haiti.

10:09 I just take you to a place called Saut-d’Eau, throw you in a march, baby, with the people who are they chanting them songs, you come out fill 13 against me. So that kind of energy, that mystical energy is very rulers always found that amazing because when people rule they rule from two aspects, the physical aspect and the metaphysical aspect, and the idea of always wanting to know what you don’t know. And so a lot of the islands have a lot of that, as in some voodoo stuff going on.

10:51 Well, it’s so funny, man, it’s just, I tell you, man, um, Hollywood, man, they be scaring y’all, man, like it was Booga Booga. There’s no James Bond in there, right? I’m like, man, listen, the best way to explain, like, Vodou to someone is just if you can be part of a religion or part of I remember watching an episode on TV with how they live in the Amazons and how they worship and how when they wake up it’s the Sun, you know, and man, I said one dude, man, he had a stick and a stick literally ran through his nose and it was like this and I was like, well, that must hurt, because it’s not an earring, right, it’s not a nose ring.

11:51 Hey, musta hurt, but it comes out like this and then you say, man, what up here you go, you know what kind of now then for him they have chili have done that right there was no anesthesia, all right, so that means whatever he was drinking at the time and the tribe has to do what they have to do. So what’s the difference with that then if I tell you I saw a man eat glass? I mean, really think about it. I mean, right now we’re in this world where through YouTube you basically have seen the most fascinating things, I think, whether we talk about Buddhist, whatever you talk about, it’s just what is the highest form of your consciousness and how do you want to reach it, because you can go in the mountains and you can see a monk levitate and it probably would take him 10 years to do that, but the level of his consciousness, that’s why you are you and I have me.

12:50 So think about it, I’m from the impossible. I’m from a place where I took donkey to school, I lived in a heart, I had no idea what electricity was, right, and then in my mind though I was like, you I’m gonna be something and I’m gonna be somebody, man. So it completely from where I’m at, it basically looks totally impossible, and that’s what it is. So when the idea of not knowing, sometimes it puts people in a state of saying, well, what is it? And so it’s not just voodoo, it, the idea of anything and, and of course, you know, me being a great movie fan and understanding how Hollywood has portrayed many stereotypes from the gate and determined of Voodoo and Haitian people being a bug lover is one of the catch it.

13:47 And you went on to actually learn French, right? And then in your last album Javert you did Nimma keep ah, and I don’t speak French, yeah, when you sing that song in French I feel like I speak French, does that make sense? Oh, my do Brasil, then Edith Piaf on me, there is the same thing or here’s the things that I’m like, and I feel her even though I don’t know the language, yeah. Do you think that’s something about French or is that something about the artist?

14:16 No, it’s before language, we have vibration of feeling, right? Because the language will come after, I but when you feel something you just feel a vibration, so even because for it to compute to note it has to go to your Neuros before then it live, if it only lives in your ear it just lives it as noise, right? So then what you feel is a vibration. When we listen to Bob Marley it don’t matter like what country we go to, like, you know, it’s like when they do goes theater, everyone is, you’re like a little, because we feel a vibration.

15:00 When Jimi Hendrix plays guitar we feel a vibration, and this is what people have to understand, like, right, so before everything you have told and you have a vibration you know. I remember one time if you after this this episode you of you you you’re going YouTube and you you you put a cannabis Wyclef Jean on stage performing Second Round Knockout with a lion on stage, right? Because it sounds like a good video. Yeah, I’m a big lover of animals, right? So and it’s so funny because well when you see this lion is big now but when you have them as cubs, right, and you’re communicating, talk, you’re not even the idea of words don’t exist, everything my rule what did my do I die about you basically using basically like tone to lay down to and then so then we forget like you know, so what you feel is you feel a vibration and that’s what I feel, but the record No Makeda part is nuts because how can a kid from Brooklyn, the projects of Marlborough, you know, sings Jacques and flips a boom-bap 90 inches doesn’t make sense.

16:41 I didn’t that happen? So my mother, who in the projects we was on welfare and I remember like was living on the first floor, every Sunday she’s basically like cooking food and when she’s cooking she would be playing what’s called shuttle net for a set, like, you know, love, love songs in French or almost like lullabies in French, and so she would be playing like Jacques Blair, Johnny Holiday, and I would just be sitting there and I’m looking at her and I always want to make her laugh, so what I did was I have a crazy gift of memorizing things, so I kept memorizing all of these French songs and, um, and then one day when she, uh, she was a little down, and then I just went out to her and I was like, no Makita power in Fotolia to purse. Oh, Blair kiss-off with the job really tired, she just started bursting out laughing.

17:40 So so anything that I think there’s always like some story to it. So the energy that I send to you is just that energy of like marble projects. Can I meet my mama in that? How did that, that, that feeling felt at the time? And I can feel that somehow, because it’s like a tribute to your mom, there’s nostalgia, there’s a whole angle to it.

18:05 Yeah, definitely. I miss your question. If we, if we to flag the cab right now and went to Charles de Gaulle Airport and flew into Port-au-Prince and you were gonna show me Haiti, I’ve never been, what would I see and what would you show me? Well, the first thing is the misconception of Haiti is that Haiti is Port-au-Prince. That’s like us getting on a plane and going to Jamaica and saying Kingston, Jamaica is Jamaica.

18:35 That’s the first perception, right? So the first thing we would do is we would land and we would not stay in the city, because the city is just too populated, it’s too concentrated, right? Same way like Jamaica was back in the days, it’s like you were you going in and the city was not designed for that many people, right? So that means that it has, it’s like you’re, you just feel like, man, cars are moving, people are running, you feel a very strong energy.

19:08 This energy is not an energy of danger, that’s what I want to explain to people. So if we go to yard and we go to Jamaica, and I can use Jamaica as a comparison, because same way I got family and Jim in Haiti, I got friends in Jamaica sense a kid. So we go on Kingston, Jamaica, if there’s a guy, dude, don’t go to Tivoli Gardens at this time, you know, you know, don’t go here at this time. Dude, I could bring you to Brooklyn, New York City right now, be like, yo, don’t go to here at this time, you might run into some blood, don’t go here this time.

19:44 I rented some crib. So that’s really the first thing I would say is when you want to see a country, the first thing I think you should explore is the, the the beautiful people, right? So Port-au-Prince, all you would see is you be like, man, I remember Angelina Jolie to Haiti and Angelina, what she told me, she’s like, mad Clef, this is the closest that I get to being in Africa without being in Africa with the beauty. So that’s what you would see in Port-au-Prince, like you would see the culture, you would see the art in the street, you would see like, you know, the Masons making things like real time, this kind of energy.

20:31 But this is why we driving to as we would leave Port-au-Prince, we would head out to the first place I would bring you to is Saut-d’Eau, so dope, you know. So do, when you go to Haiti you Moscow, so so dough is a lot of where the ancestor vibes are at, right? So we would go to Saut-d’Eau and we would go to the river, and this river is a great river, we would, we’ll jump in the river and we would go down as low as we can, and then you would feel warm, you would feel heat under this water, and then we would come up and once we come up you feel cold again, and then you would hear the women singing and you’d be like, what would this feels like, you know, like we’re in the middle of Africa, like what’s this kind of energy?

21:25 It’s almost like Saut-d’Eau is a great place because it takes you back to your roots, into your ancestors, you know what I mean? We would visit Saut-d’Eau, after that we would go to Cayes, Cayes, see, these are different places that you have to visit. Cayes, you would see the, the beautiful mountains, the beautiful water, a lot of natural resources, and basically with certain places in the Haiti, like the way, like the farmers operate, we can, if you eat organic for example, I mean you go there, you set up a little farm or something, I mean it’s basically like a wrap.

22:02 So where my wife is from, it’s a place called Jeremie. So right now we’re building in Jeremie, like we’re gonna put up an organic farm, like everything is gonna be so organic, the soil, you’re able to reproduce everything so quick. People that’s watching us that love mangoes, my wife is a mango freak, like you could eat 30 mangoes at once, if I kill you you might get diabetic, you might want to stop that. But we have the idea of mango, planting lettuce, cabbage, and a lot of the oils that you see that are used, but from a natural resource point of view, Haiti is the only place that I’ve been to where I’m inside of the house and I’m like, yo, I’m getting a little cold.

22:51 The elder goes, okay, give me two minutes, I’ll be back. She, she ain’t gonna no pharmacy, she goes straight to the back, it’s like 50 plants. She’s like, I’m like, how does she know which one takes this one? We could put a little money, boom, boom, boom, next day cold is gone. So so for me it’s important to know like this is the kind of energy.

23:17 And there’s an artist by the name of Basquiat, right, I see a great artist and has influenced the culture a lot. So his parents are from the place an ad called Cap-Haïtien, so Cap-Haïtien, that’s the same place I’m from. So they say people from Kauai don’t care very, like, creative. So you can go to Cap-Haïtien and I promise you there’s some kid right now that’s nine years old that will tell you to stand there and that will literally paint you in less than 30 minutes.

23:54 It’s like it’s this is the kind of, this is the kind of Haiti that excites me about, you know. And so before you went to New York, when you’re about nine years old, right, years old, the music had already hit you, you would already started feeling it, or did that really happen when you back to New York? Well, the music hit me in the village, because in the village you had like you had sounds, you know, you had drums, and sometimes people see me play and I’m playing three congas, I play like ten instruments, and they put the three congas and I literally, I can drink water while playing a conga and will not miss a beat.

24:40 People like, yeah, that’s it, man. The first thing you do when you born in Haiti, they throw a drum, you know, before you even can say hello, they be like, learn how to play this drum, it will make you successful. So I’ve always heard sounds, so I don’t know, because for me the birds had a certain melody to it though, the Roosters, the, the waking you up like that, your alarm clock, you heard a certain thing outside. We had no Walt Disney at the time, so when the rain come it was amazing, this produced a certain sound, and then every time we had the Thunder against the rain, you know what I mean, I said, I always tell people I say you’re my first 808 that I’ve ever heard, man, was this sound that done then the village she was like so.

25:43 And then naturally there was a old church and this old church every Sunday, man, is just you can hear like the old worships, you know, the elders they just worshiping, they’d do anything so insane. Yeah, they singing and they’re singing these hymns, man, like these hymns I’ve never heard them before, like it almost sounds like only they can sing these hymns. I did I saw, I’ve more felt it. And so my aunt always tells the story, she’s like, yo, you know the first song you wrote was really horrible, it was like four years old that she does it.

26:21 So I’ve always can hear melodies in my head, but, um, once I got to the States though, what was in my head, the orchestration, now I was in a space where I could physically touch things. Now I can hit something and what is this thing, cuz you’ve had more access to things, right? Now you have access to different things, because in Haiti it was pretty bare-bones. Yeah, it was all bare-bones, I mean you know you live but, but we had drums, you know, and these are when we say drums we talk about a little tiny, you know, drums you’re beaten, but you know twelve people beating different drums you get a certain energy.

27:06 Okay, that’s what New York City comes and you got things you can play with now. Yeah, yeah, New York is great. What you can consider a DDD is a kid, like was your mind always liked it? Yeah, I told today I have a DeeDee, like people already know, like it’s so crazy because I play last night and I literally when I perform I go to like seven instruments. I remember doing this show, it was so funny, so I show up and it’s the DJ rig is the moment woman sounded confused, like it where’s the bad [expletive], the beds here and I started, I go to do drugs on mobile, you know, so it’s my bad, be like, yo, man, I said, yeah, I got a do that cuz I gotta keep y’all sharp, man.

27:56 I learned from James Brown actually, keep the band sharp, and at any time always remember I can play any instrument. So I change these today, yeah. James says, what are you here, it’s a drunk, don’t always you don’t matter the instrument to me, it’s always a drunk, it always goes back to that, that percussion in the village, you know, I can hear Bach and the tone nation of it and the movement of it, I would follow the percussion, you know, in the timing, the timing, and that’s how I’m able to play anything.

28:27 Okay, yeah. So you get to the States, you’re in Brooklyn, right? Yeah, there’s a culture shock, dude, culture shock. I’m gonna tell you some funny stuff, man. Oh, show you my reality, baby.

28:43 I remember being in the village, right, and my parents left me and went to America cuz there’s like, you gotta figure this out because we had a dictator at the time in Haiti, right? And so they, they left, my father went first cuz I’m tell you real talk, like my father was on her a work visa, so he was sent over to like America, they’re like, preach, you know what I mean? And, um, and my mom left a year after him, so left me and my brother in this place, so we really know who my mother and my father was, was too little, so we grew up with our art.

29:25 And they couldn’t visit, right? No, no, no, no, it’s crazy, the immigration laws, you can’t play with that. So basically, so when people would be like, yo, your mama send a bicycle for you, we know what that mean, like it just was confusing. I was, I’m, I told my art, you’re my mom, and my uncle, you’re my dad, I don’t know what you’re saying. But one day I remember my grand being in the village, I’m showing you my reality, man, and a car comes up.

29:54 I never see a car before my life, man, and this truck pulls up, and when the truck pulls up a guy gets out the truck. This my first time in my life seeing a white person, I ain’t never seen a white person before in my life. I look at my grandma now, now and then what we gonna do for a second we’re gonna talk like with the Indians, right, so the white man, right? So I see the white man and he goes to the back of his car and he takes all of this rice, she’s bringing it to the vision, so apparently he’s a missionary, you know what I mean, he’s taking it, right, he’s bringing something like little, and I look and you know we all gather because we Yahoo quizzes.

30:41 So look at my grandma, I tell my grandma, she go grab, who is this? She looks delicious, she said, this is Jesus Christ. And now is that Jesus Christ? So now we like, yo, Jesus Christ, man, he’s down bringing some rice to the village, everybody come on, praise to Jesus Christ. So we get the rice and boom, boom, boom, boom, and then Jesus Christ means the village in the car and he breaks up.

31:09 And then so now my parents, now it’s like nine years later they come to get us, and me and my brother, dude, ain’t never been to an airport before, we don’t even know what that is. Now we gotta pack our bags and I tell the kids in a village, look, man, I gotta go to America, but I’m gonna be back. Now this was a little different because in the village I was the general to my village, and we always played a game, we gotta go to America, and every time we played this game, we’re gonna go to America, we came back, the game was, right, I’m thinking about this, is so funny, right, so the game is we get on a donkey, right, so the first get on a donkey and then you wave to everyone like, okay, I’ll be back, and then that you ride the donkey around the cemetery, because we literally, our village was part of the cemetery, so we ride the donkey around the cemetery.

32:14 This was our fun, and then you come back around the cemetery and then all the kids start change, yeah, would you back from America? Yeah, I bought gold back from America, I bought diamond, and your is this this imaginary game. So now it’s the, it’s me and my brother, we in on a donkey, so all the kids gathered and I get away, are going, I go going America, and then I Gilbert, where’s the donkey, you know I’m saying? And I’m like, yo, don’t worry, we gonna be back, we gonna be back, and we go.

32:46 And now for the first time see an airplane, a airplane, we come from a village where we see no light, the light was the Sun, the, the lawn clock was the rooster, you write, for water we’d have to walk from my house, the donkey was the transportation, we see this big giant thing, dude, so this thing looked like a complete UFO, you fo me, so no, I remember my aunt pointing and saying that’s your mom and that’s your dad when they were getting off the plane, because in the islands like the airport is open and you can basically at the time be looking at the airplanes are landing from the other side, like you can literally see as the people are getting out and now the parents come and get us, we’re amazed with shock, culturally shock. Now we get on this airplane, dude, this looks like a complete, I mean I’m thinking I’m in an astronaut at this time, like this don’t exist.

33:48 So we get there, me and my brother, we sit next to each other, look, I don’t, he looks at me, a woman come over to us, we don’t speak English, don’t speak English, and she goes, would you gentlemen like something to drink? And it sound like mumbo-jumbo to us, and now we see her, she’s a white woman, second white person we see in touch Farah, now and my brother said, yo, who’s that? And I said, does Jesus Christ cousin, so this that reality meant. So at a time when you tell me what was it like when we lived in Brooklyn, it was like a culture shock.

34:42 We land in this place, gasping, no English, we, uh, we get to this place called Marlborough Projects in Coney Island, man. Anybody check out the projects, man, the 80s, and this was it, and, um, and we had a little tiny apartment, and within this apartment my father did like so many miracles. I respect that man so much because he did whatever it took in the night astray to get his family out of the projects in an honest way, and I was super important for him.

35:22 Yeah, my dad was a man of dignity. He always told us like there’s two ways you could do it, you know what I mean, and he says if you do it the honest way it’s gonna pay off at the end. It’s not gonna be cool in the beginning but it’s gonna pay off at the end. So he really, my dad worked three jobs, you know, man, he, um, he did everything that he had to do, but you know we’re still kids, right, so we’d still he did three drunk and he’s a minister, you know I mean, and he says enough Church inside of that little apartment.

35:59 So we found that weird, like Ana projects, he was like, look, you got to give it, you got bring the work to the people that needs it, like, so we gonna bring him to work. So this was like, he was a man like that. I mean he named me Wyclef Jean after, you know, I have an English name which is which is finding my dad’s from Haiti, but he gave, he studied theology so he named all his kids after. So I’m Wycliffe John the reformative, so that’s what he got, that’s how he named me.

36:34 He said you’re gonna be a reforming tater. And so for us like, you know, we would be growing up and, and I remember so when we started in the church in that little project, I’ll be being a witness, a centerfire witness, man, everything is the instrument is your hand in your voice, right? Then, um, you learn an English tale, right, that’s right, you slowly learning it, and um, and then I remember it was one little TV, man, with the hanger Danny anchor was the antenna, and you know my dad’s like the boss of the house, like Al Bundy, like he’s the one who gets the middle, and you know Michael watch nothing, like it’s all on him.

37:23 He was fascinated by by, uh, two things in America, like when he used to watch, one was cowboy movies, like he was like obsessed with cowboys, and this Minister is obsessed with cowboy films, and the other was wrestling in America, like there was like obsessed with resident. So we, we, we like the cowboy movies but we hated the rest of it. So when we was privileged at the time where he wanted us to watch the TV would come, and then there was a show called The Muppet Show, so basically like we all got to sit down, we all gotta watch The Muppet Show.

38:05 Now he was training us for something, but we didn’t know what was being trained for, me, my brother’s am assistant. The Muppet Show was a show that came on with all markets, the environment, you had Miss Piggy, all of these markets, the animal, but the thing about the market stone they were musical too. Muppets play instrument, so you had the drummer, the boom, boom, boom. So we still we got obsessed with the market shows, and one Christmas, I remember the best Christmas in the projects was when my dad bought us, we all came and I guess he went to Toys R Us and he came at night and everything was in a box, it was open enough, and it was all the instruments from the markets.

38:51 So everybody had to choose some, so my brother pulled the drums, I pulled the guitar. This was his way. Now on Sundays we would be playing them up in insurance in the church. And so the Muppet instruments led to what eventually, you know, became real instruments, but now while that side was in the project, there was the other side, you know, and the getting in trouble sighs. Yeah, and then you know the, the other side was there was a beat coming from a car, and I was like, what was this stuff, man?

39:28 It was like, and the dude is low in the car, he’s like this, I’m like, girl, he’s like this, he’s so low riding, baby, he’s, you know, he got the braze, he got, you know, and I’m looking, I remember my dad pulling my ear so hard, I told everyone, what you listen to this stuff? This drug dealer music, I don’t want you hanging with these guys, removal. I say, you little, you like, man, you like these guys is cool and I wanna be like these dudes, man. My daddy working three jobs, he is suck up, man.

40:03 These dudes ain’t chillin on the block, look, they pulling up with the cars, they gettin out with the jewelry, the girls, I got be like these guys. So automatically I learned how to listen, I will actually learn how to speak English by listening to rap music. Mmm, on the DL, cuz your dad couldn’t act violent, wanna do got an old little Sony Walkman and I was listening to hip-hop, and this is actually like how I learned speak English. Hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah.

40:41 And so your dad’s telling you one thing, you’re not listening to him per se, you’re more of a mama’s boy and your dad was hard? Yeah, my dad was real hard, my mom, you know, I get over, but my dad was hard. I mean, we was heavy, I mean like I always say, I don’t, if I was to tell you like I never heard, I can’t take a gun apart and put it back together, I’d be lying to you. I used to, I could do that at barely 14, you know. If I, if I tell you I don’t know what crack looks like, I’d be lying to you.

41:21 If I told you, man, I don’t know, you know, you know, if I tell you, you know, in the hood, you know, I didn’t know, I didn’t get into situations where at times, you know, I could have not been here, because most of my friends that I consider my friends are not here, you knows, maybe like to two or three of us left. Um, you know, I would be lying, you know, so it’s like, but what people have to understand, cookies would be like, y’all, you and I get old, man, you’re using the poverty for an excuse, you can get up out of it, man, right? You using it for the excuse, don’t tell us, oh, just because you went together you got a cell truck, well you got to carry a gun, you know, there’s a library, you coulda just went straight to the library, you get a bus card, you can do what you wanna do.

42:21 There’s a part of the reality that you’re missing, the part of the reality that you’re missing is when we get out of our house and we put the backpack on to get to the library, we have to go through a section. There’s no helicopters to fly’s over this section, these sections are very territorial, so it’s like, so you find yourself moving with your own crew because to get through serger sections, you know, you risk the factor of getting jumped, and you ain’t gonna let nobody jump your system, you ain’t gonna let nobody put hands on your brother. So crossing this, what happens is this part is where politicians have felled us, because I was a little kid and I’ve seen my cousin, you know, different people get killed, my man Jeffery, like, so why are you telling us to go in this section and go past here to go through the library?

43:25 Then the policies and the legislations you put in place with the councilmen, what you said you was gonna improve the living of these urban communities, you see that. So at the end of the day it just felt like by design we was put in a certain area so we could be trapped, so it’s not an easy thing, that’s what I want people to understand, like. So you have to understand it in two ways, you have to understand it from the mind of the child, the pressure of the child, and understand it from the factor of what the councilman promised us at the time.

44:04 So if the councilman had made this section different, maybe we don’t, we would have gotten to the library much quicker. If they had put the YMCA in that neighborhood a little earlier, you know, maybe 10 people would, ten kids when they got shot on that block. So this was like our reality. So so how did I, how did I survive it? Because I went from one guy to another gang, and the gang that I ended up and was a gang called hip-hop, you know, after, you know, and this gang I found it cooler than the other guy knows it because on the initiation was totally different.

44:53 You, you tell a story where you were working at a fast-food restaurant and the guy in the hood would roll up with the fancy cars and kind of make fun of what we were working at, splash the cash and go. I mean, how do you look at that and not, and not stick to, you know, the, the right path as your father would say? I mean it wasn’t easy, like I said, I always tell kids, you know, choice, man, yo, anyone was watching, it’s like a split decision determines life or death, it determines the prison life or your freedom, a split little stupid decision though.

45:30 So yeah, man, I’m working in a fast-food restaurant, like many watching this show, I chose event. Yeah, Clef worked in fast-food restaurant and my boys, they were high rollers, men just so like they could, you know, that term like the hard-working man is a sucker, they love that term. So it would roll up to the job too, man, right? Yeah, let me get thirty burgers, forty fries, they make it extreme, what was he like, man, these em f’s, all right, you got it, and you ride by and, um, and and you see like you giving them in there laughing, like, yo, dude, you clock out, jump in this car, let’s go, like we headed to Atlantic City.

46:14 How easy is that because the bundle of cash is in the car and you good, like these are your boys, like you know, you get in the car, his 10k, we bought an Atlantic City, like let’s write, and you literally not making $200 for the week. So but man, I was like, yo, a brain, I was like, yo, man, my dad was like, man, you know, like if you could just, you know, like figure it out the honest way, you’re gonna be good, you know, and then so so that split decision, you know, so but I’m gonna tell you like I didn’t want to get in the car, or I ain’t want to go to Atlantic City. Yeah, I wanted to go, yeah, like who wouldn’t want to go?

46:55 But this split decision of me saying, yo, hold up, man, just, just kind of feel like a little eerie, like, you know, like maybe my dad, right, so let me just chill, you know. Your mom said you could make more money with a guitar than with a gun. There’s that always the plan that music was the way out, or was it more like, I don’t feel this energy of these guys over here, I know this is gonna end wrong? No, cuz at the time you don’t know what’s gonna end up wrong, because like we all alive, we’re live, man, with teenagers, we poppin off like everything is good, like you know, we’re surviving, you know, we’re not taking the headaches of our parents, they’re taking their own headaches, we ain’t worried about the bills like that.

47:46 So the money we make and we move in, right, so you make a little money from the street, you know, you make a little money, next thing you know, cuz what are you worried about at the time? Fresh pair of sneakers, nice pair lead jeans, you know, new now grease for the waves, you know, that was really it. But my mom understood that, she saw it, she was like, yo, did he is either gonna die or I gotta figure it out, because anything that I do I’m I’m always the ringleader, you know, so it’s the ringleader, I’m like, you know what, are we gonna do, how are we gonna move?

48:33 So and I always tell people this, I want them to understand, and I always say this and I was one of my mom to understand, she took that guitar from her, she took the gun from my hand and really put a guitar in my head, and I really wanted to understand her, and then that reverse, it made me be able to, uh, to express now what my community is going through, and if I’m angry I could say it, I could write it in a song, I can express it, and this is dis started on how my songwriting star and how I would fly through time. Yeah, I mean, music is like was the original scalable medium, you know, the internet wasn’t going on, and lookit I always listen to like the Doors songs from the early seventies or Hendrix, it’s like I was spreading messages around the world, people would repeat the messages, and this is all happening in music.

49:37 Yeah, so at the time that must have been potentially empowering for you to know that. Yeah, I mean it was exciting because I found a form of release, like it was like, wow, man, I could just sit here and write all this stuff, then I could go on a block and just share with my friends. And what was the tone of those early songs? Man, the tone of the Murli songs was very, it was militant, you know, because we was like within these environments, you know what I’m saying, it was, um, it was just the idea of we was reading a lot and we understood history but was learning it from his streets, so it was like Egyptian Book of the Dead, you know, an understanding the scrolls, so we was coming from a level of very militant in the beginning, you know, understanding the oppression, understanding why we had those neighborhoods.

50:42 Yeah, there’s big Malcolm X revival around that time, two people were talking more about him than they had in the past. Yeah, so like the little late 80s for me it was like, you know, if we knew who Malcolm X was, I understood what he stood for, and we was very conscious, so I guess what it was, it called conscious rap, but it was, it was based from that neighborhood that we came from. Okay, now your parents move you over to Jersey and then you start, you know, in the basement making music.

51:18 Was that an important move to get you out of that Coney Island project? Was it less dangerous in Jersey? Well, they got me out of the projects because you know, I was probably gonna die doing with the good intentions. Yeah, I mean with good intentions though, but I was I was tough, like I wouldn’t back down from nothing. I heard you used to always be up for a scrap, even as the smaller kid.

51:44 Yeah, I mean yeah, I was, I was straight up, like I was from Brixton, like knuckle be head knuckles, like we go in the head of my examination thing, is that just, you know, it’s not a bare-knuckles, like I’m just is just a, it was just a thing in the projects, like it’s like, you know, I mean, we had slap boxing, you know I mean, before the guns and like, look, at the end of the day or if you disrespect me, we’re gonna solve it now. So and this is not a good mentality to have, like you know, like I’ve lost friends over that mentality. So my mother, you gotta call me tempered on you got a and you know they killed a few of my friends.

52:29 We got to Jersey, but the reason my dad thought New Jersey was gonna be better, honestly, cuz in Haiti he was a farmer and a fisherman, and I kid you not, I’ve one of the jobs he did was he worked for Don Warnock, he used to transport cars literally from New York to New Jersey, back to New York. So one day he’s transporting a car and he looks in the sign say Garden State and his dude bring us to Jersey because he’s thinking it’s the Garden State, as a farmer, and we ended up worse than being in the projects of Brooklyn, was an East Orange and then after that Newark, New Jersey, and then Newark could forget about it. I mean, this was like where every day they was still in the car from the church and I had to basically go get the car back, so it was a desert movie called New Jersey Drive, right?

53:30 New Jersey Drive is like, yo, Nicolas, Nicolas Cage, he had nothing on us, my and later. So now you fall into this culture to once again, now you in Jersey, it’s a different culture, you want a hot ride a car, you know, give. So I’ve watched kids, they all give themselves different names, you had Turbo, yeah, Ozone, crazy name, and then the Kiester, hot rod a car, go around the block, police go boop, and then you take it for a chase, and then so my dad had a church, and then so once the services was gonna be done with it he’s look at me, go get the car back, like I know, you know who the kids are, you know.

54:14 So so that led me into, um, to, to being the church director, but more, I always ask myself, how did he know I could get the cars back and how did he know he’s sending me to it to like as if I’m a Navy SEAL, like, like, y’all go on the mission, and he’s come back, okay, he’s like, you could do this. And, um, and then so he had this church and it was a bilingual church and his idea was now it’s gonna be a minister, me and my brother. And the fall out with my dad was when it was time to go to the theology school, I ran away from home and I was like, man, I’m not going to no, I don’t want to do no no peaches stuff, that’s not me.

55:05 I just want to do my music, I want to hip-hop, and I don’t know what this this religious stuff is he’s talking about at the time. So that ended up getting me kicked out the house, and then I ended up and my uncle took me into his basement and I lived in my uncle’s basement and, and I became the booger basement man. Yeah, was that an open-door policy, anybody could come and hang out and record, what was going on? Man, the best way I could explain it, it was like Tuff Gong to me, like the Marley types to do so was the neighborhood.

55:44 My uncle who loved DJing and all that, my mother’s brother, so me, my cousins, we built it downstairs and I left the back open, literally like so literally if you were in a neighborhood, you know what I’m saying, this is my trap, this is my trap, this is what we are. So you come here, you want to do music, you’re selling drugs on the block, you want to get out of it, come here, do some music, but you still won’t pay me because I’m a entrepreneur at the time, right, then you know, so my brain is like, look, you know, we sell time now, man, we sounded that husband time and I’m selling my brain in my music, so what do you want, you know. So I was like the ancient Dr. Dre at the time in that neighbor far, I was like 17.

56:43 Okay, yeah, so by now you’re, you’re a producer. Okay, but I don’t know what that term is yet. I’d be like, look, man, y’all wanna hook, I got this girl, you know what I’m saying, I’m gonna get her to do the hook for y’all, she’s only like 15, but she sound like she Nina Simone was, you know, it means she gonna throw this hook for y’all to, hook gonna cost your dough, if y’all just want to beat it’s cool, but the hook come with an extra, no, hey, how much do I, my side out of 25 I was gonna be, and you know who the girl is singing a hook, right?

57:20 I got a funny feeling here. Lauryn Hill. Yo, it so it’s just, it’s, it’s, uh, I remember prize Michelle, I was in my dad’s Church, things like, yo, I got a, I got these two girls that I’m doing a record with and, um, and I need you to, uh, to to do one of your reggae hooks on it, you know, I’m a teenager, I’m Michael, I said, uh, how do girls look, man, cuz ain’t coming to the studio on a Sunday, honey, look, he like, no, I mean I know you, man, just come to the hook, man.

58:04 So so I get to the studio and his two girls, it’s Lauren and it’s Marcy, and Marcy, I thought she was gonna make it two minutes, she sounded like early Mariah Carey before I even knew Mariah Carey was, and so I go ahead and the producer at the time in the studio was kelis me on from cooling again, he was the one I was doing all the cooling and gas, she’s fresh, exciting, totally Thunder doobie, and, uh, and then he ended up becoming my mentor because he saw something at me that I didn’t even see. So so I do the hook and when I do the hook and I’m gonna leave and the girls like, you can’t leave. And, uh, so basically the girls was like, you know, we’re staying, you know, we’re staying, you’re staying basically, you gotta be part of this, whatever it’s gonna be, and Khaleesi, I was like, girl, there’s some kind of magic and this when it’s all y’all together doing something is producing this frequency, and then that was it, and then me and Lauren and Marcy would just stay connected.

59:17 So then so now I always had the book a basement sounds like, yo, L, I need you to do this hook, she will come down, and it was deep, right, because she was in the suburbs, I was in the hood, so it’s like one of those kind of movies where the girl Eva Stuber is come to sleep, sleep in the basement, you know, the place where you know the mouse traps, and she’s just recording hooks for people and voices. Yeah, what she was doing, she was singing once again, III call it a lot of development was going on, you know, like Lauren was more of a singer, I got her into rapid, she wasn’t rapping, you know, like so I used to in the early days. So what is that called, artist development today?

1:00:10 And she was just naturally incredibly talented, but so many people was kind to my basement, so then my basement, I was a battle rapper, so I also became the best battle rapper in high school, and then in my basement if you come we could battle rap, I mean if you win, you know, we get out, we have a little pot, like you know, you could take it, like but I never lost the pot. So I mean I literally would be rapping for days, like here’s a back and forth, back and forth, oh yeah, it’s a survival for me, like I was a knight and everyone went through my basement, Erykah Badu came, too. It was like so through the course of the years, everyone ate corn when I married when I, when I, when I first met Akon, Akon was a barber.

1:01:00 Yeah, Akon was a barber, it can’t cut my hair a few times, that’s why I look like this. Hey, everybody’s coming through this studio, yeah, through the basement, through the hood, like it was, you know, if you feel like you got some kind of talent, you know, like at one time or another, um, you would stop by there and clearly so me, I’m just like, I’m like I’m a dais, I’m just a creator. So for me you have to understand, having my jazz chops, being a jazz major, rebelling against jazz, wanted to do Street music, then understanding church music, being a choir director, rebelling against all that, so I came in with this whole musicality that the neighborhood, it would be impossible to find another me because I was street smart and I knew institutions, so I was like, there you put the best two together, you know, so and then I knew technology, which was crazy at the time, so I basically learned every form of analogue within the studio, I know how to cut tape, I knew who had a, you know, which equipment was gonna buy, you know, it’s funny because when people hear “Killing Me Softly”, for example, and they hear brilliance, know me, my pain, and they in it, and musicians will call me, be like, yo, we trying to play along with “Killing Me Softly”, we have to detune instruments because it’s not on 440, it’s not standard.

1:02:30 What is that? Why did you play with a detuned Fender Rhodes? And I’m like, I ain’t play with no Fender Rhodes, I couldn’t afford a Fender Rhodes, so I had to trick your neuro. He said just trick your neuro, that vibration thing comes back to the village. So if I couldn’t inch it, it goes back to that drum.

1:02:49 So what I did was there was a almost I’m a straight-up geek in this part, there’s an old machine called S900, Akai produces have dinner when I’m talking about, and it has a sine wave, the sign was local. So but what happens is if you can MIDI this sine wave to a keyboard, now it will just play it as the keyboard. So now once I MIDI the tone into the keyboard, if I’m playing a C, now the C is going to play the sine wave. I put a little verb on the chamber of the sine wave and this is what’s playing “Killing Me Softly”.

1:03:31 But how would the human know that? Because the human just feels the vibration. So they’re so used to it being called the Fender Rhodes before, Fender Rhodes is just a sine wave vibration. So I’m just trying to say this, the kind of stuff I was into, like the building a Frankenstein and the biggest myth, so at not even 19 yet. So for me this gave the neighborhood, you know, a sense of like belonging, and then we had, so we went from the, the tape machines, right, and I’m watching all that this conversion, like we went from the tape machines to the DAT, the DAT was like this small, and so people, so people would have to pay me for tape machines, then once I figure out did that, I was like, look, man, I was making a fortune, dude, because I was like, I can charge you for the tape machine, then I’m gonna charge you for this, that so that I can go by like 40 DATs and I can charge you 300 for that because you don’t know what a DAT player is, and I’m telling you that the DAT player sounds better than the analog, this is me doing my pitch like a Salesman.

1:04:52 And then so kids would get this DAT and then listen to it not to be like, yo, man, the DAT is always like about getting the next stuff, so the dudes come back to enable, yo, to Tom said, I need my music converted to the DAT, yo, like soon, all right, 300, and this is like what, 92, 93, 92, 93, all right. So you’re making good business Johanna Omar, some other tracks you’re producing, going places for people, or is it kind of local people that come in, everything is just low global, so nothing that hopping back to you say no you made that track, I got, oh gee, no, not at all. Okay, this is the story, did that, um, the White Cliffs story that nobody will know until I tell you, because I had a record deal before the Fugees, it was like a singles deal for something, right?

1:05:48 So what happened was there was a small label called Big Beat Records, and Big Beat Records was producing house music, and one of my man was like, look, there’s this producer, we was telling him about you, and you might get a shot to, um, to be on his own on his album with Big Beat Records. I remember this clearly, you take the train, we go to New York, and he says just the kid, he says there’s a kid I’m telling you about, he’s this kid came right on the spot, he’s selling me to the guy, and I go ahead, I still play the track, man, he plays the track, you listen to the track, said, I got some, throw me in the booth. I go in the booth, I was so happy that day cuz that’s the day they free Nelson Mandela.

1:06:56 So I’m gonna move on my and see how my consciousness, I’m always conscious even though I’m a street kid, I’m a history kid, that’s what I was saying, the street is, is not a terminology to say you’re a bad person, it just means that you know you grew up a certain, a certain way, and I get in a booth in the right out of the jungle, if we go way, a way out of the jungle here we go, and I’m doing this crazy African chat over this beat, and then this song I’m talking about, you’ll hear a line, and I said, they just freed Mandela. And so now I do it, I get a little change for it, you feel me, and I leave. Now what’s interesting about this for music heads is that so today we have all in the DJs, right, and then the DJs are actually, I call them the new, they’ve replaced the rock and roll bands, like you know, they, they their production is like the old-school 80s productions, like what we used to see, the round but, you know, so and then so the DJs though, when they’re doing their albums, right, they would use vocalists, so but when you would see an Avicii album, for example, like it wouldn’t say, it would really say featuring, so like you, it would say fee, but the marketing for the album is like Avicii, you know what I’m saying to you?

1:08:37 So what different DJs, and then you know the vocalists would get credit, but it’s not really about the vocalists, but it’s about the mastermind of the DJ producing the record, because the DJs are producers, to this the other part people is missing. So they’re producing these records, so the other guy was a DJ who did my record, so I guess when I left the studio, dude was like putting the record out, there’s like a willow, who was that guy, what was his name, right? Cuz now my manly and this story so funny, cuz I’m gonna send you to the record afterwards and y’all gonna die laughing, see, y’all, what was his name?

1:09:22 We don’t know, man, way from everything, he from Africa, cuz you sound like he, I forget, I cool, man, let’s just call him Africa Lead-in. Yo, dude, y’all can go right now, search of Africa Lee out of the jungle, you will hear Wyclef’s vocals with, uh, with the name that someone gave me that’s not my name. So and that’s me freestyle on that one day, ever free started that one day. So years later I was in the studio with Gorgon City, a band, a crew out of the, the UK, it’s a, it’s a, you know, they producers and they DJs and they house music but different, and I was telling them this story and it was just laughing, I was like, yo, you know, I started off doing house music.

1:10:30 So once again you’re doing all of these grind, like you’re trying to figure it out, and I would say the the Fugees was unique because there was a small label, it wasn’t even Columbia or Sony, the small, it was called Ruffhouse, Ruffhouse, my house, Ruffhouse was a small independent that was taking risk, okay, and they had Jermaine Dupri, Kris Kross, Cypress Hill, that was just like weird, like good doing different stuff. So the CEO, uh, Chris Schwartz and Joe Nicolo own came to see us, was being managed by David Sandberg, and you know this showcase, I have a guitar, no, we we rock out, Lauren, we sing “Let It Be”, once again Lauren is singing “Let It Be”, I’m playing the guitar, then we freestyling, rapid, then we go into this whole crazy routine with Pras, this just looks weird, I kind of retain my Pras, so basically once the beat start now, Pras starts, now Pras starts the hard rapping, I join in, Lauren Jones joins me, then I jump on David sign of various dinner table in office table, this is all real time, like we’re not planning this on how we gonna do it, we’re doing a showcase for you.

1:11:58 I’m straight from the hood, by the time this is over my pants is down, I’m in my boxers, Lauren sweating, Pras sweat with like yellow and a guy Chris looks and he’s like, and then we was passed by like 30 labels, was like, we don’t want to sign these kids, they’re too weird, weird, that’s the right word, lazy hair, really great, and Chris Schwartz was like, I don’t like it, I love it, and that started, I hope the Foods easy, man, being signed to Ruffhouse Records, and then later Columbia picked it up, you know, did a joint venture with Ruffhouse. How’d that feel when you got signed? It was incredible, it was, um, it was amazing because you just felt like now if I like, wow, I’m gonna be able to do something for my mom, like whatever, you know, all that stuff I told, told my brother was gonna do for her, now we’re gonna be in a position, because you really use tu still a team, right, so your brain, you signed and you in your mind you like, you think once you sign you about to make a million dollars, and your brain you not, you don’t even know the half of it, like if there’s about to be, you thought the streets was tough, you’re about to go through some crap.

1:13:29 Yeah. And so what was that new reality? Because there was an album before The Score, wasn’t there? Yeah, welcome to learning music business. Yeah, welcome to the music, what was that like in first year because before that you’re running your own showings, basement, yeah, making good money, huh, you’re telling people what to do, you’re making the calls, right?

1:13:46 Yeah, with this you’re not making the calls, right? It changes because they go, okay, the first album we signed to a production company and ledge AB, which was cooling again, Khaleesi on him, so they were calling the shots on the album. So now it was, it was weird for me because I was doing something else in the basement, and then when I would go to the New Jam studios only doing the Fugees stuff, it was just sounded different, but our how was Adam and I Kennedy talking you know the little kid who studies calculus, is just a natural genius, he’s in the class and sees the professor making a mistake, he can’t really say nothing at the time.

1:14:34 That’s awesome. Did you know that first album wasn’t, I don’t work out? Yeah, I knew it wasn’t gonna work out because they let me produce one track, and the track that they let me produce is the first time ever and the history of hip hop where it was just an acoustic guitar against vocals. So I’m blood-in on reality, the track that I produced was the track with purely, I heard it different, I was like, what happens if it’s just vocals in an acoustic guitar, dude is like, well, that’s weird as I get, but it’s gonna be cool.

1:15:15 And then that record turned out to be vocab and it gives once again, it gave us another spin-off. After that album did not work though, Sony has to call the shots because Sony, you know, is like, who’s this kid? Like clubs in the basement, he’s not, we don’t know him yet, he ain’t poppin, so we gotta find the producers that are killing it. So Jeff Burroughs, they put us with this kid at the child, his name is Salaam Remi. Now Salaam, if you watch the Amy Winehouse documentary when she’s calling this sensei on the phone and she’s doing the rapping, that’s enough.

1:15:58 Salaam was doing hits before he was born and he still looks so little like he, so we always like the same age, it was weird. So now I Smith this kid who like, that’s where I want to be, I’m gonna be like this kid, he is already doing all these hits, people know you, know, and so I’m like, I’m going to study again. So now Salaam produces a record called “Nappy Heads”, man, I’m on Salaam like a hawk because I’m like, I want to see what he’s doing because he got that pulse, because his pulse is registering where I want to be, right?

1:16:44 Because we all have these mentors, so I asked questions in the studio, album, boom, and then Salaam does the Fugees first real hit, it was called “Nappy Heads”, it was the underground hit, he sampled the old Christmas record, butchy butchy be up. First thing I learned from Salaam was he puts on his beat, he says, Clef, go go on a booth, man, and, um, and just do whatever you feel, and you know, so coming from the block I went in there and I was rapping, cuz I’m, I was trained to be a rap killer, so I was a battle rapper, so I was trained, that literally was rapping like 12 minutes and and I’m going like nuts, stopped going, going, going, and maybe seven minutes in, because I always used to rap in sync, that was my whole thing with melodies, like I’m just never monotone, I didn’t know that was a pitch my voice up, boom, difference, it would literally sound like there’s a hundred people in the booth, he’s gonna hurt me, and then I think like 3 minutes, 7 minutes in to whatever I was doing in my mind, mmm, you want a battle, you wanna battle, sing our brain commanded, man, like I was king, and then your dreams are right to harbor flicker Stephen King, yo, Mona Lisa, can I get a date on Friday, and if you’re busy I would, I might say again Saturday a roundup, and then I’m still going, I’m still want the 140.

1:18:19 He said, I said, all right, Clef, good, good job. He takes me up, he goes long and going to booth, do what you want, Lauren is trained by me, she’s a killer, I try not to be, boom, boom, she kills it, prior to school does what he does. You say she’s a killer, what does that mean? Cuz I trained her how to rap, so she just goes in and she’s gonna be better than me, I trained her. So that mean whatever I’m doing, she’s gonna do it four times, like you see what I’m saying, when I’m thinking I’m writing a song, she’s writing another verse.

1:18:50 So I used to battle her when I trained her, then I had her battle and me sparring me on stage, regularly, you know I mean, like student-teachers, a master killer, you tank stuff going on, so she was just trained to kill, that’s hard training. And you guys would create battling, I got back and forth, and it was just keep it the creative just was just, you know, so and she’s in a niche, she was like, ah, and I think like six minutes and she was like, what’s it kid to do, cuz I feel like she just once again these phonetics of, and then she was an incredible singer, so when she went from his singing to the rhyme, you forget about that, was crazy. Then Pras did, Pras was very rock, had influence, like he was just not Guns N’ Roses and different things like that, and then he used to rob and make sound effects while he raps.

1:19:46 So you’d be like, battle was battling to battle another battle, if you snaked on rattle, like he had a where he was weird, but it was, you know, it is all came from the book of basement, like these weird things. And then we left, yeah, this was my first lesson, Salaam basically had 30 minutes worth of lyrics from us and melodies, no one said nothing to him, man, we come back, he chopped it up into a hook, 16-bar hook, 16 bar hook, and I said, mm-hmm, just guys actually a composer. So what he did was took the sheet music and he condensed it and broke it down to the best parts, then my brain just opened up this wine and I went right back to the basement after that and I started creating “The Score”, you know, and I was like, okay, I see what he’s doing, and I’m it, one night I was watching the movie called Sleepwalker, and I heard the sound, you know, in the movie I heard song called, on da, da da da da da da, you know, I recorded that right on the VCR, to the VCR back downstairs, put it on tape, just looped it into like a 8 bar, just put some MPC drums on it, and it was like, and I’m and I remember the law in combination, like it was that this is speed, I’m just catching a vibe and then she’s like, ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide, alone find you.

1:21:53 And once again, like I said, it’s like drinking water, like the first thing that came out of her mouth was that hook, and then so that’s like how a lot of “The Score” was created, who’s just like, I’m getting chills, I could just see, I can feel you in that basement, hurt, so that she, that was just the first thing that came to her mind, yeah, you know what I mean? And then and I didn’t even know what sampling was, like the idea of clearing samples. So when we put “The Score” out, any of people was like, I’ll bet take all these records off the shelves, are y’all gonna get sued?

1:22:37 Can you imagine “The Score” coming out and I sampled Enya, and no one thought at Sony to clear that? I ain’t no, no, no, from the streets, man, I ain’t nobody, no sample clearance, and so they handled it. Yeah, but it was deep because Enya don’t really clear stuff, right, cheek at the time, it was crazy because she was like, I mean the idea of rappers rapping over Enya, I was like, man, but, um, we got on the phone and I’m telling you it’s because the wave of what we were saying was different, and I think the fact that I was Wyclef Jean from a Reforma Tator from England, I think that really helped because she has a very Orthodox thing about her on how she releases her music and has a whole spirituality with her form of religion, whatever they do, but it ended up working out thanks to my dad.

1:23:38 So you record “The Score” in the basement, does the label know another album’s coming? Well, they just really know another album’s coming but they don’t know how it’s coming. Okay, don’t know where it’s coming from, but we told them, we just knew that this was our make or break, so we took everybody out, it was like, look, you know, and that’s once again that’s that general mentality as I’d look, this make a break, only person we’re gonna work with is Salaam, Diamond D, and but we have to do the record, I gotta tell the story, got to tell the story, and man, and, um, when we went in the basement day and night just because we knew the reason it was called The Score was like we had to settle the score.

1:24:30 It was either who’s gonna settle the score or Sony was gonna drop us, there’ll be no more Fugees, it wouldn’t even exist, so we knew what was on the line. Like if we wanted a championship ring, we had to go create the best piece of music that mankind ever heard. So that’s what my whole focus was, so we all put our chops together. That a painful process, it’s a hard work. Yeah, I mean it’s hard work, it’s days and night, no sleep, but we would like the X-Men team, so everybody had their own superpowers and we just put all the powers together, and, um, and then, uh, and we just knew like we always were saying, you know, we don’t want to do music, we want to do movement.

1:25:17 And the record that we end up putting less production on and it like being like the biggest records, you know what I mean, which was like, you know, “Killing Me Softly”, “Ready or Not”, the records that was just beer but nothing on them but just an emotion. It’s funny cuz you if you listen to it, it sounds like someone produced it heavily because it all sounds like it’s perfectly there, but like you said, it’s it was wrong, right? It was wrong, but you know like when I was like mixing on the board and doing different, I had in my brain there was one album that I listened to like I would always sneak and listen to parts of it by myself, and they’d come back to The Score, Pink Floyd, “The Wall”, cuz the engineering on that, the spacing, that the mood in that, the the time travel in that audio, I was like if we could create like a hip-hop, my whole thing was like I wanted like a hip-hop version of “The Wall”.

1:26:37 That’s why like even with “Ready or Not”, when you listen to with your headphones, you see I’m moving the sample like back and forth, turning it inside of your headphones, you know, Pink Floyd used this microphone and a lot of the recording called binaural, and then so I couldn’t afford those mics, I had to like little things cheating, doing it myself while I was going to that, but man, yeah, cool, cool stuff. So you spent months on that album, uh-huh, and you bring it at the label and you’re like, here it is, and what happens from there? I mean they didn’t really believe that we did it in the basement, I know Donnie and I had to go see the basement for real, like, yeah, below, this is below, and that was excited, um, it was excited, it was different, but they didn’t know what it was yet, but it is new, it was different, and, um, and then the first single that they went with because the, the “Nappy Heads”, Salaam Remi had the remix, Salaam had the pulse.

1:27:50 So keep in mind, so Wyclef is not in the picture yet, why Clef produce “Ready or Not”, you know, you produce it “Killing Me Softly”, so it’s all any credits, write it, but we’re not on the radar, so why miss, let’s go straight for the kill, so let’s go with the Salaam Remi single, so and then we always a year we have to go to Salaam, and the first single was called “Fu-Gee-La”, and once again here comes a lot with these crazy, you know, and then the Fugees here I come, we used to be number 10, now we permanent, what you know, lalala, I come, Lord. So this single was like people’s like, man, okay, just some serious vibes going on here, you know, and meanwhile that a record come out and radio has their own idea of what they want to play, so every radio is like, man, look, they are poor “Killing Me Softly”, meanwhile are they pulling “Killing Me Softly”, we are in California shooting the video for “Ready or Not”, right, because was like, okay, after the Salaam we gonna go with some Clef, it so so we’re shooting “Ready or Not” and why we she wasn’t “Ready or Not”, radio is not already or not yet, like they’re like, look, man, this “Killing Me Softly” thing, it’s just this is us, we need this right now.

1:29:26 So and then something good was going on now because it was like you could see certain radios playing “Ready or Not”, certain radios playing “Killing Me Softly”, and then it looked like a fight between the two, and the label was like, look, this is a great problem, and it so I only just shoot two videos, any we ended up shooting “Ready or Not” and then “Killing Me Softly”. Everybody here not video had two helicopters and STOVL was it, yeah, okay, they tell me selfies in the movie theater, yeah, cuz we’re big movie buffs, okay, so we’re like super super movie buffs, like I’m like a movie head, you know, in the videos we always anything that we couldn’t be we wanted to portray and we become it in the videos, like a Hollywood movie, say that video, cuz you guys are watching yourselves in kind of movie scenes, and yeah, that’s me.

1:30:19 And so like, how did you keep, you know, how do you keep your s*** together when everything is blowing up to the max, because that’s like a thousand decks what you’re used to when that album blows up, and like you said, radio stations are fighting over different tracks, it’s not like, you know, you’re you’re fighting against 200 different artists, it’s all this stuff. I mean, you know, you guys were ubiquitous at the time, mm-hmm, what’s that like? Well, I mean you’re young, you, yeah, you, if it’s like a, a rollercoaster ride, a very fast one, it’s moving so fast that it scares you at times.

1:31:05 Do you find yourself like, yo, what’s going on, you know what I mean? And once again you find yourself in these different rooms, now there’s no, I mean I find yourself in the cocaine room, right now you gotta be like, damn, am I gonna do this line or am I not? Because then that’s what my father voice come into play, you throw me, yeah, like yeah, that’s the dangerous room, the dangerous rooms, but you find yourself in every room now. If you can survive these rooms and walk out nine times out of ten, you gonna be okay, right?

1:31:54 Because a lot of it, man, doing drugs, man, right, because yo, and the drugs sometimes like my friends doing, it’s like depression, you know what I’m saying, because you get lonely very, very quick, right? Cuz what happens is when you, when you make that much money and everyone is telling you yes, okay, and anything you want you can have, then you start to action yourself what is it that you really want, because did you finally understand that there’s something bigger than like fame and money? Like it’s hard to explain, but it’s like Danny, your brain goes, I can understand how I did this, and okay, now I got the money, now I got the fame, everybody in the world knows me, now what, like what’s now?

1:33:03 So you start to search for what your greater purpose is because now you start to understand that it’s not really about the fame and the money, like that, don’t you see artists be one of these famous, then once they get famous they’d be like, I don’t care, I don’t want to be famous no more, I don’t want to have not do it to me anything, because it’s the Zen, is the sense of purpose, and when you are trying to find your sense of purpose you go through everything. He went through dark times, it’s is so, and I watched some of my friends, I watched my parents, I watching some of them get killed to do this, it’s very, it’s, it’s a very and every artist will go do it, every artist, if you, that’s why, you know, they be called like the kids call me triple OG, you know, I can target apology, the gangster, gangster, gangster, cuz you, you live so many lifetimes to it.

1:34:12 So how do you survive it and how do you stay cool, do it all, and it’s not an easy thing, every generation will have a drug, right? So this generation, they drug is more of a pharmaceutical drug and a more, right, so no one like, once again, I ain’t telling you like this is the good thing about walk left and look at me talking about myself and everybody ain’t gonna never tell you that I’m a goody-two-shoes, I don’t ever tell you I didn’t try things, but whoever is telling you that, good luck to them, that’s why I’m here and I could talk about it, at the end of the day I’m not a, an addictive person, like I don’t get addicted to anything, so you know what’s that, oh that’s cool, right, cool, I’m done, keep it moving, but you have people that there’s that addiction factor.

1:35:11 So even look at the new generation, you got kids that are so addictive that they might not be here a lot of times, any of you come up, just saying. So so it’s not an easy thing, once again it’s easy for people that’s on the outside looking, it simply better I go, if I was making all that money, first thing I would do is, well, does do you not making that money and you will never make that one, if I had this kind of frame, you know, you know what, people are chosen for different things, and when you get that Fame and that responsibility you go, holy s***, I finally understand we all are really connected in the sense of life is purpose. Now what is your greatest purpose, and to find your greater purpose you find artists doing all kinds of things, man, I’m Buddhist this week, it’s just day, it’s all call trying to find purpose, event, right?

1:36:18 And so nine times out of 10 when you get that Fame and get that money it leads to a sense of loneliness, depression, and most people at some point will bump into those drugs because they’re there, and then you’ll be dealing with that problem on top of the other problems, and then you either go one way or the other, we’re either gonna give me Hendrix, Janis, Janis Joplin way, or you find a way out. Yeah, you gonna be dealing with drugs, you gonna be dealing with sex, you gonna be done with alcohol, you know what I’m saying to you, then you gonna be where you’re gonna be dealing a lot of what US rappers doing is the old neighborhood, like everybody now from the old neighborhood that they feel like you owed them something, do be like, y’all went to high school with your under one, I gave you a pin, that’s how you pass the test, huh, you know, so now you find a lot of that jealousy, right, so you go back to the certain rappers can’t go back to the old neighborhood, you know, they’re doing a show California, they got had the security has to be so enormous, right, all this money, so you gotta basically be walking around with 30 securities, all of this plays part of this hype thing, right, so now but when all of the security and everything goes away you find yourself in a small goal by yourself, so and then when you in a small room, do you really have someone you can call?

1:37:44 Is there someone you can really call your friend? Can you really call someone and have a conversation where you don’t have to wait for it, and the way for it is, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it. I was thinking, man, can I borrow ten thousand, so uh all in this man in this right then everyone starts to feel like you know you’re responsible for everything and everyone, so it’s like cousins start the pop-up that you don’t know, man, it’s like you know, it’s it’s it’s nuts, it completely drives are these nuts to you till you can get to that place where we call it the purge, man, and you’d be like, you know what, everybody out of my way.

1:38:34 Yeah, and those that don’t do that, we find them in a coffin. And so you did a lot of growing up those few years after it? Oh yeah, definitely, you grow up, you suffer, you, you know, you you run it, man, like you move alike, my whole life’s an open book, like I never, that’s why I say like if I don’t tell the story somebody will tell me, I rather just, you know, yo, I did this, I did that, it doesn’t matter, like you young, you’re moving around, you know, you going through relationships, you know, you like in and out, you know, and I mean you’ve dating the girl in the band, but then you got wife, you know, it’s like you just you you know, then you aren’t or it’s, you know, then there’s like thirty Sheba’s, you know what I mean, like you basically you, uh, you’re on a high, you know I’m saying, even that high and even so the high comes down, not the fame, the high comes down when that reality strikes with what’s really your purpose.

1:39:49 That’s that monkey and the back you start to talk to you, and did you figure that purpose out? Yeah, definitely, I definitely figured the purpose out, the sense of purpose at the end, those years after in order to take ten years more. No, it’s good, man, like you, you coast in like you’re not, because it’s a, you have to live your natural course of your life, you know, to me, so you’re not gonna have some epiphany in a year later you like, card, I’m on the hall, you know, it’s my sense of purpose, I started to figure it out when and Haiti, they, uh, they took the president out, genre travesty, I think a Bush gave the order to Colin Powell to go and take this president out.

1:40:50 When he took the president out, I think Aristide went to South Africa, I went to make, uh, I was watching the news that was on in France and the TV came on and it was like riots in Haiti, seen kids with M16s. There’s a documentary online called “The Ghosts of Cité Soleil”, one of my film companies was part of producing that. It goes right into the eye of the gang, so you can see what the kids were doing firsthand, but why they were doing it and who was controlling it.

1:41:41 These kids, man, I’m watching the TV and, man, and they said in Creole, the only person act of make us put our guns down here, his Wyclef, because if we don’t, anybody else, they’re gonna make us take our guns and he gonna come kill us in the middle of the night, and they just took our leader out and we gonna paint these streets with blood. And so I decided that I had to go back home and this time I won’t be coming back on the donkey across the cemetery, but, um, I will have to face these kids again, and so I go home at a time where there’s no hype, there’s no camera crew to follow me, I go in the deep of the belly of the beast, a place called Cité Soleil, as I’m walking in, the way that I’m being announced and the gangs know I’m coming is through the pigeons.

1:43:06 So I could look in my right and I could see the little, the, the, the pigeon trainer on the roof, like you see in the ball like this, and then I could see the pigeon gone like that, and that means someone’s coming, so they can I the gangs, but once again it just all started bringing me back to my natural senses. I do it, if you ain’t never get to America this would be this way, you would be at that’s why, that’s why your eyes remember just to look right and look in the air and the direction of the pigeon, you wouldn’t know if you’re okay or not, it’s just an old instinct, clothes instinct. Now I get there, the gangs greet me.

1:43:55 Are you scared going in there? No, I can’t be scared cuz I’m from them. You could still be scared. No, no, I can’t be scared because I’m from them, and I would be scared for someone else but I can’t be scared for me cuz at the time it might be called stupidity because you have no fear. You clearly have found your sense of purpose and you feel like if you aren’t friends, the TV goes on and they say, why Clef, the only one I could make us but our guns down, and you’re mine now, you just focused on the mission and you become numb to the fear, you become because it has none, even if you don’t come back, at that time that’s no way in your head, you ain’t thinking, not like that.

1:44:54 So I get there and I won’t lie to you, in the course of probably seven minutes I’m surrounded by the real city of gods and, uh, and, uh, and it was so happy, man, and there was more guns than you can count there. And what are you feeling when you hear that on the TV and you’re going to this mission statement and when you’re traveling there and you’re walking in, what kind of, what are you feeling? Um, you feel like, um, why, you like, why, man, like why you like why is this the move, like, like why do the Astros call for this, like what’s really, what’s the endgame, like why, what’s going on, like it’s more like you I the why factor, what are the higher powers got, I mean was like what’s going on, like you like you, you know, so going on this conversation it leads to, uh, to the gangs explaining to me that is that I you know they took they leader out our Steve at the time and they want the leader to come back, hurt, you know, and I said, well, it don’t look like the leader come back in time soon, so you’re either gonna kill the babies or you’re gonna give them a chance to go into the future.

1:46:55 They say, look, Clef, I used to just we do that, um, I said, well, there’s a few things you’re gonna have to stop doing, I know y’all know I, y’all carjacking a lot of the NGOs this and the country yard, there’s a lot of kidnapping on all, we have to figure that part of it out, but I’m not talking to them like I want you to stop what you’re doing, we’re talking to them because in my brain I could have been one of them, so I don’t say I in a Gangnam, um, there’s no conversation because a real gang is really a family and the ideology of their mindset. So this conversation, man, it led me to farming what was called Yéle Haiti, and a lot of people don’t know the genesis of how Yéle Haiti was formed. When people see Yéle Haiti they see two signs, and today they’ll know the genesis of what it means, so there’s this hand, and then you see this hand, stop the violence, we want peace.

1:48:21 So the genesis of me forming a foundation, kinda called a foundation, I want non-governmental organization, was when people was saying, let’s bring rice, its brain chicken as Venus, I was like, well, until you form an organization where you put make the community part of it in any part of the world, when you actually care about the community and you’re like, okay, I’m not gonna be an NGO making $10,000 a month coming to this foreign place where I do not put a structure in place for people. So this is where it started. Now I didn’t know what it meant to, um, where how different NGOs operate, I didn’t have a clue what that was, I was a bit confused because I went to a factory in Haiti and I saw a bunch of rice, like piles of rice and factories, it was a lot of rice.

1:49:28 I like, you know what, why are laying all these rice right here, right? Like people is hungry as hell, you’re letting the rice fryer like this, makes no sense to me, take this, right, do it, I’ll pay for the trucks, man, let’s get these trucks in, kids either not, class, it don’t work like that, every rice here is counted for, it has to be moved to an organization. Huh, I don’t know what that means, man, I was just in a slump, man, I see little babies dying of hunger, I see people sleeping next to dogs, what people, huh?

1:50:11 So at the time a gentleman was working with me by the name of u-lock, who today I still love, you luck, great guy, people might not like this part but he was one of the advisors for Govich offer one time, so but I’m a very, very intellectual dude on how I pick people, reach out, how is that? Because I needed someone who understood government and because I wasn’t trying to do a foundation, I needed someone who can see it from a level of 360 how it operates as a government, now to tell me, Clef, this policy is not gonna work, this legislation ain’t gonna work, this ain’t gonna work, because I needed to know what the Lord’s work is, I was just confused because I’m working for my heart, like I’m just like, you what do you mean this has to go through this, um, so he came and I said, look, man, go to the Dominican Republic and this is the money, go get macaroni, get pasta, get trucks, because I can’t sleep tonight, man, like people gotta eat personally out of my own inside of that country, I know I spent over a million dollars of my own personal money.

1:51:55 Now while I’m doing this I’m moving, I guess it’s like I’m gullible and I’m naive, right, because if you give me rice I’m gonna want rice tomorrow but if you give me the fertilizer and the seed, the irrigation, then I’m gonna be able to eat forever and my family will be able to eat. So I wasn’t even there yet, I was with the emotion and love, the fact. So this is how the this was the start of how Yéle Haiti started, and how did that end up once again? You know my dad says no good deed goes unpunished, art, it’s a horrible thing to say.

1:52:47 Yeah, he does saying had that is a yoke, oh you wanna help, go ahead, but don’t, don’t forget most people that’s on, on the right side will be accused of the wrong side, but history will always prevail them back to the right side, that’s what he says. I mean, look at Marcus Garvey, Obama just gave him a part. So with this foundation I would say we had an earthquake in Haiti, 250,000 people under the rubble. Now the part that people don’t know is when we talked about the gang negotiation, if the UN is watching this right now, they can go back and look at the Intel tape, they will see why I kept John in a room with a piece of paper in his hand saying this is what the gangs would like for it to be calm down, and Haiti, I left Haiti, I went to Washington with ulong, we spoke in behalf of what the kids in the street were looking for, we helped bring certain back into the country, came back to Washington, we testified in Congress for a bill called the textile bill where this would bring more jobs back into the country, huh.

1:54:16 I didn’t set up just scholarship programs for kids, but what we did was I set up small businesses for women that was in these communities, I called it social entrepreneurship, I didn’t even, I was like, y’all dude, I understand micro loan, I mean me and you LOC, we’ve we’ve debated back and forth and I’ve challenged them like the same way I can challenge different institutions, I’m like, nah, you let me just give them the 300 dollars because they math equation is zero. So the math equation is zero and I start them with 300. Why would I want em to pay me back something that means that I’ve already set them up by design for failure?

1:55:12 So an understanding that I became an investment and look, here’s a charitable contribution, but this charitable contribution is different, like I want you to take that 300 dollars and turn it into 600. This is how I was moving to yelling 80. So by the time that the earthquake came and the cameras came and y’all saw the cameras and every celebrity in the world was feeling pity and the world was feeling that, I was on the ground years before theirs. Yeah, so I get to call 250,000 people under the rubble, I was were actually watching the news in a studio and my uncle comes on the news, his name is Raymond Joseph, he was in the ambassador for Haiti in America, he has a great book called “For Whom the Dogs Spy”, he was responsible for being part of taking the dictator out of Haiti in the 80s.

1:56:28 So he comes on the TV and he’s like, look, you have a problem in Haiti, boom, boom, boom, God, I start to call my friends, I can’t get him on the phone, so I said, I gotta go to Haiti right now. So I told my wife was going Haiti because I’m gonna Haiti, I said, but let me stop by seeing him real quick, I think it was Edison Cooper and I was like, look, I’m going to Haiti, if any body’s watching this, I’m actually missing a few people are looking for Jimmy, oh one of my friends not revived. So the towers are down in Haiti, the towers are down, we had to go to the DR and the and from the DR, you know, we basically got in a small little plane and, uh, and navigated ourselves to probably navigate it into the airport in Haiti because all of the towers are down.

1:57:32 So once again we anything about our lives now, keep in mind so you’re in the middle of no air traffic control, no nothing at this point, we land over, then we see the President of Haiti at the time, he was on the determine and I mean he passed away not to the earthquake but just passed away recently, he said, before you go out there you might want to eat a sandwich cuz once you go out there you probably never gonna eat again. So we go now out there because of what you’re gonna say that you know soon, and the minute we stuck out the airport it was purely Apocalypse, backpack, a man so famous in a country I cannot walk on the ground without 30,000 people approaching me, the minute I stepped up I was invisible, know what song I saw women with their babies dead on the ground, pregnant women dead, I’ve seen every corner, it literally look like a tsunami of death surrounded.

1:59:08 I was like, your where’s the government now, I’m pissed off and like once again I’m like, yo, let’s get a truck, let’s start going digging Rumble and seeing if there’s anybody left. So I go to look for my man, so now we’re we get in and now even though the earthquake is finished you still got the rumble, so you got the aftershocks, so now I’m going to look for my man and finally when I get to the area I couldn’t, I couldn’t get to him, what happened was the, the building fell over and the Carter he was in it just crushed, so I could see the car but he’s already gone, so now we get cars and be like, yo, we gotta do something, man, so go ahead, what is everybody dealing at this point, wandering, walking, walking, walking, screaming, asking for help, water, there’s people that still stuck under the rubble.

2:00:17 So now so we go, we’re gonna go on a survival mission right now, what’s funny about what I’m telling you is when you’re watching the news at the time, it’s like every Network wants to bring day heroes that are pulling people out the rubble, but the real people that was pulling people like the rubble, you’ll never see them, most of them ended up dying, me tell you is pulling this girl out the rubble and I remember pulling her out, she’s like, my mom is still in there, Clef, can you get her out? Said, don’t worry, we gonna try my best, but I know I can’t get her mom’s out, her mom I could see she’s gone already. We saved this little girl who looked in her eyes and I was like, you know, every little bit counts, let’s bring it to the hospital, we go, they ain’t no hospital, to see you know what happens, Madeleine, Clef, ain’t no hospitals, but we, we’ve installed small clinics by, we’ve turned hotels into small clinics.

2:01:32 So I get to what would be a good hotel where the swimming pool is supposed to be, bodies laid out, and I’ll never forget, I heard a kid, man, he’s screaming, he said my name for the first time, someone has said my name and a place where I’m so famous I can’t walk around, that everything’s invisible. Wyclef, so I go to him, he’s laid out and he says, oh you know, I’m going to die, but I saw you here and I want you to know you you inspired me, like you my favorite artist, and I need you to talk to you until I die, that’s what this kid tell, yo, man, I’m like tripping right now, I’m going and he says, um, you know you are your modern-day Tucson, he says, oh you know, it’s only you and Toussaint L’Ouverture, you know, that this kid is about to die and he’s finding humor in words, and so I start to sing to him, soon is all day Sunday, sugan bush pilot CA pasa pain only plan cooling a Creole song about that I know he loves, and he goes, he leaves earth, but when he’s leaving, right when you’re holding somebody and they’re passing away, those are those that this has happened to understood, like you literally can feel the spirit leaving, like you literally could feel that, so it’s not like you’re saying, hey, you feel that, and this was different than when I was in the neighborhood and I seen my homie get shot to death, because you on a block and there’s violence and you could see, okay, something can happen, but with this you go, damn it, these kids ain’t do nothing, that was just waking up trying to make a survival of an honest way.

2:04:15 So afterwards, so when I said Tech’s yearly 501, when people did that they did that because not of what you saw on the TV, they did that because they know the real groundwork, like before the height, before the TV, every artist will tell you Clef has always been about go to Haiti, see Haiti, he’s always been on the ground doing that work. So what happened is the organization just became super big overnight, so went from like a million to two million to like a fifteen, sixty million dollar organization now. Like I said on on the news, the idea of me using personal funds for myself to gain for my personal wealth or whatever, I don’t only denounce that but it’s pretty ludicrous, but I’ve seen this happen to many before me and I was in a position where it was too much power, and like I said on Oprah, was there faults in the organization?

2:05:47 Of course, you know, like at the end of the day the accountants have to take care of what if there’s an accountant problem, a tax is not far, what do you do, accountants file it, handle it and take care of that. The idea of you know Mike Clef paying himself for a show, you know, all of this once again is ludicrous, but I’ve watched now myself, but I watched these rumors go on for different charities. The way that it works, just so you understand, it’s important to give the viewer an understanding, when you are putting a charity event together for you for people to show up and spend money, there’s a production costs that go with that, so you have to put up a cost to put the show together that course I don’t the money, the lights have to be up, the stage has to be up, the productions, the video screens.

2:06:47 So whether if it’s my foundation or the next foundation, this is the roots. So like I said on Oprah, but the most important thing is that the only name that people saw was Wyclef Jean, it didn’t matter, no one, and they brain said, well, in order for him to have done that he would have to go to a board. Yeah, he only hate he had a board, so in order for me to have done that the board would have to say Mark Clef takes sixty million dollars in, no member of the board would do such a thing.

2:07:18 But I understand the propaganda of this patsy formation for Yéle, because now while all of this is going on I come from Haiti and now I have to appear in a big press conference. Dude, in the press conference when your saw water came from my eyes, water did not come from our eyes because you always attacking my foundation, that’s okay, like I have no problem with that, because I can speak and I could explain, because in public service if somebody give a dollar you damn well better explain it until they fully understand it. This is what wasn’t like what it’s what it came out of my eyes because if you saw what I just saw the day before, water would have came out of your eyes.

2:08:17 So within this structure and there’s people in Haiti that don’t want your charity to be successful cuz they lose power if that, what’s going on a lot of times, what the thing is, you built, you break a structure, right? If I was just a celebrity with the face of a foundation this would have never happened, right? But what was crazy about it is every NGO that’s watching this right now, Red Cross, UNICEF, you’re not gonna name all of them, right, they know me, they know Wyclef Jean is a good guy because I’ve worked with all of them, American Food Program, even in Haiti at times there’s NGOs watching this where the truck was gonna get hijacked and I told them, just put LA stickers on them and nobody’s gonna do nothing to you.

2:09:31 My power just started getting too big in this field and one man’s gain is another man’s tragedy, one man’s tragedy is another man’s gain, and so at the end of the day what I don’t want to do is use that card that I first met you, know, I was gaining so much power they broke my China, history will prevail, the truth, and the truth thus far, if you go now and you look on the internet and you google how much money of aid came to Haiti to all of the organizations, where did they really go to, the truth lies there. So for me I said, what am I going to do, am I gonna take that hit, am I gonna fall? As newspapers around the entire world picked up the story and everybody was running with the New York Times, and we basically wrote an article background to say, you luck was the president, wrote this article, he says, look, this is where the money went, this is, nobody wants to publish that, I don’t know why nobody wanted to publish where we said everything went to, but it we understand today why because it’s clear where all the money went to, and but your reputation was tarnished in this?

2:11:02 Yes, so what this did was it it gave you, it took though my reputation, I said, well, you know, you gots now it’s debatable, right? So son says, well, I think he did it, I was not a, Clef, Clef would never do that, I mean why would he do such a thing, right? So now what do I do? I clearly know, yeah, that I’m innocent, and history always prevailed, but what did I do after that? I think he went all-in, right?

2:11:34 I said I’m going to run to become president of my country. So once again it’s not like I’m not, I’m not the one because I came from, don’t, I used to take that donkey to the village and from that thing when we used to go across the cemetery and I said, I’ll, I’ll be back, I’m going to America. I knew my purpose, right, it was bigger than me, and understanding that it was bigger than me I could not let nothing distract me. So I said, look, in order for you to turn people against me, you would have to be able to turn my own people against, that’s the, that’s the, the, the covert operation, that’s how you divide a condom.

2:12:24 So my people in Haiti, they know my class, they know I’m for them because long before the cameras I was always there doing work, long after the cameras I’m always there. So I said, look, I’m going to become the president of Haiti, and you have to think long and hard before making that decision. Yes, what do you want, they don’t just make that decision and what did the missus say? They didn’t approve of that, you know, like you know, you, you, you should probably take a break for another two years, you just took a hit, and no, said I’m running, she’s still by my side, and I said, we gotta do this.

2:13:15 Would you a friend if they hadn’t questioned your reputation, but the running had nothing to do with the question of the reputation, right? My running had to do with 250,000 people under the rubble, right, because the ruining of my reputation is to me a distraction, it’s like a Machiavellian scare for a bigger game. So at the end of the day I was focused on seven moves ahead in the chess game, so I couldn’t get distracted, right? So pow, you wound me, right, but you didn’t kill me, it’s still a battle, so I’m still going, so I’m not looking at this wound, like I know this will be healed.

2:13:59 So my focus was 250,250 thousand people went under the rubble, and my brain, I’m running, I said, this is a chance, we call it destroy to rebuild, our country possess human capital, right now the youth in the country wants to work, and we have great resources in the country, men arose different things, and I said half of the population is a youth population, I said more than half, and I said they’re all are with me, and I said we can do this, said this is important to do at this time because what’s going to happen now, it’s within the rebuilding process you’re gonna have private sector making deals with businesses coming in to Haiti, so this is a great structure to restructure Parliament and to strengthen a young government that can be in a position of trade, because this may be our chance now to get Haiti and a different light, to start all over again.

2:15:22 I was clear. Zoho, so and what our presidential politics like in Haiti, what surprised you and what didn’t? Well, it’s like cutting your arm with the seesaw, oh man, this is where Pilate presidential politics, like anyone having, I mean, what does that mean? You can only fight with one arm, I, you are going up against the most ruthless system that you’ve ever came across because you find the invisible hand, right? So they’re throwing so absorbed, but they like the way things up, they like it the way things are, my job was to break the old cycle, right, and that happened, that happened like this, happened so when I go, when I went in, the first thing they did, this is craziness, they said, uh, how do we get him out to race, we have to get him out the race, because when they did that polling in their analytics I was gonna win like by by 97%, when you do your analytics, because the people on the ground was like, this he went to America, he became successful, he’s a businessman, he’s written music for people, he’s not just a singer, he actually owns publishing, is he doesn’t need nothing for his kid, she said, doesn’t need none for his wife, and unlike here in Haiti actually the place where he’s at is actually owns it, so a lot of people leave Haiti and don’t go back, they settled a home, they good, so the people is like, no one’s got a foolís will vote for my collection.

2:17:10 So now the powers that be said we had to get this dude out the race quick before this thing escalates, cuz y’all had it like world news, Wyclef Jean, rapper, running for president, right? Home is going down, so the news was so strong they created a law, and this law said you have to live in the country for five years to run, right? And you know within this, you know, you get death threats, different things, like they trying all kind of corny stuff that I’m not gonna bend, like you got a, I’m a different kind of breed when I, when I set my mind to it.

2:17:49 So for me the Constitution, like the law that they said you got it five years, now every news outlet ran with that propaganda was like, your Clef in it, but I was like, yo, is anybody gonna take a second out and just look at the card, the Haitian Constitution, it may be what I want to beat it and did before just he’s seen what these people are saying, right? There’s a few things, one is I could have contested it, and if I contested it in the court I may not have been here with you today, and three or four million kids fighting in the street, we would have had a genocide because the kids was ready to pick up the arms and hit the streets for me. Why did not contest it because of that reason, here we go, I would have just been another egomaniac saying, you know what, I gotta be the president no matter what, even blood, we’re gonna win, because it wasn’t about being that, it was about the people.

2:18:53 Now if I was to speak to you now as Wyclef Jean the lawyer, this is what happened, so I had a diplomatic passport before, with a diplomatic passport I’m what’s called an ambassador at large, an ambassador is large, duty is he’s an ambassador that travels to different parts of the world promoting nuance of his culture and of his country to bring people back in for business, for, for private sector, for the culture, for different things going on. So if I have a diplomatic passport, how can you put a law on me and say that I would have to be in the country for five years when your government gave me this passport to tell me that my job is to travel through the world and to bring back business with the country? So once again I could have contested it with my diplomatic passport and we would have passed, but what would that have meant now?

2:20:11 That would admit instability, political instability, it would have met. So what I decided to do and they do everything at me that they can, and I was like, you know, at the end of the day I was like, okay, I’ll support the candidate of change that I felt that would dismantle the old regime. So it’s a game of chess, so four moves ahead. Now you think you struck me, now I’m gonna strike you back, I will dismantle every form of old regime government that was there in an intellectual way, in a legislation way, watch me break you down.

2:20:57 So I went on the radio until all my supporters, look, at the end of the day and look see the, yeah, and they we’re going to support President Michel Martelly, and in doing that, that broke the cycle, and he’s not the president now, his successor is 40-something, that’s what I wanted. I want a government that can fight for the next 30 years because and it has to be a mixture of young and old, but you need a lot of young guys that are working within the structure, because the older we get the tired we won’t get, we won’t get tired, and then so you need kids to be like, okay, we gotta keep pushing, because the idea of rebranding this place, the idea of bringing business to this place, the idea of anti-corruption, the whirling buying a yet for Haiti, they’re not buying it, the seven years later now, right here it’s every year things I was working, it’s not working as fast as you wanted it to, it’s working though.

2:22:07 I believe that with Michel and I believe like continuing with the next administration, right, I haven’t seen political instability and Haiti which we know that we’ve seen in Prior in a minute, and I believe it starts with political stability and it starts with education, so I just I feel like it’s in the direction, right? Is there gonna be mistakes made, your mistakes, economy, they different thing, but I feel once again now there’s a chance because we’re starting with the younger government. But you would have rather been president, did you ever want to be president, or was that a bluff?

2:22:50 No, once again, I mean I played poker, but it wasn’t a bluff at the time that I was gonna run. Well, think about it, for me to, to have been bluffing then I would have to be bluffing for a greater purpose, and that greater purpose would be did all my mind, I knew I wasn’t gonna win, but I was distracting the opposition to make my man the president, right? We go into conspiracy theory with that, right? So the basis of it is at the time I wanted to be President to change the structure and the system of our country, because I felt like destroy to rebuild, and I felt like I would have been the best negotiator at the time.

2:23:48 Today do I want to be President? No, because I feel that that void in that structure that I wanted to feel because I didn’t see it now, I clearly see it. You still carry a lot of trauma around in you from visiting Haiti, that day, those days after that earthquake. I mean the things are described to me, it seems like things that would keep me from sleeping, keep me from enjoying things, you know, um, the museum it led me back. I really think, um, when I first got back, man, it was like I was having headaches, the back of my head, I would sleep and I could hear voices, but sometimes I was sleeping, loud sounds would wake me up, started doing music going back, and I mean I think my daughter helped it all go away, she’s 12, hmm, you know, she’s my inner, huh, talk music, we talk fun, um, she took me back to the place of writing, like vibration.

2:25:17 You said, could you said when you got back to the states in 2010 that that had taken a lot out of you and you had to kind of reset, right, and get back to it? Yeah, cuz I didn’t go to, I didn’t take no drugs for it, I didn’t go to no post dress, I mean what I suffered was the same thing that when people go to war on all sides, all start what they see, when they see flesh, when they see the human and the other form where it just looks like animal stock, it just makes you think different when you’re picking up a body and you’re forgetting to wear glove, you’re not thinking of that, like you’re like, y’all, did you touch it, and then the acid from his skin burns your fingertips, it’s a different thing. So what happens is now when you seem that man or woman like cattle, you know, you, you when a dead body is in the Sun, it uh it consumes and it gets blown up like a balloon, you see what I’m saying, the smell is different, or when you take bodies to a cemetery and you get there and the gravedigger is hustling, how many people he’s gonna put in a hole, where he goes, look, man, I’m gonna need extra fire on it, you go, well, you already got two bodies in that hole, man, like no, this person we need to put them in here, man, and then you tell one of your boys, like, yo, I don’t trust this gravedigger, stay here, make sure this person goes in the hole, proper burial, then you leave with another crew to go pick up some bodies, then when you come back your friend that you left is no longer, you can’t even find a little the one that you left to,

2:28:30 You assign him to basically make sure the grave digger don’t hustle, the grave digger kills him, dismantle him and disappears, until today I can’t find my friend nor the great thing. This is all that was going on in the course of those couple of days, so yes, till today, you know, there’s a side of me down always, what I’ve seen I could never take it back, but now it’s it’s not weighed on me the way it bleed because I feel so much free, like my daughter gives me so much freedom, and then the music, it’s like the rise, that’s why the, the title of the album is change, it’s changed to the fall and the rise. Yeah, I looked it up online because I was, I was like, what’s that classification was in the fall in the riots, did know what changed, tell me about this, because this thing seven years in the making, right?

2:29:38 Yeah, but it’s exactly what she said, it’s like the fall in the rise of the fallen in the rise of refugee, and once again it’s the album is like “Carnival” in 1997, but 2017. What was that record in 97, what was that statement you were putting that at the time? The statement that was put out was that music culture, the one word we use, this global Gumbel, like global Gumbel was like, you know, you can’t, you can’t the idea of you saying this is south, so this is hip-hop, this is world, you know, Clef don’t believe in that stuff, like I believe in good music and bad music.

2:30:24 Now what happens is good music, when you put it all together, it sounds like the carnival, so the whole idea was a celebration of culture, of life, and, and in 97 we were celebrating the the success, the failures, the betrayals, the mistress, the fall, just arise again on the album 97, I confessed everything, you know, to all the girls I cheated on before, you thought you had all kind of record, so in this it’s the same, it’s like it’s just I got a chanst one with the links are your clothes on the 97. The idea of Afrobeat today and all of that, I could go go back to the “Carnival” in 97, like here a lot of those kind of rhythms. So on one of the songs on the “Carnival 3” that’s fire to me that I love is, I named the song “Fela Kuti” after the late Fela, and it’s so crazy that song, I did it with producer by the name of Super Mario, Super Mario did a record for Young Thug called “Wyclef Jean”, so and then so then it’s me and Super Mario get together to America, it’s gonna be called “Fela Kuti”.

2:31:48 This whole album is how generations cross, so you have like these young Wyclefs that are like 25 and then you have Wyclef 40-something, you put the frequencies together, so you get the best of hardware mixed with the software and you put it together. One of my favorite songs on this album is there’s song with Emeli Sandé, I have a song, it’s called “Carry On”, and “Carry On” is a song which talks about the time and my favorite lyric in that song is owned basically for us to get the world peace or men have to come up truce, like they can be a truce on one side or a half a side, like everybody all may God be like that, you need like world full for world peace to happen, it has to be a world truce, you know I’m saying, so let it for metaphorically in hip-hop one word means two things to us, so when a politician says world peace, to us it do not mean world peace, it means world peace, hmm, so you know the world truth is like how do we get back to that still carry on, we talk about everything, carry on for those like that record up the time, right?

2:33:08 No matter what you gonna do, you still gotta carry on, and there’s another record called “Borrowed Time”, just to say like you know we are basically on borrowed time, but the music, man, is so wavy, man, clever, I’m just on my way V game again, just very, um, very vibey, and there’s another great little producer by the name of Wavy Boy from Milwaukee, I think he’s like the next Teddy Riley. So and keep in mind my whole, my whole life with music has always been about reinvention but also discovery, like who’s this singer with Clef, who’s that? You get a lot of that with the “Carnival 3”, so there’s a lot of introducing of new talent and I’m doing that, I’m happy.

2:33:54 Why do you go there, why you go with the youth? And it’s not like you’re trying to teach them, like I think you might have said this in a cult in an article that you’re the, you’re the mentor and the mentee, you know, earlier your ski called yourself the Haitian Dre, I don’t see Dre doing those things, you go in, I like, what can I learn from this 20-something year old that’s that’s different? Yeah, what is what, what it is is and music, right, we never stop learning, and all that means is so uneven stop running, right?

2:34:27 Yeah, but I’m saying like though the culture bunnies never stop learning, and then so what that means is when I say we never start learning from the eye of a composer, right, it’s like, okay, man, you just you study Thelonious, you understand case the ladies month, and it’s my house come since, man, you have over somebody named Miles Davis, know who that, listen to B*****s Brew, oh my god, your whole thing automatically opened up, so any goes on and on and on and on. So for me we never stop learning, so for me if there’s, if my daughter is bouncing to a certain Sonic and a certain tone, I have to know what it is, I’m interested. So now I become the student again because I get to learn again, so cuz once, once I, once I stop learning and have an excitement and the thirst to understand what’s making you bounce like that, was making what’s making her feel like that, but what’s making you feel like that, then the art dies for me.

2:35:34 So the youth is crucial, that the youth is the pulse, right? So they say we Forever Young, so me I’m forever youthful, I come for every young, oh you see what I’m saying, so it might be like because when it’s to suddenly be like, oh look, look, Clef’s reaching out to the kids, but the kids reach out to Clef because Clef is Clef, right? I, I didn’t name a song more acclaim show, the little kid did that, what was he listened to, only heard the “Carnival”, okay, so who did that record call work, Super Mary, was he listening to, okay, but I gotta get with the Super Mario cap, the exchange of information, this is jazz, and so whatever form it always comes back, and it would break ungraded avenues, like analytical terms is basically the exchange of information between generations, and that’s the only way the world will move forward, whether if it’s tech, music, anything, for solutions.

2:36:43 They call it “The Fall and Rise”. What is the music space look like and then in the 2017 you now versus where you were in 97? I mean your profile is different, the music’s different, the social media is different, how do you explain those two extremes? It’s so funny because when you listen to the “Carnival 3” you’re gonna say it sounds like 1997 meets 2017, man meets machine, hardware meets software, the only difference now, right, is I’d be telling the kids, I said, oh y’all kind of way easier than me, then what you mean, Clef, really, I literally had to sit there and then A&R had to dictate whether if it was good or not.

2:37:28 You actually get to build your own fan base and your own people will tell you what they like and what they don’t like, so for me, for me with this 2017 it’s like I’m in heaven because as an artist that never lives in a box and never believed in the box, I’m always putting, believe in putting all kind of music out, you know, this is like the era slowly when we was coming back, we did a record called “Hendrix”, yeah, and people naming songs up after famous artists, yeah, we directed or Hendrix because I was big on Hendrix as a guitar player, and, um, and this record ended up streaming like 30 million and it’s a sound I call acoustic trap, and then the acoustic guitars against the trap moving at like 130,140, 145, and then people be like, yo, I don’t even like the old club doing track now, I said, man, they must not have been paying attention, I’ve been trapping since the book of basement, and you know everything that the the idea of electric Sonics against acoustic Sonics, that’s the school.

2:38:52 This is cool. Yeah, yeah, I was just listening to the track out there. Yeah, and so you’ve been doing this for 20 years and you just reintroducing it, it’s beak on your daughter if you would, I know she’s your daughter, I think you also adopted her at Burrell, I funny enough have a 13 year old stepdaughter and she came to my life, um, and she was about six, pretty much damn near saved my life, ah, Jesus, it’s like somebody put her in my life and it was my job just to grab her and pick up the ball, and in retrospect I thought I was doing her a favor, she was doing me a favor.

2:39:29 How’s that changed your life? We changed it drastically, you know what I mean, there was said nobody could control, she sure can it, once again sense of purpose, like it’s just it’s a beautiful thing, like to just know like someone can change your life, like you said it’s not us doing them a favor, they’re actually doing us the favor, and I don’t care, man, nothing beats that FaceTime, nothing beats the face now, like, dad, what’s up, what’s going on, don’t matter which way you are, you you always want daddy’s time with your daughter, you know, like no matter what, daddy’s time. Then you live like these moments that not a mind boggling to you, the other day I mean my daughter was like going crazy for a poodle, so I think I’m one of the poodle like eight months ago, so the other day was the poodle’s birthday and I’m over here in the 2000 Belgium and I get this call and it’s, I call me ASAP, you know, the things I’m gonna call, you know, dad, are you forgetting something, it’s I’m it’s on Princesa birthday, okay, who’s butters, don’t care about it, can you put this video on your Instagram and let all your fans know that, um, it’s Prince’s birthday, and Princess also have our own Instagram, dad, it’s poppin’, so he can you do that right away.

2:41:25 So yeah, I was like, I’m freaking out because I’ve got a automatically upload this video from Belgium, oppresses, I kidding, and I put it and, uh, and so the night that night I’m performing, I’m doing middle of Belgium, crazy crowd, I’m like, y’all listen, I gotta stop this right now, I gotta do a small video for my daughter and so dog’s birthday, princess, so on the Catholic Turkey I didn’t, everybody’s happy birthday, princess County, happy princess, and my mother since its when she’s like, wow, cool. So yeah, let me tell you, man, that right there, that’s worth a thousand lifetimes, it’s like those are the really little things that matter. You know, I have friends that is so wealthy, alright, when I tell you like wealthy, but I think like making like million dollars every couple of hours, they can’t get a half a percent of what I just explained to you.

2:42:46 So we’ve learned like those little things when I daughters, those little things, you know, with a spouse, just a simple idea of picking up the phone and saying how you doing, those are the biggest thing, man. I would tell you Will Smith, he probably watching this right now, he I never have to talk to that guy, I consider him one of the best friends I met in this lifetime, real simple. Friendship means and the darkest, darkest, darkest days they’ll step up, and let me tell you me and we’ll we barely talk in the time of the earthquake in Haiti, when I was in my lowest point, like, like, yo, hey, why am I going through this, like all I was trying to do is help people, but tell my always broke, my phone goes off, man, and I hit is but up, what up, y’all, what I ran as well, but, uh, just making sure you okay, man, you know, and that cheered me up for like that, that gave me that, that, that shot that I needed to be like, okay, can you take a shot, let me get back into it.

2:44:25 So sometimes I’m just telling you the simplest, littlest thing, you know what I’m saying, so that’s more like what I’ve learned to appreciate, and that’s what I, I love most about my daughter, the simplicity, the simplest things you can give her, that’s what you value, don’t you? That’s it, the simplest things you can give her because sometimes we think of it has to be big stuff, right, and and it’s really not because people can have big stuff, right, all the time and they’re just miserable, you know, they can’t find love, they can’t find happiness, and what is happiness? Happiness is love, like when you find somebody you love, like somebody that you can pick that phone up and talk to that ain’t gonna talk to you about nothing but what’s up, would you like as a, you know, and great conversation talk, how many of those do we really have in life?

2:45:32 I mean it, those people we have, that’s what we should always cherish because everything else Muraki, I’m telling you, I was watching the Warren Buffett one of his documentaries and richest men in the world, living the same career but he’s got love in this house, and I’m just like, and you see what I’m saying, once you got forget all of that stuff, like the bottom line, I was like, yo, the relationship with him in this house and his wife, either you see this guy has love and that love is just eternal. Night on the news these days, and you know, you see all this divisive nasai, right? God, I haven’t been back to the states recently, but everybody that comes to visit me in London, they’re like, this and that, and he voted, day voted, and the Brexit on it.

2:46:28 Sometimes it looks like we’re going the wrong way and I wonder what you see and if there’s anything we maybe should be thinking about doing differently. Well, I think that what happens is policies have really failed in the Middle East, like terribly bad, like it seems like every time we like we’re going into the Middle East it’s like it’s disaster, and one action brings another reaction. So I think like one of the things that we really have to do as the world is like we have to have honest conversations, right, and I denounce violence on all fronts, I will always do that, but we can’t have one-sided news.

2:47:34 What happens is when one power thinks they bigger than the next power, and then the next power thing they bigger than the next power, then all you’re gonna do is keep having this clash, and now as you can see the clashes are bigger than they ever been, and in order for there has to be what’s called a reality, right? Let me tell you something, this is what I love and the best way I can explain it. Nelson Mandela, tell me who hates Nelson Mandela, who hates them?

2:48:14 I haven’t met you, I haven’t met Amit and I’m hitting South Africa, I’m saying anywhere though around the world, anywhere, because this guy gets out of prison and he’s like, and I’m speaking to you as a man who had face-to-face conversations with Nelson Mandela more than one occasion, at one time was just the three of us, me and my cousin was it was my Bartlett, boy did I have a question, and my question is probably gonna help, you know, after all of this stuff they did to you, I don’t get it, man, like where’d you find a place in your heart to forgive? Beyond forgiving, you set up these courts, Nelson, where it’s sort of like if I killed your sister I would show up, you would have to have to listen to what I must say, and I would have to listen to what you don’t say, and somehow we’d have to leave with no remorse and just say, you know, let’s let bygones be bygones and figure out how we won’t live together, and I think that we’re missing that lesson.

2:49:33 You kill five, four months, I kill 50 of yours, you kill 50 of Mines, I kill a thousand years, you killed a thousand of Mines, I killed ten thousand yards, we missing that Nelson Mandela lesson, and I think we have to go back to that. I mean we stopped focusing on ourselves, our careers, our money, our self East, we have to think beyond ourselves. No, because you know it’s funny, our money, our career, our selfies, our social medias are all part of it, right, but we actually can apply more to our selfies, we can apply more to our social medias, we can apply more to our money, right?

2:50:19 If a news is one-sided, you know, in your selfie you can show all the signs if you want, if economically you like, you know what, I’m making this much and I’m maybe I want to take $3,000 this month and do something different with it, you know, there’s these kids in Africa, maybe I won’t give the organization’s the money and I’ll take that trip myself in Africa and walk through the streets and find an epiphany and see a family in the village and have that conversation and take they cellphone number and give them five hundred dollars, you know, so once again it all works together, but we have to apply it, keep in mind the same tool that you apply for bad you can apply for good. Wyclef, I always ask my guest a couple questions at the end. I’m gonna hit you.

2:51:18 If you can make a phone call to the 20 year old Wyclef, give that young man a bit of advice, I guess he’s in the Jersey basement, maybe, yeah, give that man some advice, what would you say? I’d be like, hello, 2000 wife left, man, listen, I know you a player, man, but you gotta slow down with the ladies, you done broke too many girls’ hearts, man, all right, brother. What would he say back to you? Yeah, I, I hear you, bro, I’ll talk to you later, I got a girl waiting for me right now.

2:52:00 As good advice, on that same note, best advice you ever received, maybe it was filling your pops or your mom’s or maybe from Salaam or somebody, it’s just something you remember, man, that was just that was strong advice. You said when you died, when you bought, when you’re born and when you die, I heard you say one time that both of those things are a gift. What does that mean? Because a lot of people say birth is a gift, that’s special, then why is death to say a gift and special?

2:53:01 Well, I mean birth is, again, we celebrate birth, birth, right, and we don’t celebrate death, but where are we from though, you have you celebrate, I don’t know if you’ve seen either surprise like New Orleans, you know, you celebrate like when you’re going out, you’re going out with a celebration, the celebration of life, because what happens is to be born as such a gift, to live period, to be on the earth, right, then when you’re leaving, we humans are so selfish that we want people to just stay with us, like you’re so selfish, why don’t you celebrate when he going, like why are you so selfish, where you like, nah, man, I need you to stay with me, like we, why don’t you say, you know what, I celebrate it, it’s okay to celebrate. Yeah, I guess it makes all that stuff in between much more important.

2:54:02 That’s right, right, which means I had a guest before that said he, he said you should meditate on your death every day and to where you can say today is a good day to die, because you’ve done everything possible in this life that you need to do to where today is a good day to die, and until you get there, then do more. Really, you can do that every day. I agree with him 100%. His name is IDO Portal, I’ll introduce you, turn one time. Last question and I gotta ask anybody, I got to ask you, what is music when it all comes down to it, what is it?

2:54:37 Because I grew up, you know, the scientist guy, the math guy and this other guy, and I never felt like I was music or I understood music, I could play music and yet it’s sometimes it speaks to me and it pulls so many emotions in me I can’t explain it, like when you, when you sing in French or when Edith does or these kinds of things, what is it at the end of the day? Well, music to me is just a spiritual vibration, that’s what music is because like I said, it’s before he goes, it computes when it gets to your neuro that it’s music and it makes sense, like but if it just stays here, like I said earlier, it’s just noise. So when it gets to here it fills your soul and it’s just, it’s a vibration, all right, and it’s a spiritual vibration, and the reason why I applied spiritual to it and not just vibration is because where does it come from?

2:55:46 Where do I get this thing from to translate it to a human, and the human feels that it’s that it’s from that same place where the birth comes from or that same place where the death comes from, where we can’t, you know, we can have scientific terms for it but until we are, right, we just an add-on, right, so that place, the what is it we call it, the Big Bang Theory, and I’m saying but it’s the bang, it’s like that’s what we are, we like a vibration in a spiritual one that time, that’s what music is to me. Do you think we’re all one as humans, do you think we’re all kind of one big organism and we just don’t know it sometimes? Well, I think that with the best particles of carbon put together and, like I said, I was able to see it in two forms, I’m able to see it in the form of life and in the form of the passing, and an understanding that you would, um, you would, uh, you would understand it difference.

2:57:01 There was one time I’ll share something with your audience, they’ve got your Clef is mad weird, but if it was so funny because I got weird out in so I don’t think they’ll think this is a because I’m super weird, so if if it was on at one time, if you basically could stand, if you could sit still for 24 hours, I just lay down and going to your state of meditation and in silence you would hear, you would hear music vibrations because there’s a part that we don’t pay attention to and this vibration is always there, it’s always in the air, it’s always around and it’s from the same place that air comes from, right, because we can’t really like see it, you can’t see music, all you can do is feel it. So so if you feel that, that means it’s always there, there’s this vibration and the spirituality, so it’s just more like if you stay within yourself and you’ll hear it, like anybody, like you five minutes after this energy, you’ll let me just close my eyes and cut out like the sounds that you would hear if you go outside, the tones and that you’ll be like, holy crap, you know I mean.

2:58:42 That’s why we say that Orchestra lives in our head, cuz we can hear it, like I’m talking to you now and I literally can hear the orchestra. I’m gonna listen for next time, let’s listen for the orchestra. What, Clef, I really appreciate, you know, your time today. When I, what I listen to you describe the events of your life, you know, the past 30, 40 years you’re describing and telling you what happened, but it’s the way you tell me that it happened within all these kind of some tones of the way you view it that teaches me more than just your version of the events, it’s kind of the way you see the world, and I see it in a way where you’re saying no, I wanna, I mean just the fact that you’re a producer trying to make this person better and make this person better, I mean that’s a crazy job, that’s like your dad, you know, really, you know, let me make this person famous, let me get the best out of this person, and then, then I move on.

2:59:36 I move on, I move on, I’m not waiting to see if they thank me or if we make money, let’s just go, go, go. So part of it’s that, and then part of it is just the way you have gained this wisdom by doing all these things, and then I spent the last six years speaking to over 400 people and as I go around and have these long conversations with people that have done things, a lot of the same messages come back and they’re the ones you’re talking about, as in go help somebody else, go look inside, why are you doing that, is it for the right reason, or is it gonna get three million people riding in the streets for me to be president, when what does that get us? Nothing, nothing.

3:00:15 And so it’s comforting for me to hear that here’s a guy for in Haiti, New York City, music industry, so different from anybody else I spoken do that comes back with these same messages about who we are as humans and what we need to do, and it’s not always the obvious thing. So thank you for dropping some science on us. Thank you, I appreciate it.