"You have to stick to what you believe in" - The Wyclef Jean story

Wyclef Jean needs no introduction now, but when the seminal artist started out, his vision of what hip-hop could be was not exactly embraced. "The hip-hop community was like, yo, that's not hip-hop," Jean told Catalyst. 

Even lovers of one of the most free-wheeling modern forms of music thought there was a limit to experimentation. Jean did not.

But making his point would take a little while, and a little help from his friends. Early on he took some advice from a wise music teacher. "She said, 'You going to start Jazz tomorrow?' And I said, 'That's for old folks. I'm gonna be a battle rapper.' And she says, 'Why don't you do both?'" 

Hence the The Fugees — the group Jean founded in 1990 with Lauryn Hill and Pras Michel. In the early days they played to crowds that just didn't get it, didn't move at all. Even cursed at Jean for playing guitar. 

And Jean got that. "It was hard in the beginning to accept Fugees as a hip-hop act," he said. "We established from the gate, that when we show up we gonna show up with the drum set, with the guitar, with the turntables, which at the time was very confusing to everybody else."

The gamble was that the audience would catch up. But Jean didn't have forever. "Can you imagine how many record companies turned us down? Like a gazillion."

The breakthrough came after he took some more sage advice, this time from legendary hip-hop / R&B producer Salaam Remi. "Basically Salaam was like, 'Yo, y'all way too advanced.' He was like, 'Yo, give them one plus one equals two, then you can add algebra to it. Then geometry. You feeding them too much in one shot.'"

The work that emerged from that feedback, Nappy Heads — later reimagined with an earlier piece as "Nappy Heads (Mona Lisa)," produced by Remi on their first album — put Jean and The Fugees on the map. "We had no idea that this song would be super massive," Jean said. "The streets said this is different, but we dig it. That's like one of the best feelings. And that was that moment when we was like, all right, we got it."

"The biggest lesson that I've learned in that journey is you have to stick to what you believe in," Jean said. They definitely try to make us think like we had to play in a line. We never fell for that," he said. "I stuck to my artistic vision and that changed everything."