No one believed it anymore, at this Fugees concert. No one anymore believed in Lauryn Hill (more or less) on time on stage, at the best of her form and her voice. And yet this is what happened on Friday October 18 at the Accor Arena in Paris. Against all expectations, because a few weeks before the two concerts in Paris (the second Saturday 19), the American press announced that one of the three members of the Fugees, Pras Michel, was suing him for fraud and breach of contract, reproaching, among other things, his chronic lateness on stage.
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Since the separation of the group in 1997, and the global success of their second album The Scorethen that of their singer and rapper The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1998, the diva was especially distinguished by her lack of respect for her audience, up to three and a half hours late in New York in 2021, more than two and a half hours in Paris in 2018, and a more than erratic attitude with its musicians. To top it off, she asks her childhood friends, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel, to call her Miss Hill.
Friday, as if to prove everyone wrong, Lauryn Hill, 49, arrived on stage at a decent time: 9:45 p.m., only getting a few whistles for having left her audience for two hours with DJ Reborn, as the opening act. On stage, the musicians are complete: four keyboards, two drummers, a bassist, a guitarist and three backing singers, barely heard because they are covered by the backer’s questions, for a rather painful and messy start to the concert.
Dressed in an impressive wool coat with pink and green fringes, Lauryn Hill displays a t-shirt with an Eiffel Tower and greets a thunderously packed Accor Arena ” Good evening how are you ? “. At the back of the stage, a screen broadcasts videos, which mix archive images of her young, a poster of Jim Crow segregationist laws, a photo of the Black Panther Assata Shakur, exiled in Cuba, and a video of teenagers in a class, reminiscent of the interludes of his solo album, where a teacher asks students to define the word “love”. Lauryn Hill raps, sings, wiggles, asks to arrange a comeback here, wipes her brow here, then delivers a long, bracing version of The Lost Ones.
YG Marley comes to steal the show
She then seems to find her feet by covering one of her most beautiful songs, X-Factor, about a toxic romantic relationship which many believed to recognize its history with his accomplice of the Fugees, Wyclef Jean. With Zion, written for his eldest son, his voice soars, ventures, then becomes more precise. Lauryn Hill once again becomes the artist who, in her early days, shook up every scene she appeared on. At the end of her song, she brings Zion on stage, the first of her six children that she had with Rohan Marley, heir to reggae icon Bob Marley. Zion sings his song Why Won’t You Stay Then that of his grandfather, War.
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