Wyclef Jean has opened up about the time he and the Fugees found themselves at odds with 2Pac.
Sitting down with Genius to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the group’s game-changing 1996 album, The Score — which was released on the same day as Pac’s All Eyez on Me — Clef went into detail about how some lyrics on the song "Cowboys" were misunderstood by the late rap legend.
"Rappers want to be actors / So they play the Jesse James call-up card / And get they bones fractured / You ain't got no guns, you off to the precinct / Inside tough guys are feminine like Sheena Easton," Wyclef spits on the track alongside Outsidaz rapper Pace Won.
The song prompted a response from 2Pac via the unreleased track, "When We Ride on Our Enemies," on which he spits: "Heard the Fugees was tryna to do me / Look bitch, I'll cut your face, this ain't no muthafuckin' movie / Then, we watch the other two die slow / Castrated entertainin' at my muthafuckin' sideshow."
But according to Clef, his lyrics weren’t aimed at 'Pac. "There ain’t no issues," the Grammy Award-winning musician explained. "We never did nothing to disrespect 'Pac."
Clef told the outlet that it wasn’t actually a conflict between them, but a consequence of Shakur’s "everybody gonna get it" mindset at the time, particularly because Fugees were representative of the East Coast.
"We wasn’t gonna go there," he added. "I’m saying, like, 'Go ahead. You can have that. We good.'"
Elsewhere in the interview, Wyclef, who is gearing up to release Quantum Leap, an expansive monthly rollout of seven consecutive albums, paid homage to late friend and collaborator John Forté.
"Forté literally is the fourth Fugee, for real," Wyclef said. "We were all childhood friends. The subtlety [of his passing], it really fucked all of us up."
He then credited Forté with elevating The Score from a standard rap record to a lo-fi masterpiece.
"Tribe Called Quest had Q-Tip; we had John Forté," he explained. "He brought a whole other perspective to The Score. He was the kind of dude — he’d do a verse, and you’d have to go back and rewrite yours. He was the only person who could anchor a track like 'Cowboys' with that many ill MCs on it."
John Forté died last month at his home in Chilmark, Massachusetts. He was 50 years old.