I haven't always been well disposed towards Wyclef Jean, so this represents quite an about face for me. I found the Fugees underwhelming and exhaustingly worthy, rap music for people who read Mojo or who shop at Whole Foods. I wasn't wild about their solo material either and was particularly appalled by Wyclef's colonisation of Another One Bites the Dust, improbably billed as a collaboration for some movie soundtrack or other. It was the Queen song stretched out so as to accommodate lines from Wyclef and Canibus, with Mercury's verses prefixed by Mr. Jean asking, Freddie, where you at? as though to conjure the image of some magical jam with the afterlife - although the actual answer to the question of where Freddie was at should logically have been, I'm fucking brown bread, pal. Don't you watch the news? Additionally, there was Gone Till November which I couldn't avoid for about six months or so, and which annoyed the hell out of me. The song takes the form of an address from a bad lad who has been sentenced and is off to do his time in the stripey hole. Take care, mum, he says - although, I'm paraphrasing here - and sorry about being a criminal. It's just that I'd prefer not to work a nine to five because robbing banks is easier, given my lack of qualifications. At the time I somehow missed the inference of the song and assumed it to be Wyclef telling everyone he was off for a lovely six month holiday, sipping rum from a half coconut on some beach because work is for squares and suckers. I found this irritating because my job was fairly back breaking but fucking off to Barbados didn't really seem like an option.
Then he turned up on an episode of that Jools Holland thing, which wasn't really a massive surprise.
Several decades later, I experience an unexpected tug of nostalgia for Gone Till November, not least because I realise the subject matter isn't quite so gormless as I somehow took it to be. I haven't thought about Wyclef in a long time and am surprised to recall the strength of my dislike for the man, which of course prompts a re-evaluation. Because I'm nothing if not a contrarian, it probably helps my volte-face that Wyclef's most vocal critics have themselves tended to be complete fucking cocks, one of whom I seem to remember objecting on the grounds that Wyclef thinks he's Bob Marley, the evidence presumably being that they're both musical black men with dreads and are therefore essentially identical.
Anyway, the only thing I've been able to find wrong with The Carnival is all the extraneous yacking between tracks, of which there seems to be a lot. Much of the album is framed as a courtroom drama with songs provided in evidence in the case of Wyclef accused of being too fly, or something of the sort. It's not that it's not actually funny, because it sort of is - and the interview with the world's scariest rapper made me literally laugh out loud - but the album simply doesn't need it because it's already good enough, which I really didn't expect. The fact of Wyclef playing a shitload of instruments to a fairly high standard doesn't actually mean he's merely dabbling when it comes to either the rap or hip-hop production, and certainly no more than it means he thinks he's Bob Marley. The key to the man seems to be that he never really gave a shit about ticking the right boxes or fitting neatly into any single genre, so he takes the sort of eclectic approach which means you're a multi-instrumentalist if you're a white guy, but apparently doing too much if you're Wyclef Jean; and he's eclectic because he fucking loves music and, above all, he tries to entertain and keep things interesting for the rest of us - hence even that Jools Holland slot.
As you might expect, The Carnival drifts all over the place, musically speaking, with a substantial Latin or Caribbean influence on a lot of the material, but it's cheery and sincere rather than cheesy, being born from an obvious and infectious desire for the listener to have at least as much of a blast as those playing the stuff. In case I've made it all sound like Tito Puente, hip-hop production nevertheless dominates, and it's a fairly polished sound - as distinct from the rough as fuck we're all used to - but draws heavily on dub and the whole sound system dynamic so we don't have to think about Sting nodding his head with approval as he listens to the record; not unless we really want to. Weirdly, excepting Gone Till November, much of the album blends into a relatively seamless landscape of uptempo beats and tunes, nothing really standing out but working as a whole because, possibly excepting the chatter, there are no real duds to ruin the mood. It's not the greatest album I've ever heard, but it's decent for something I once assumed would be fucking terrible. Better late to the party than never, I guess.
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