Nobody believed it anymore at this Fugees concert. Nobody believed in Lauryn Hill anymore (more or less) on stage, in 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 odds, because a few weeks before the two concerts in Paris (the second Saturday the 19th), 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 him, among other things, his chronic lateness on stage.
Since the group’s breakup in 1997, and the worldwide success of their second album The scorethen that of its singer and rapper. Lauryn Hill’s bad education in 1998, The diva was especially distinguished by her lack of respect towards 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 towards her musicians. To make matters worse, she asks her childhood friends, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel, to call her Miss Hill.
On Friday, as if to prove everyone wrong, Lauryn Hill, 49, arrived on stage at a decent time: 9:45 p.m., receiving only a few whistles for abandoning her audience for two hours with DJ Reborn as her opening act. . On stage, the musicians are complete: four keyboards, two drummers, a bassist, a guitarist and three backup singers, barely heard because they are covered by the questions of the sponsors, for a rather painful and messy start to the concert.
Dressed in a stunning wool coat with pink and green fringes, Lauryn Hill sports an Eiffel Tower T-shirt and waves to a thunderous, packed Accor Arena. “Good evening, how are you?” At the back of the stage, a screen plays videos that mix archival images of his youth, a poster of the Jim Crow segregation laws, a photograph 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 his students to define the word “love.” Lauryn Hill raps, sings, moves, asks to arrange a comeback here, wipes her brow here, and then delivers a long, bracing version of The lost ones.
YG Marley is coming to steal the show
Then he seems to find his place covering one of his most beautiful songs, x factor, about a toxic romantic relationship that many believed to recognize her history with her Fugitives accomplice, Wyclef Jean. With Zion, Written for his eldest son, his voice rises, ventures, and then becomes more precise. Lauryn Hill is once again the artist who, in her early days, revolutionized every scene in which she appeared. At the end of her song, she brings Zion on stage, the first of the six children she had with Rohan Marley, heir to reggae icon Bob Marley. Zion sings her song Why don’t you stay? So his grandfather’s, War.
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