Song 12: Killing Me Softly

Killing Me Softly - The Fugees

I imagine this will be another shorter post. I wouldn't say it's intended as light relief, but it is a song I neither love nor loathe, but is a worthwhile curio.

I remember it was first brought to my attention by my friend Stephen - released during our A-Levels so not surprising I was a little slow off the mark. I remember him saying "see what you think of it, I think it's beautiful, the girl just has the purest, most faultless voice". Which is true.

I can't recall if I already knew the Roberta Flack version or just was aware of its existence, I wasn't grossly offended by the cover version, in any case. I actually don't think it's that fantastic a song in its original. Roberta Flack and Lauryn Hill both have beautifully pure and unshowy voices which would dignify anything if they did it right. So I think it's a cool 70s soul song but in terms of Flack material I'd take 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' every day of the week.

I do remember being amused and impressed that the song had been written about Don McLean from a poem by Lori Lieberman (according to wikipedia, this fact is in dispute among the song's writers). Don McLean's rather a hoot, isn't he? I rather think he wrote some lovely songs and had a lovely voice but he seems an insufferable bellend from all accounts.

Also, it's used in the film 'About a Boy' (getting back to Hornby) as a kind of po-faced, emotive song in a way which is both funny and, eventually, moving. It's that kind of song. Serious, conscious soul, but I don't think it ever really takes off to the heavens.

But anyway, I'd been told this Fugees version was a beautiful song, and I could just about go with it for the first few seconds, until I was introduced, for the first time, to that phrase that would haunt the second half of 1996 .... "One time" ... wh-wh-what? Sorry, what? and then "My girl, L, you know you got the lyric!" Well, yes, I'm sure she did know that and she, nor we, really needed you to tell us.

Since then, there has been an awful lot of commercial hip-hop/pop which has involved a "superstar guest"  chatting some inconsequential crap over a nice tune, and it even sometimes works rather well (Crazy in Love, say, or Umbrella) but back then this seemed an odd choice. And it kind of works the other way too. There's not really any actual rapping on the song, it's literally just a cover with some wittering. The only stylistic change Lauryn Hill makes really is to sing "bwai" rather than "boy", which I suppose brought it up to date a little. No wonder some purists were a little unimpressed by the Fugees.

But anyway, you don't need me to tell you it was a monstrously big hit. In some ways, the Fugees were as important as anyone in making hip-hop a mainstream concern. It's effect was far-reaching. In Kenya in 1997, one of the schoolgirls had "KILL ME SOFTLY" stencilled on her school shirt. I was briefly deeply alarmed until I remembered the song. It was pretty incongruous - there wasn't really a sense of much Western pop music (apart from Bob Marley) at that stage, so this was pretty striking (having said that, the headmaster of the primary school i taught at was a massive fan of the country singer Don Williams).

And I admit I underestimated the various members of the Fugees, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel (well, perhaps not Pras Michel). Wyclef has proved his skills go a fair bit beyond "One time" - 'Gone til November' and '911' are both guilty pleasures of mine and he's had his pawprints on an awful lot of hits. His bid for the presidency of Haiti seems a little misjudged and rather a feat of ego - something Lauryn Hill doesn't appear to be short of either. Her general goings on have been rather a mystery for years, and sadly there has been no follow-up to her solo debut 'The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill', which is a pretty damn tremendous album - in particular 'Doo-Wop (That Thing)', one of my favourite songs in the whole world and one which I initially thought I would write about, before thinking all I would do would be to gush boringly, while 'Killing Me Softly' has a bit more silliness to build a story round.

Which I hope I've done.

Anyway, 'Killing Me Softly' was one of the biggest, most definitive hits of the 90s - one could easily call it uninspired hip-hop karaoke of a pretty but uninspiring song, but clearly both versions have meant an awful lot more than that to an awful lot of people. It's an interesting thing that my friend Alex was wondering today that I don't often write much about the actual music of the songs, the actual meat, which is true really though I've been a little more in-depth on some recent posts. But, here, I've done it again, just several pages of trivia, ephemera and undeserved character assassination. Aah well, but i kind of think I've put as much effort into really getting inside the character of the song, really feeling it from the bottom up, as the Fugees did. Two time ...