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Bios: Fugees, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean & Pras
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Members
Wyclef Jean (Born Nelust Wyclef Jean, October 17, 1972 in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti)
Lauryn Hill (Born Lauryn Noel Hill, May 25, 1975 in South Orange, NJ)
Pras (Born Prakazrel Samuel Michel, October 19, 1972 in Haiti)

Albums
Fugees - Blunted On Reality
Fugees - The Score
Fugees - Bootleg Versions
Fugees - Greatest Hits
Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill
Wyclef Jean - The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II A Book
Wyclef Jean - The Preacher's Son
Wyclef Jean - Welcome To Haiti: Creole 101
Wyclef Jean - The Carnival Vol. II: Memoirs Of An Immigrant

Singles
Refugee Camp All-Stars Featuring Pras - Avenues (Single)
Wyclef Jean - We Trying To Stay Alive (Single)
Wyclef Jean - Cheated (To All The Girls) (Single)
Wyclef Jean - New Day (Single)
Wyclef Jean - Take Me As I Am (Single)
Wyclef Jean - Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill) (Vinyl Promo)

Also Featured On...
Charli Baltimore - Cold As Ice (Wyclef)
The Best Man (Lauryn Hill)
Big Punisher - Capitol Punishment (Wyclef)
Mary J. Blige - Mary (Lauryn Hill)
Mary J. Blige - Reflections (A Retrospective) (Wyclef)
Booth Blasters Rip-Up The Mic!! (Wyclef)
Bulworth (Pras)
Chef Aid: The South Park Album (Wyclef)
City High (Wyclef)
Common - One Day It'll All Make Sense (Lauryn Hill)
Cypress Hill - Unreleased & Revamped (EP)
Destiny's Child (Wyclef & Pras)
Destiny's Child - Love:Destiny (Wyclef)
DJ Finesse - Platinum Slow Jams 15 (Lauryn Hill)
DJ Green Lantern - Invasion Part Three: Countdown To Armageddon (Wyclef)
DJ Green Lantern, Russell Simmons & Barack Obama - Yes, We Can (Wyclef)
DJ Quik - Trauma (Wyclef)
DJ Kayslay - The Streetsweeper Vol. 1 (Wyclef)
Down To Earth (Lauryn Hill)
Dr.Dolittle 2 (Wyclef)
How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Wyclef)
R. Kelly Presents The Pied Piper (Wyclef)
Life (Wyclef)
Love Jones (Lauryn Hill)
Made Men - Black Friday (Wyclef)
M.O.P. - St. Marxmen (Wyclef Jean)
Bob Marley - Chant Down Babylon (Lauryn Hill)
Nas - It Was Written (Lauryn Hill)
Next Friday (Wyclef)
Ol' Dirty Bastard - In Loving Memory Of Russell Jones (Pras)
Pacewon - Won (Wyclef)
Pharoahe Monch - Y'all Know The Name (Wyclef)
Queen Latifah - Order In The Court (Pras)
Santana - Supernatural (Lauryn Hill)
Slam (Pras)
So Amazing: An All Star Tribute To Luther Vandross (Wyclef)
The Source Presents Hip Hop Hits Volume 1 (Wyclef & Pras)
The Source Presents Hip Hop Hits Volume 2 (Wyclef)
Sprung (Pras)
Joss Stone - Introducing Joss Stone (Lauryn Hill)
Thug Radio Mixtape 15: Hard As Steel (Wyclef)
Thug Radio Mixtape 19: Gonna Make A Change (Wyclef)
Urban Hip Hop Volume 1 (Wyclef Jean & Lauryn Hill)
Viva La Revolución Volume I: Get Up, Stand Up (Thug Radio Mixtape)
Kanye West - Freshman Adjustment (Lauryn Hill)
Kanye West - The Lost Tapes (Lauryn Hill)

Bio From All Music Guide
The Fugees translated an intriguing blend of jazz-rap, R&B and reggae into huge success during the mid-'90s, when the trio's sophomore album The Score hit number one on the pop charts and sold over five million copies. The trio formed in the late '80s in the New Jersey area, where Lauryn Hill and Prakazrel Michel ("Pras") attended a local high school and began working together. Michel's cousin Wyclef Jean ("Clef") joined the group (then called the Tranzlator Crew), and the trio signed to Ruffhouse/Columbia in 1993. After renaming themselves the Fugees (a term of derision, short for refugees, which was usually used to describe Haitian immigrants). Though the group's debut album, Blunted On Reality, was quite solid, it reflected a prevailing gangsta stance that may have been forced by the record label.

No matter how pigeonholed the Fugees may have sounded on their debut, the group had obviously asserted their control by the time of their second album, The Score. With just as much intelligence as their jazz-rap forebears, the trio also worked with surprisingly straight ahead R&B on the soulful "Killing Me Softly with His Song," sung by Lauryn Hill. Elsewhere, Clef and Pras sampled doo-wop and covered Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry," giving the record familiarity for the commercial mainstream, but keeping it real with insightful commentary on their urban surroundings. The Score became one of the surprise hits of 1996, reaching number one on the pop charts and making the Fugees one of the most visible rap groups around the world. During 1997, the crew played on the Smokin' Grooves tour, and took time out while Hill gave birth to a child and Clef issued a solo album, Wyclef Jean & the Refugee All-Stars. In 1998 Hil released her smash record The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill and in 2000 Clef released his second solo disc, The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II A Book. In turn, their solo success has cast further doubt on a Fugees release. — John Bush

Lauryn Hill's Bio From All Music Guide
Call Lauryn Hill the Mother of Hip-Hop Invention: With her 1998 solo debut The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, the Fugees' most vocal member not only established herself as creative force on her own, but also broke new ground by successfully integrating rap, soul, reggae and R&B into her own sound.

Raised in South Orange, NJ, Hill spent her youth listening her parents' multi-genre, multi-generational record collection. She began singing at an early age, and was soon snagging minor roles on television (As the World Turns) and in film (Sister Act II: Back in the Habit). Her on-again, off-again stint in the Fugees began at the age of 13, but was often interrupted by both the acting gigs and her enrollment at Columbia University. After developing a following in the tri-state area, the group's first release — the much-hyped but uneven Blunted On Reality — bombed, almost causing a break-up. But with the multi-platinum The Score, the Fugees (and especially the camera-friendly Hill) achieved international success, though some pundits took shots at their penchant for cover songs.

That criticism made Miseducation even more of a surprise. Hill wrote, arranged or produced just about every track on the album, which is steeped in her old-school background, both musically (the Motown-esque singalong of "Doo Wop (That Thing)") and lyrically (the nostalgic "Every Ghetto, Every City"). As Miseducation began a long reign on the charts through most of the fall and winter of 1998 — initally thanks to heavy buzz and overwhelming radio support for "Doo Wop (That Thing)" — Hill became a national media icon, as magazines ranging from Time to Esquire to Teen People vied to put her on the cover. By the end of the year, as the album topped virtually every major music critic's "best-of" list, she was being credited for helping fully assimilate hip-hop into mainstream music (Such an analysis, however, is lightweight at best: Hip-hop had been a huge force on the sales and radio fronts for most of the decade, and rappers Jay-Z, DMX and OutKast had dropped similarly lauded LPs prior to or just after Miseducation's release, adding to the genre's dominant sales for the year). Such momentum finally culminated at the February 1999 Grammy awards, during which Hill took home five trophies from her eleven nominations, including Album of the Year, Best New Artist, Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, Best R&B Song and Best R&B Album — the most ever for a woman. Shortly after, she launched a highly praised national tour with Atlanta rappers OutKast.

Hill also faced a lawsuit from two musicians who claim they were denied full credit for their work on the album. In an interesting twist, Hill's album has proven to be such a commercial and critical success that it has shed doubt on the Fugees' future. Their in-fighting has become common knowledge, and matters were complicated when many fans interpreted Miseducation's various anti-stardom rants as a public dissing of co-Fugee Wyclef Jean.

She did continue shaping her solo career. The double-disc MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 appeared in spring 2002, showcasing a deeply personal performance from Hill. — Brian Raftery

Wyclef Jean's Bio From All Music Guide
Lead Fugees rapper and sometime guitarist Wyclef Jean was the first member of his group to embark on a solo career, and he proved even more ambitious and eclectic on his own. As the Fugees hung in limbo, Wyclef also became hip-hop's unofficial multicultural conscience; a seemingly omnipresent activist, he assembled or participated in numerous high-profile charity benefit shows for a variety of causes, including aid for his native Haiti. The utopian one-world sensibility that fueled Wyclef's political consciousness also informed his recordings, which fused hip-hop with as many different styles of music as he could get his hands on (though, given his Caribbean roots, reggae was a particular favorite). In addition to his niche as hip-hop's foremost global citizen, Clef was also a noted producer and remixer who worked with an impressive array of pop, R&B, and hip-hop talent, including Whitney Houston, Santana, and Destiny's Child, among many others.

The son of a minister, Nelust Wyclef Jean was born in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti, on October 17, 1972. When he was nine, his family moved to the Marlborough projects in Brooklyn, NY; by his teenage years, Jean had moved to New Jersey, taken up the guitar, and begun studying jazz through his high school's music department. In 1987, he also joined a rap group with his cousin Prakazrel Michel (aka Pras) and Michel's high-school classmate Lauryn Hill. Initially calling themselves the Tranzlator Crew, they evolved into the Fugees, a name taken from slang for Haitian refugees. The trio signed with Ruffhouse Records in 1993 and released their debut album, Blunted On Reality, the following year; it attracted little notice, thanks to an inappropriate hardcore stance that the group wore like an ill-fitting suit. But the Fugees hit their stride on the follow-up, The Score, ignoring popular trends and crafting an eclectic, bohemian masterpiece that sounded like nothing else on the hip-hop landscape in 1996. Thanks to hit singles like "Fu-Gee-La" and "Killing Me Softly," The Score became a chart-topping phenomenon; in fact, with sales of over six million copies, it still ranks as one of the biggest-selling rap albums of all time.

Wyclef Jean was the first Fugee to declare plans for a solo project, setting to work soon after the group completed its supporting tours. Released in the summer of 1997, The Carnival (full title: Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival Featuring the Refugee All-Stars) was even more musically ambitious than The Score. Its roster of guests included not only the remainder of the Fugees, but also Jean's siblings (who performed together in the duo Melky Sedeck), Cuban legend Celia Cruz, New Orleans funk mainstays the Neville Brothers, and Bob Marley's female backing vocalists the I Threes. The breadth of his ambition was further in evidence on the album's two hit singles; "We Trying to Stay Alive" recast the Bee Gees' signature disco tune as a ghetto empowerment anthem, and the Grammy-nominated "Gone Till November" was recorded with part of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Those two songs helped push The Carnival into a Top 20, triple-platinum showing, and most reviews were naturally quite positive.

In the wake of The Carnival, Wyclef stepped up his outside work for other artists; over the next few years, he collaborated as a producer, songwriter, and/or remixer with a typically diverse list of artists: Destiny's Child ("No No No"), Sublime, Simply Red, Whitney Houston (the title track of her My Love Is Your Love album), dancehall reggae star Bounty Killer, Cypress Hill, Michael Jackson, Eric Benet, Mýa, Santana ("Maria Maria"), Tevin Campbell, the Black Eyed Peas, Kimberly Scott, Sinéad O'Connor, Mick Jagger, and Canibus. Clef also served as Canibus' manager for a short time in 1998; prior to their split, a report surfaced that Wyclef had pulled a gun on Blaze editor Jesse Washington over a negative Canibus review the magazine was slated to run (Wyclef vehemently denied the accusation, and no charges were filed).

By the time Wyclef began work on his second solo album, rumors were flying about tension between individual Fugees, and despite their denials, the fact that no follow-up to The Score was in sight seemed to lend credence to all the speculation. Although Wyclef had previously announced he would put off his sophomore effort until after the next Fugees album, he was well into the project by early 2000, giving an early release the antipolice brutality track "Diallo" (with guest vocals from Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour) via the Internet. The full album, titled The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II A Book, was released toward the end of the summer and entered the charts at number nine. Besides N'Dour, guests this time around included Mary J. Blige (on the Grammy-nominated duet "911"), Earth, Wind & Fire, Kenny Rogers, and even wrestling star the Rock ("It Doesn't Matter"); Clef also threw in a left-field cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." This time around, some critics suggested that Wyclef's sprawling ambitions were growing messy, but the record went platinum nonetheless. Shortly after its release, he also started up his own record label, Yclef.

With no Fugees reunion in sight, Wyclef began preparing his third solo album, Masquerade, in 2001; he also appeared in the Jamaican gangster flick Shottas, and, sadly, suffered the death of his father in a home accident. Masquerade was released in the summer of 2002, and in addition to the usual worldbeat fusions, it found Wyclef reworking songs by Bob Dylan and Frankie Valli, and featured guest shots from Tom Jones and Israeli violinist Miri Ben-Ari. Masquerade entered the charts at number six, proving that Wyclef's freewheeling approach still held quite a bit of appeal. One year later, he returned with The The Preacher's Son, and also released an album of traditional Haitian Creole music, Welcome To Haiti: Creole 101. His debut solo album got its sequel in 2007 when Carnival, Vol. 2: Memoirs of an Immigrant hit the shelves. The album had a diverse and lengthy guest list, with Akon, Mary J. Blige, Norah Jones, Shakira, Paul Simon, and Sizzla being just some of the names involved. - Steve Huey

Pras' Bio From All Music Guide
A member of the seminal '90s rap trio the Fugees, Pras' solo career didn't rise to the same heights as those of his colleagues, Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill, in part because he concentrated more on acting than music. Of Haitian descent (like his cousin Wyclef), Pras was born Prakazrel Michel in New Jersey. Along with his high-school classmate Lauryn Hill, he co-founded the rap group Tranzlator Crew in 1987; cousin Wyclef, who'd been hanging out with Pras quite a bit since moving to the United States, joined a short time later. Eventually, the trio renamed itself the Fugees, after an expression for Haitian refugees, and signed with Ruffhouse Records in 1993. Their 1994 debut, Blunted On Reality, was aimed at the hardcore crowd, which didn't really fit the group's own sensibilities, but with their all-inclusive groundbreaking sophomore effort, The Score, the Fugees created one of the biggest-selling rap albums of all time, adored by critics and record buyers alike.

Pras was the last of the Fugees to release a solo album, although he did cut his first solo track in 1997, covering Eddy Grant's '80s smash "Electric Avenue" for the soundtrack of the Chris Tucker flick Money Talks. In 1998, Pras contributed "Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)" to the soundtrack of Warren Beatty's Bulworth. With appearances from Ol' Dirty Bastard and Mýa, "Ghetto Supastar" became a substantial hit, climbing to number three pop and number one R&B. Pras immediately rushed to put together his first solo album, solving the problem of coordinating guest appearances by inviting celebrities to leave him answering-machine messages. Ghetto Supastar the album didn't fare nearly as well as the single, spending only two weeks in the Top 100 upon its release in late 1998. Undaunted, Pras turned some of the narratives from Ghetto Supastar songs into a novel — also naturally titled Ghetto Supastar — in early 1999. He also struck a deal with Madonna's new film production company to turn Ghetto Supastar into a movie, starring himself.

First, though, Pras made his feature film debut in the 1999 Ben Stiller superhero comedy Mystery Men, playing a supporting villain. He then set to work on Ghetto Supastar the movie, whose title was eventually changed to Turn It Up (perhaps for variety's sake). Turn It Up hit theaters in the summer of 2000 (two years after Pras' initial hit single), and it too performed disappointingly. Still, Pras was slated to appear in the films Higher Ed and Full Contact, and began work on a new album in late 2000, which wasn't released until August 2005. - Steve Huey

Official Sites: Lauryn Hill, Pras (Guerrilla Entertainment)