Can't stand this crap. It's criminal, the bullshit that hiphop gets away with in wrecking truly great songs. I just hope everybody on the original samples got paid very handsomely.
[Edited 4/23/09 14:03pm]

I'm much more of a fan of Al B. Sure's version!

I'm much more a fan of Roberta Flack's original.

I loved the Fugees and always thought Lauryn's voice was equal to Roberta's

scriptgirl said:

I'm a fan of Lauryn but with all due respect to your opinon, what you uttered was ABSOLUTE BLASPHEMOUS! Lauryn's vocal ability and sometimes over-acrobatics, can't touch Roberta Flack's smoothness.

What in hell is going on with the standards ofthe listening audience today? Just last week, I heard seperately two young ladies on two different occassions refer to Ciara as a Icon. I am of the old skool for sure.

I am old school too and I would never refer to Ciara as an icon, but I was never a Roberta fan.

My mom really doesn't like music (super odd, I know), but she is a big fan of Roberta Flack and a big fan of this song (and Don McLean's, who inspired the lyric), so it is kind of special to me.

In the 90's my roommate loved the Al B. Sure version and would play it All. The. Time. One day she got home from work, threw her purse on the floor, and said, "Who the FUCK are the Fugees??" Apparently, she'd heard their version on the ride home and was none too pleased with it.
[Edited 4/23/09 15:23pm]

Awful crap. That "one time!" and "hah! hah! hah!" nonsense wrecks it.

However, from the same album I really like...

RipHer2Shreds said:

I got tired of it too. I did it until that fall, I was like "enough of that 'one time' shit!"

Timmy84 said:

Yeah this song bored me to tears. Really didn't care for the fugees
although lauryn hill was good vocally and i did like her solo project.

phunkdaddy said:

Right. I used to like "The Score" but now I can't stand it and I bought it again like five years ago but haven't played it since 2006 or something like that, not too sure when, I just knew I didn't play it anymore after that.

Everytime Wyclef did that "one time" shit, he reminded me of one of those dopey cartoon characters. Y'know, "Duhhh.....one time.....duuhh...two time."

When I saw the video clip, I was waiting for a brick to fall on his head or sumthin', just so a giant lump could emenate from his big fat head and his eyes would roll up and he'd pass out n' shit.

anc282 said:

I like this remake I also like the video,I guess it was supposed to be a tribute to the movie 'Cooley High'?

We have an R&B station in my area and they play this song alot,but they removed Wyclef from it completely It's all Lauryn...there's no "one time!" in it at all.I like it this way,it sounds less hip-hop.

Let's hope the cats from Rotary connection got paid

scriptgirl said:

Ohh lawrd.....

Timmy84 said:

Meant to comment on this and forgot (I'm getting forgetful in my old age ). Lori Lieberman was the first to record it. Roberta's was a remake. I've loved her version since I was a kid but didn't know it was a cover until a few years ago.

Long story short - Lori loved Don McLean. Saw him in concert and wrote a poem on a napkin ("Killing Me Softly with His Blues"). Songwriter friends caught wind of her poem and wrote the song.



The Greatest Songs Ever! ... Me Softly
Posted Saturday 03/15/2003 1:00 AM in Guide by Johnny Black
Filed Under: the Fugees, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Killing Me Softly

“KILLING ME SOFTLY With His Song” might be pop’s most misunderstood tune of all time. It’s surrounded by so many myths, it makes Aesop’s fables look like reality TV. Millions of pop fans know that Roberta Flack wrote the song about Don McLean – killing her softly with his song “American Pie” – and that the Fugees made it a smash more than 20 years later.

Interesting, but not true. Yes, Flack took this classic lovelorn weepie to number 1 in February 1973. But she didn’t write it.

“When Roberta’s version came out,” McLean recalls, “somebody called me and said, ’Do you know there’s a song about you that’s number 1?’ I said, ’What – are you kidding?’ And they said, “The girl who originally recorded it had it written for her after she saw you at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. She went on TV and talked about it.”

The girl was an L.A. folkie named Lori Lieberman. “I thought [McLean] was just incredible,” she says. “He was singing songs that I felt pertained to my life.” But it wasn’t “American Pie” that got her scribbling – it was a lesser-known album track called “Empty Chairs.”

“I was going through some difficult things at the time, and what he was singing about made me think, ’Whoa! This person knows me! How could he know me so well?’ ” Lieberman says.“I went home and wrote a poem and showed it to the two men I was working with at the time”: songwriters Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, who decided her heartfelt words weren’t lyrics yet.

“Never having written a song,” she says, “I didn’t know how to put my poem into lyric form. Norman was able to do that. The finished lyrics are Norman’s, but he was very careful to make sure that all of the feelings were coming from me.” His biggest change was her title, originally “Killing Me Softly With His Blues.”

Although Lieberman’s recording didn’t set the world on fire, it did become a track on TWA’s in-flight entertainment set, and that’s where fate stepped in. “I was flying from Los Angeles to New York,” Roberta Flack has said. “Looking at the in-flight magazine, I saw the picture of this little girl, Lori Lieberman, and the title of the song.

Before I heard the song, I thought it had an awfully good title, and when I heard it, I loved it. By the time I got to New York I knew I had to do that song, and I knew I’d be able to add something to it.”

Quincy Jones, Flack’s producer, contacted Gimbel and Fox and began transforming the song. “My classical background made it possible for me to try a number of things with it,” Flack has said. “I changed parts of the chord structure and chose to end on a major chord. It wasn’t written that way.”

Her revised arrangement rocketed to number 1 in 1973 and earned a Grammy double-whammy: Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal.

More than two decades later, the song was still in regular radio rotation, and a New Jersey rap trio was hitting the charts with its 1994 debut album, Blunted on Reality.

“My mom was a Roberta Flack fan, so I grew up with her music,” Fugees vocalist Lauryn Hill said at the time. “One day, me and [Fugee] Pras [Michel] were in the car. The song came on the radio, and we both decided that song was it. One of our goals is to reunite the youths with musicality. It’s about soul.”

The Fugees had to jump through hoops to get permission to record it. Like Gimbel, Fox and Flack before them, they had a couple of changes they wanted to make. They had rewritten the lyric to become an antidrug, antipoverty theme called “Killing Him Softly,” but Gimbel and Fox refused to play ball, forcing the Fugees to stamp their identity on its sound and not on its lyrics.

The Fugees recorded the song cheaply, in band member Wyclef Jean’s rudimentary home studio, the Booga Basement, and the song hit the streets on March 9, 1996, as a track on the Fugees’ second album, The Score. By May 5, “Killing Me Softly” had become a runaway smash, leaping up the rap airplay chart before exploding onto mainstream radio.

Among the song’s millions of fans was a certain Welshman-about-Vegas. “I loved what Wyclef did with the Fugees, especially ’Killing Me Softly,’ ” Tom Jones said at the time. “He stripped it down and turned it into something different from the original.”

The Fugees’ smartest move, though, wasn’t musical but commercial: They decided not to release the song as a single, forcing fans to buy their entire album. The song helped The Score go multiplatinum and garnered both the Best R&B Performance by a Group and Rap Album of the Year Grammies for the Fugees in 1997.

“Killing Me Softly” also enjoyed a brief jolt in last year’s movie About a Boy, in which young British actor Nicholas Hoult warbles it – a cappella – before hundreds of jeering schoolmates. Things are looking pretty grim until Hugh Grant materializes with a guitar to salvage a shred of their dignity.

Hoult and Grant’s interpretation, needless to say, didn’t chart. But Roberta Flack’s and the Fugees’ versions have racked up an astonishing 5 million performances, propelling “Killing Me Softly” to number 11 in the BMI list of the Top 100 songs of all time. Not bad for one night’s work at the Troubadour.

SoulAlive said:

Yeah I was gonna say, I think there is a "No Rap" (no TALK) version that was officially released by the record label. I hear that one all the time on the radio.

There's an even shorter edit that cuts out the 8 bars of "haaa, this Wyclef of the Refugee Camp ( do do do)" before the first verse.

I'll probably never get sick of this song. It's a classic to me. I like Roberta's version too of course but this remake has a special place of its own.

IAintTheOne said:

and Little Feat

Cinnie said:

Actually, we better mention that this is probably what Wyclef looped up:

RipHer2Shreds said:

Oh wow, that's great to know. Thanks for clearing that up.

I love this version. It made me appreciate Roberta Flack's version even more than I did before. I remember hearing this song everywhere. I was in the Supermarket and they played this song (they also had the radio on). It was like everytime I went in the store, that song would come on that summer. I loved it but I couldn't escape it either.

purplecam said:

I agree, Its silly to call this version crap, Lauryn Hill really has a beautiful voice, the original will always be original but still, I dig this version.