Songoftheday 5/13/20 - I heard he sang a good song I heard he had a style, and so I came to see him to listen for a while...
from the album The Score (1996)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart
Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #2 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 30
Today's song of the day comes from the New Jersey hip-hop trio Fugees, who scored their first top-40 pop hit with the lead single from their The Score album, "Fu-Gee-La", in the spring of 1996. But that underground fan fave would be nothing compared to the second release, which was the last song recorded for the record. It was a reggae-tinged cover of Roberta Flack's 70's pop hit "Killing Me Softly With His Song". Written by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel infamously inspired (and co-written) by singer Lori Lieberman and her impression of seeing Don McLean live, the song already had a timeless quality that even relative music neophytes could recognize the song. Flack's single went to #1 on the American pop charts and won three Grammys for Record and Song of the Year along with Best Female Pop Vocal Performance...
With Lauryn Hill's vocals providing the base for rap lyrics by the trio, the song was transformed into something new and fresh and yet familiar, not negating the need for the original.
Since the Fugees' version of "Killing Me Softly" wasn't released as a single to goose up the sales of the album, their cover was unable to place on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart. However, the song got so much love on mainstream radio that it spent three weeks at #2 on the airplay portion of the chart, spending almost nine months on that list (35 weeks). The song also spent five weeks at #1 on the R&B Airplay chart, and made both the Adult Contemporary (#30) and Adult Top-40 (#20) "easy listening" format lists. The remixes of the track even snuck on to the Dance Club Play list at #48 (more on that after the break). Internationally, the single topped the charts in the UK (five weeks), Germany (nine weeks), Australia (seven weeks), Austria (seven weeks), the Netherlands (seven weeks), France (five weeks), Ireland (seven weeks), Belgium (eight weeks), Switzerland (seven weeks), Sweden (five weeks), Finland (seven weeks), Norway (six weeks), New Zealand (three weeks), Denmark, Czech Republic, Hungary, Iceland, and Italy (the last five one for a week). It also rose to #6 in Canada and #8 in Spain. There really wasn't a country it did poorly in. At the Grammy Awards in 1997, the single won for Best R&B Duo/Group Vocal Performance.
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Here's the trio live on TV in 1996...
and again that same year...
Because the song was so popular, and club DJ's was antsy for a remix that didn't immediately appear, Roberta Flack's label Atlantic commisioned a set of remixes for the dancefloor done by Soul Solution and Jonathan Peters, which ended up spending two weeks at #1 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart in 1996, which is pretty damn amazing...
Back to the Fugees live on MTV...
and finally, Lauryn Hill in concert in 1999...
Up tomorrow: We're introduced by a barely-teen country music ingenue thanks to a forgotten nugget from the 1950's.
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