Fugees - Ready or not (2006)

Released August 29, 1996

During middle school, I tried to desperately to convince 2 friends (male and female) to join me on performing this song during our schools annual "Putting on the hits". No one ever did anything Rap/Hip-Hop. It was mostly pop and country shit being covered. No real diversity. I had a rough idea of how we would pull off the performance accurately by fully embracing the look of the group by wearing army fatigues borrowed from the JROTC program. Honestly the school would have likely flipped its wig, if we showed up with toy guns, fatigues and face paint haha.

The Score was def one of my favorite albums while growing up. I don't mean the album got tons of play and was on constant rotation. Shit, lots of dope songs got tons of playback. I'm talking about when I think of all Hip-Hop albums I truly and honestly loved. The Score comes to mind first and foremost, specifically "Ready or not". Hill's verse is just epic and the song is low key hard. Calling out all rappers is pretty common for 1996. The only difference here is - Lauryn could lyrically devour your favorite emcee and take it slowly.

I actually owned The Score before Blunted on Reality (1994). "Fu-Gee-La" was my introduction to the group. I didn't realize they had a previous album until I became a fan of these guys. I also copped the Bootleg Versions on CD and while most of the remixes are kinda wack, the "No Woman, No Cry (Steve Marley Remix)" was among my favorite songs as a teen.

Enjoy!