Wyclef Jean: Masquerade

If Pras is The Fugees' talent-impaired, underachieving Ringo Starr, and Lauryn Hill its brooding, intellectual, socially conscious John Lennon, then Wyclef Jean is the group's Paul McCartney: an ambitious populist who would generally rather play arenas and sell records than be recognized as a Serious Artiste. Like McCartney, Jean tends toward showmanship and sentimentality that sometimes overshadows his considerable songwriting gifts. Jean has always been a musician of outsized strengths and weaknesses, but on Masquerade, his weaknesses begin to obscure his formidable strengths. Yet another overreaching, overlong musical erector set, the album offers an uneven, conceptually muddled tour of the rapper's current musical obsessions, from gritty underground hip-hop to Caribbean music. As in the past, Jean seems equally inspired by a globetrotting sense of musical internationalism and a dreary fondness for overplayed radio staples. He has shown little shame in his previous raids on the classic-rock songbook, and he continues that trend here, most painfully in his cruel resurrection of Tom Jones' "What's New Pussycat" Jean's schlock-rock binge continues with "Oh What A Night," which hijacks the classic kitsch of "December 1963 (Oh What A Night)" for a self-congratulatory ode to the rapper's early success. Not one for subtlety, he then plays a cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" distinguished only by a shout-out to slain Lost Boy Freaky Tah. Of course, misguided song concepts, cheesy gimmicks, and lazy covers are nothing new for Jean, but in the past, he's compensated with classic melodies and sturdy songcraft. Here, the execution tends to be as misguided as the conception, and the highs seldom live up to his best work. Late in the disc, Jean takes a turn for the serious with a tribute to his dead father and an anti-war song ("War No More") that, like Ecleftic (2 Sides II A Book)'s similarly portentous "Diallo," offers little more than fuzzy-headed good intentions. Masquerade is far from an embarrassment, but rarely has Jean's fabled eclecticism felt so tired.