The Fugees’ Recreation of Jones’s “Changing Same”

The Fugees’ Recreation of Jones’s “Changing Same”

“And we gonna make what we believe manifest”

--Ras Baraka, The Score

Introduction: Making Black Texts “Manifest”

Artistic expression is all about making what one believes “manifest.” Artists of black texts are constantly grappling with what exactly they want to make manifest. A tension exists between manifesting a black identity by harkening back to old texts and manifesting “what [black artists] believe” by creating new understandings of what they see as black identity. That is to say, in creating new black texts, artists likely want to move (at least in part) away from old black texts that do not reflect contemporary conceptions of blackness. Without holding onto some sense of blackness, a black text is just a text. It no longer holds a specific cultural identity. Yet black texts must also continue to move and evolve so that audiences can connect with them. If artists want to speak to black communities, they must understand the movement that exists within society. The question, then, becomes what it is that artists of black texts want to manifest and how they go about creating a text that retains its black identity but continues to evolve.

How do artists make “what [they] believe manifest”? In “The Changing Same,” LeRoi Jones uses the paradoxical term “the changing same” to explain the equilibrium that black artists attempt to reach between the opposing forces of stability. Jones proposes that “New Black Music,” which he attributes to “Rhythm and Blues, R&B oriented jazz, or what the cat on the block digs” (Jones 125) draws from black music of the past and also evolves toward a truer portrayal of black people (Jones 126). He insists that this music both is expressive and reflective of its expression. This notion that Jones calls “the changing same,” allows black music to change without losing its connection to the previous forms of black music (Jones 126).

Jones’s analysis serves as a very useful tool in developing an understanding of not only the specific forms of music Jones speaks to, but of all black forms of expression. “The changing same” applies to rhythm and blues, jazz, and blues as Jones asserts but it is also useful in assessing black forms of expression that came after Jones. I particularly want to address the way Jones’s term is useful in understanding rap music, which is one of the newest and most popular black forms of expression in contemporary American society.

Though “the changing same” offers interesting ways of looking at the creation and recreation of black texts, in attempting to use Jones’s notion of “the changing same” as a way of understanding expression, reflection, and direction in black texts, some serious conceptual issues arise. Put simply, Jones attempts to make black music, which has emerged from a cultural tradition, as innately “black” as possible. Several problems arise in attributing a racial essence to black music. First, Jones argues that there is one black experience that speaks to all black people. Yet I intend to assert that blacks choose to share in the creation of a common culture, not an innate essence that they are inextricably bound to. In Jones’s attempt to unify blacks, he ignores any difference they might have. Jones fences off blackness, ignoring texts from other cultures as influencing black texts. Secondly, Jones asserts that only black texts can partake in the creation of new black texts. Jones draws a definitive line between what is black and what is not. He does not note that just as African Americans contribute to the creation of American culture, American culture influences the creation of black texts. Texts from a plethora of other cultures influence black texts. I intend to demonstrate how white references and references from other cultures, particularly Haitian culture, influence the creation of the Fugees’ music in The Score. Ignoring the influence of non-African American cultures in the creation of black texts is inaccurate and stigmatizes black texts by placing limits on the texts black artists are allowed to create with.

In their rap album The Score, the Fugees identify the interaction that occurs between various cultural texts. Thus they are able to actively change the black musical tradition in a way that is not possible for Jones. With a focus on black empowerment, Jones oscillates between acknowledging that white society plays a role in shaping black music (and fundamentally black identity as well) and rejecting American influences altogether. The Fugees, however, are able to contribute to the process of cultural remaking because they welcome the incorporation of different cultural texts. Instead of trying to keep black music within the boundaries of black culture, the Fugees change black tradition to make it a more inclusive, all-encompassing form of expression.

Benefits of Using the Jones’s Concept of “The Changing Same”

In “The Changing Same,” Jones explains that black music remains rooted in “the same” while constantly “changing.” Jones writes that black music possesses specific characteristics of African culture. New black music, argues Jones, makes a conscious effort to hold onto those characteristics. Black artists make a conscious effort to hold onto their black identity by drawing from older texts. Jones writes that “at its best and most expressive, the New Black Music is expression, and expression of reflection as well. What is presented is a consciously proposed learning experience” (Jones 126). The “‘new’ musicians [are] [e]xtremely conscious of self,” writes Jones (125). As conscious reflectors, Jones argues that new musicians try to move black music forward while taking care to hold onto a black identity. Black artists note the musical tradition that they are emulating and intentionally direct the music they create toward a new conception of blackness by drawing from old black musical forms in new and provocative ways. Jones explains, “We feel, Where is the expression going? What will it lead to?...Jazz content, of course, is as pregnant” (Jones 125). There is a conscious and critical examination of what past black texts are saying and what artists want to make new black texts say, according to Jones.

Jones explains the experimentation that artists engage in when trying to re-contextualize black music. He argues that artists must work within their contemporary environment to create music that reflects the values of its audience. Jones asserts that “[t]he Blues (impulse) lyric (song) is even descriptive of a plane of evolution, a direction…coming and going…through whatever worlds. Environment, as the social workers say…but Total Environment (including at all levels, the spiritual)” (Jones 122). Jones asserts that musicians should draw upon their complete environment, which includes both their past cultural values and their present states. Creators of black music try to connect the past with the present in new and engrossing ways. “They are interested in the unknown. The mystical,” writes Jones (126). Jones believes the artists revel in improvisation. Black music must continually be remade, essentially, to keep it black. Black music is fluid and ever-changing, concludes Jones.

Jones’s conception of “the changing same” is very helpful in resolving the tension that arises between holding onto older conceptions of blackness, emulated in older black texts, and moving away from preconceived notions of blackness. However Jones’s argument incorrectly assumes that there is a single black experience and insists that black music will cease its evolution once a form of music develops to encompass all black experience. Jones writes that “musicians point toward the final close in the spectrum of the sound that will come. A really new, really all inclusive music. The whole people” (Jones 127). On the contrary, my contention is that black music will never stop changing. Music will continue to reflect upon the changes undergone by whole societies and specific cultural groups within society. Black texts are not unified by a shared experience but rather, they unify in their participation of the creation and recreation of black texts. As I will attempt to demonstrate, the Fugees recreate Jones’s concept of “the changing same” in black texts to actively change black texts and black identity.

Speaking Personas in “The Score”: Debunking the Myth of Essential Blackness

In “The Changing Same,” Jones attempts to identify a black quality in black music. He asserts that in their creation of black texts, all artists try to emulate one distinct idea of blackness. Jones starts his essay claiming that “[t]hrough its many changes, [the blues impulse] remained the exact replication of The Black Man In The West” (my italics, Jones 118). Throughout the text, Jones asserts that blacks are united by a single shared identity. Yet that there are more than three distinct speaking personas in the Fugees’ track “The Beast” proves that Jones’s claim is incorrect. Jones’s description of “the blues impulse,” or the black tradition, as representing the experience of “The Black Man In The West” is not possible, given that there are a multitude of people who identify themselves as black but have completely different experiences. With two very different male personas and a female persona in the Fugees’ album The Score, the Fugees react against Jones’s assertion that there is one all-encompassing black identity.

Jones only attempts to account for differences in experience on very rare occasions in his essay. He writes that “the hard Black core of America is African. From the different churches, the different Gods, the different versions of Earth. The different weights and ‘classic’ versions of reality. And the different singing. Different expressions (of a whole). A whole people…a nation, in captivity” (Jones 122). Jones notes that blacks have different religions, different “weights” or experiences, and different “‘classic’ versions of reality” or perspectives. Yet despite his brief acknowledgement of different identities within black communities, Jones’s understanding of black music remains ultimately grounded in the belief that a single unifying identity exists for black people. That identity, which he names in the beginning and grounds his analysis in, is of “The Black Man In The West” (Jones 118).

In writing “The” rather than “A,” Jones asserts that all black music attempts to address the experience not of a black man, but of the one epitome of the black male. Yet in the Fugees’ track “The Beast,” three speaking personas or characters exist, one of which is not a male at all. While Wyclef Jean exerts a sing-songy, higher pitched and animated voice, Praz Michel’s persona is very steady, bold, and consistently threatening. Lauryn Hill’s female voice identifies different genders and gender relations in The Score. The various voices, which all come from a black text, could not possibly all emulate the same one true black experience, as Jones asserts.

Each of the Fugees creates a distinctly different speaking persona, which illustrates his or her intention in creating not one voice to embody the black experience, as Jones insists is the case in “The Changing Same,” but a variety of voices. In Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity, Adam Krims defines various types of rap styles that rappers use to create different personas for themselves within their songs. Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill have what Krims calls “speech-effusive flow,” which Krims defines as a rhythm of speaking that “spill[s] over rhythmic boundaries of meter, couplet, and groupings” (Krims, 50). For example, in “The Score,” Lauryn speeds up and slows down, rapping on-beat and with pauses at the end of rhymes at times and carrying over into other verses at other times. Lauryn raps, “Natural hallucinogen” and pauses. Then quickly, without pause, Hill raps “Turning boys to men again with estrogen dreams/ Release blues, yellows, and greens/ From Brownsville to Queens” (“The Score,” The Score). In contrast to the Fugees’ text, in “Changing Same,” Jones does not note the experiences of black women when trying to emulate the one black experience through music. While her speaking persona is not necessarily always focused on feminist issues, Lauryn literally brings a female voice to the album. Her very presence takes issue with Jones’s assertion that the black spirit reflects the black male experience.

Wyclef has a similar flow. Like Lauryn, he varies speeds and rhyme schemes. Wyclef takes on the speaking persona of a fast-talking and dynamic story teller in many of the Fugees’ songs, including “The Beast.” Wyclef is a lot of talk, so to speak. In “The Beast,” Wyclef speaks excitedly and with enthusiasm as he recounts an encounter with the police. He raps, “Listen I bring friction to your whole jurisdiction./ You planted seeds in my seeds in my seat when I wasn’t looking./” As he discusses his encounter with “you,” the police officer, Wyclef gets increasingly angry. He amplifies the sound of his voice to demonstrate his frustration: “Now you ask me for my license/registration/ What the fuck is my name?/ What the fuck is my occupation?” (“The Beast” The Score). Wyclef angrily emphasizes the curse words as he imitates the harshness of the police officer who harassed him. In “The Bests,” his persona is more animated and aggrevated by social situations than Lauryn’s character, who colly uses her verse in “The Score” to boast about her rap skills.

While Lauryn and Wyclef have differing “speech-effusive flows,” Praz Michel has a “percussive-effusive flow” in much of The Score. Krims writes that with “percussive-effusive flow,” rappers tend to use their voices as percussive instruments by emitting regular, slow, and focused sounds (Krims 51). For example, with precision, Michel raps, “Motion, commotion, what’s your proposal/ Uphold two-fold, the crew is disposal” (“The Score” The Score). Praz’s words have regular beats and rhyme schemes. Praz has a deep, confrontational voice that makes the listener sure that he has the brute strength to back up others. The Fugees develop a dialogue amongst the various personas in the text. For instance, Praz encourages Wyclef to have the courage to speak in “The Beast.” After Praz has begun his boasting part in “The Beast,” Wyclef interrupts,

“Hey yo should I slow down?”

“Naw kid go faster,” Jean encourages (“The Beast” The Score).

Wyclef’s presence is both powerful and resonant. As the “enforcer,” so to speak, Praz supports Wyclef and Lauryn, whose verses come before his.

Though Lauryn, Wyclef, and Praz are the three forefront speaking personas in The Score, the Fugees also bring in a number of other rappers to create a world of various characters who interact in the community the Fugees create in The Score. Thus despite trying to account for its “many changes” (Jones 118), Jones retains an essentialist conception of blackness, which does not account for the various speaking personas that exist in The Score.

Essentialism in Jones’s “The Changing Same”

Each of the speaking personas the Fugees create expresses his or her personal experience as a black man or black woman. The Fugees offer a different understanding of black music by creating various black experiences instead of one fundamental and all-encompassing black experience that Jones claims as inherent in black texts. While the Fugees reject the assertion that there is only one black experience, I have not yet resolved whether there is a form of blackness that unites black forms of expression but maintains an understanding that individual experiences are diverse. In “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. asserts that blackness comes from a tradition rather than an essence. According to Gates, individuals who identify themselves as black have different experiences. Yet according to Gates, they are all connected to a single body of black texts that make up the black tradition.

Jones astutely observes that black music, or “New Black Music,” as he prefers to call it, is created from a conscious reflection of the past (Jones 126), as I elaborated on earlier when I discussed the benefits of Jones’s notion of “the changing same.” However Jones’s essay defines black music as a reflection upon some blackness that he wrongly attributes to some innate black core. Jones insists that black texts are different from white texts because “it is a different quality of energy they summon” (Jones 121). Jones uses this energy, or essence, to distinguish black texts from other cultural texts.

Gates, however, contests that texts are not black because artists draw from a black essence to create them, but because they are rooted in a black tradition. Gates writes, “The black tradition exists only insofar as black artists enact it. Only because black writers have read and responded to other black writers with a sense of recognition and acknowledgement can we speak of a black literary inheritance, with all the burdens and ironies that has entailed. Race it a text (an array of discursive practices), not an essence. It must be read with painstaking care and suspicion, not imbibed” (Gates 2429). The black tradition is not called black because it has an innate blackness to it. Rather, Gates argues that the black tradition exists as such because it consists of a group of characteristics which emerged out of African American culture.

While Gates defines black texts as texts that have emerged out of other black texts and choose to be part of a black tradition, Jones uses a spectrum of blackness to classify black music. “The closer the church was to Africa, the Blacker the God. (The Blacker the spirit),” offers Jones (122). Music with “Blacker spirit,” according to Jones, is classified as such because it has more African characteristics than other music. Jones finds innate black qualities in the music. By identifying some music as black, the African American community can claim complete ownership over this form of expression. Attributing an essential blackness to music gives a sort of empowerment to African Americans. Jones champions black musicians who play music with adherence to the “Black spirit,” or the black tradition. He is dogmatic about keeping black music tradition separate from any other cultural influences to maintain black ownership over black texts. Jones insists, “But dig, not only is it a place where Black People live, it is a place…where Black People move in almost absolute openness and strength” (Jones 124). Black music is an area for African Americans to reign over, writes Jones. It is a place for them to operate freely and with little censorship from outside forces. Without the continuation of the black musical traits, Jones argues that African Americans would lose this precious domain. “A ‘cultureless’ people is a people without memory,” warns Jones (120). Without passing on the black vernacular tradition, African Americans forget their roots and essentially lose the sense of a cultural community that they worked so hard to retain.

Gates, like Jones, recognizes the desire of African Americans to maintain a sense of ownership over black texts. Gates claims that black texts were created in response to criticism that African Americans were not capable of creating texts. He notes, “allegations of an absence led directly to a presence, a literature often inextricably bound in a dialogue with its harshest critics” (Gates 2428). Black texts, which were modeled after Western styles to prove their legitimacy, were constantly criticized by whites. Asserting that black texts are a craft, and not an essence, opens up the doors of criticism and allows for further growth in the tradition. Gates and Jones are both aware that dispelling the myth that African American people and African American texts are innately tied together allows all critics, regardless of racial identity, to criticize black texts. Yet Gates asserts that the separation must be made. Gates writes that black nationalists often call on notion of “‘sounding’…without understanding how problematic this can be” (Gates 2428). Gates insists that black critics get away from the belief that there is an essential blackness and that they move toward “close readings of the texts themselves” (Gates 2429). In conducting close textual analysis, critics can recognize key features of the text not as innately black, but as characteristics of a black tradition, explains Gates. As I noted earlier, Gates contends that “[r]ace is a text” (Gates 2429). It is cultural, not biological. Black texts can be consciously directed towards notions of blackness. Gates insists that black texts must be critically analyzed as literary works, instead of “imbibed” (Gates 2429) as unalterable truths about the nature of blackness.

While it may be tempting to embrace Jones’s view of black texts as romantically attuned to some sort of unifying and all-encompassing black experience, Gates insists that in order for black music to be fully appreciated and understood, one must read black music critically. However even Gates’ concept of a black tradition insists upon fencing black texts into some category of essential blackness. Though a black tradition as Gates understands it is a step away from the single unifying black experience denoted by Jones, Gates’s theory still rests upon ambiguous cultural boundaries. Gates does not provide us with ways to know what to include in black tradition but rather assumes certain texts will simply be understood as black. Nor does he define where influential texts from other cultural traditions stand in relation to the recreation of the black tradition. Gates separates the black tradition from other cultural influences and like Jones, relies upon some essential blackness as the thing that groups these texts together.

Communal Authorship in The Score

As I noted in my last passage, Gates explains that writers like Jones tenaciously hold onto an all-encompassing black experience to preserve black texts for black people. Detaching black texts from an innate black identity leaves them vulnerable to criticism. Gates insists that this anxiety exists for writers like Jones because in the past, black texts have been dismissed and demeaned when subjected to criticism. Gates’ solution is to understand black texts as fitting within a particular tradition of texts. Yet another way of preserving black texts for blacks is to understand that black communities, in addition to other communities or audiences, participate in the entire creative process, and not just in end-product analysis, as Gates suggests. (I will explain influential non-black communities in greater detail with my passage that reflects on Simon J. Ortiz’s essay “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism.”) Audiences are not forced to wait until a black text is produced to comment, critique, and reformat the text. Rather, they are part of the creative process from the beginning. Because audiences are the focus in many black texts, they fundamentally participate in the creation process of black art.

Audience as Subjects and Objects in the Fugees

In “Family Business,” the Fugees speak both of and to the black community. The Fugees work to establish a sense of community within the text through characteristic black oral styles like call and response. They write about the community and directly address their audience, calling on them to actively participate in positively recreating their community. The Fugees see their community not as a definitive racial group, like Jones and Gates, but as a localized urban community.

The Fugees remain closely cemented to the urban community. This community is, in essence, the subject of The Score. The Fugees rap about their community with “ghettocentricity,” boasting about their success amidst the difficulties of street life but also lamenting adversity in the community, like poverty and violence (Krims 78). Omega’s chorus describes the harshness of life in the ghetto: “Just walkin’ the streets death can take you away/ It’s never guaranteed that you’ll see the next day/ At night the evil armies of Shaton don’t play/ So defend the family that’s the code to obey” (“Family Business,” The Score). Wyclef, and later Lauryn echo Omega’s chorus in the first person, emulating a oral style often found in gospels, named call and response: “But if I fall asleep and death takes me away/ Don’t be surprised son, I wasn’t put here to stay/ At night the evil armies of Shaton don’t play/ So the family sticks together and we never betray” (“Family Business”). In responding to Omega’s call, Wyclef and Lauryn reiterate Omega’s words to indicate that they are internalizing his message. Their words are very similar to a common child’s prayer: “Now I lay thee down to sleep/ I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep/ If I should die before I wake,/ I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.” Both the verses of the Fugees and the traditional prayer look to an outside force for strength. While the common prayer looks to God, the Fugees end their prayer looking to family, which is the intimate name they give to the urban community they rap about. This emphasis on community is similar to the movement toward communities and away from a reliance on God as a stabilizing force that are characteristically found in African American ballads and folklore. The Fugees stress that their community is their first and foremost source of strength and moral support as Omega shows when he raps, “The family’s behind you if you’re worthy” (“Family Business” The Score). Community is also literally the Fugees’ basis for musical creation. That is to say, the Fugees’ community is important to them because it helps them morally, but also because the community provides them with material to create their album.

The Fugees emphasize the important role their community plays both with the instrumentation they use in addition to their lyrics. The music’s circularity in “Family Business” is indicative of the urban community’s continuity, which Lauryn describes as unbreakable. Unlike Johnny Cash’s song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” which laments about an emotionally disconnected family, Lauryn insists, “My circle, it can’t be broken” (“Family Business,” The Score). With modern technology, the Fugees are able to demonstrate the circularity that Lauryn speaks of in their song. “Family Business” demonstrates the strong bond of community through verse and instrumentation. Just as the guitar riff is ending, a new riff starts on top of it, maintaining continuity in the music to symbolize the indestructible communal bond. The Fugees try to make their music sound circular to emulate the unending aspect of community. Thus, the Fugees make the urban community their subject in The Score. Their text ‘s creation is based on situations that exist in the urban community. This is not to say that The Score is completely autobiographical. Rather, the Fugees use their text to interpret and recreate a portrayal of their urban community. As a topic, community not only gives the Fugees material to rap about in their lyrics. The subject of community also provides the Fugees with an instrumental format to use in the shaping of their text.

The Fugees also make the urban community the Fugees’ object in directly addressing them in The Score. The Fugees fall into a subgenre of what Adam Krims calls “knowledge rap,” a subgenre of “reality rap,” in Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (Krims 79). According to Krims, “knowledge rap” has a heavy “focus on political and historical tales, religious lessons, or other didactic modes of information” (Krims 79). Along with their mimicry and reflection on life in the urban community, the Fugees also engage directly with the audience. As I quoted earlier, Omega raps, “The family’s behind you if you’re worthy” (my italics, “Family Business,” The Score). Omega promises moral support, as I already alluded to, but he makes this support conditional. This moral undertone is characteristic of knowledge rap. The Fugees emphasize that they intend preserve family, or in other words, their sense of community, and wish to extort members of the audience who threaten the black community’s stability with violence. The idea of preserving a black community also exists in Jones’s and Gates’ texts.Gates criticizes writers like Jones for trying to protect black texts from outsiders who threaten the integrity of black texts. Gates insists that “ironically, it is necessary to create distance between reader and texts in order to go beyond reflexive responses and achieve critical insight into and intimacy with their formal workings” (Gates 2429). Yet rather than asserting that there is a black essence to protect black texts from being attacked by outsiders, the Fugees implore their audience to participate in the creation of new black texts. Hence, like Gates, the Fugees invite community members and their audience members to partake in the criticism, which I assert can also be seen as recreation, so as to preserve black influence in the creation of black texts without falling back on the notion of an essential black core.

In speaking directly to and of their urban audience, the Fugees encourage them to take an active role in helping to literally create a new society. While the Fugees suggest that their urban community can be preserved by actively promoting peace and understanding amongst community members, their audience also has the power to recreate society by actively taking part in recreation through the critical analysis of black texts. This engagement and interaction with the audience results in the joint creation of the text by authors and audiences. The urban community hence takes part in the creation of The Score, as it is their experiences upon which the text is based. They further contribute to the creation process as audience members, which Gates recognizes. The Fugees encourage their audience to actively reflect upon black texts and to work to recreate conceptions of their communities. Gates’ emphasis on opening up black texts to criticism is attained not only in the way the audience receives the text, but also participation in the creation of the text from the text’s initial conception.

Expulsion of the Un-African in Black Music

As I have already discussed, Jones wants to shelter black music from the criticism of outsiders in “The Changing Same.” Assuming a sort of parental, care-taker role in his attempt to protect black texts, Jones tries to preserve black texts for black people. That is, he tries to include as much “blackness” as possible and consequently tries to eliminate, or at least limit, that which is not black. Jones wants to purify black music, so to speak. He wants to ensure that black music remains aimed toward unifying the black community. Jones argues that black music is moving toward the elimination of white influences in black texts so as to create completely black texts. Jones stresses that black music’s role is ultimately to emulate the entire black experience. He prophesizes the “actual New Black Music” will reflect the shared experience of all black people. Jones calls the actual new black music “the final close in the spectrum of the sound that will come. A really new, really all inclusive music. The whole people” (Jones 126-7). However, a music that will encompass the experiences of all black people, as I have asserted earlier with my argument against “The Black Man In The West” (Jones 118), is not possible, given the diverse group of individuals who identify themselves as black.

Getting to a completely black form of music requires the elimination of all that is non-black, particularly whiteness, to Jones. Jones prevents the inclusion of other cultures in the actual new black music, which is meant to be an even “larger expression” than “New Black Music,” which Jones asserts is about “the digging of everything” (Jones 126). However it seems impractical to assume that “the digging of everything” (my italics, Jones 126) can be attained through the exclusion of non-black texts. While this ostensibly keeps black music “pure,” it seriously hinders the possibilities for experimentation with and innovation of black music. Rather than creating a more authentic form of black music, Jones creates a limited sense of blackness. Jones does not recognize that other cultural references influence black artists and that in any society, particularly in one as eclectic as American culture; black artists are bound to come in contact with and be influenced by texts from other cultures. The attempt to create purely black music prevents black artists from changing music to reflect any experience they have that has been “tainted” with, or influenced by, other cultural communities. Hence, Jones’s insistence upon trying to create purely black music discourages black music from changing. This is problematic since change is a necessary component in the conception of black music as “the changing same.”

Another pressing tension in Jones’s piece involves determining the aim of black music, since Jones is so intent on arriving at a final form of black music. Jones insists that black music is evolving or changing (hence Jones’s essay title “The Changing Same”) but to what end? In Jones’s search for a black essence, he opts to move backwards toward a form of music that is devoid of white authoritative influence. At the end of Jones’s essay, he criticizes black artists for playing white music. Jones concludes, “To play [white] music is to be them and to act out their lives, as if you were them. There is then, a whole world of most intimacy and most expression, which is yours, colored man, but which you will lose playing melancholy baby in B-flat, or the Emporer Concerto, for that matter. Music lessons of a dying people” (Jones 131). Jones is quite clear in his adamant opposition to the inclusion of whiteness, particularly in his reference to white culture as “dying”. Yet though it is, perhaps, difficult to admit, the white authoritative texts that oppressed blacks are linked to the experience of blacks in America. To ignore the American aspects of black identity is to ignore the American aspect of African American identities.

Jones asserts that blacks are naturally inclined to move toward African music that is void of white influence and will lead black people to a pure black music that encompasses “a whole people” (Jones 127). In Jones’s insistence on eliminating white references in the text, he neglects to realize that white references are part of American culture and that American culture is a necessary part of the African American identity. Jones’s focus is on the movement toward an actual New Black Music, not an actual new African American music. He attempts to avoid incorporating any whiteness or aspects of American culture into the really new black music that he insists artists are moving towards. Jones stresses, “[T]he hard Black core of America is African” (Jones 122). Ultimately, Jones argues that the really new black music is headed in the direction of a purified blackness. Yet Jones includes an American identity in his conception of black music as well. As I have already quoted, Jones writes that the “blues impulse transferred…remained the exact replication of The Black Man In The West” (Jones 118). “In The West,” or American identity, is an essential aspect to the unified black identity Jones posits only some of the time. Toward the end of his piece, Jones resolves to incorporate American culture into the creation of the really new black music. Jones writes, “The meeting of the practical God (i.e., of the existent American idiom) and the mystical (abstract) God is also the meeting of the tones, of the moods, of the knowledge, the different musics and the emergence of the new music, the really new music, the all-inclusive whole. The emergence also of the new people, the Black people conscious of all their strength, in a unified portrait of strength, beauty and contemplation” (Jones 130). Since American culture is utterly inseparable from the experience of African Americans in America, some whiteness must be incorporated in black music to more realistically portray an African American identity.

Despite Jones’s push regression toward an essentially African identity, he also prophesizes about the really New Black Music of the future. As I asserted earlier, Jones has trouble asserting that the final music is a purely and distinctly black form of music and tends to resort back to an acceptance of some whiteness (resulting from American culture) in black music. Jones writes that Afro-American forms erode the “pure African form…and the gradual embracing of mixed Afro-Christian, Afro-American forms is an initial reference to the cultural philosophy of Black People, Black Art” (my italics, Jones 120). Yet Jones also contradicts himself in asserting that this “initial reference,” that is, the conglomeration of African and American, encapsulates the whole identity of black people. Jones writes, “Black Music is African in origin, African-American in its totality” (Jones 120). Thus, here, Jones indicates that black music’s destination lies in the emulation of an African American identity, and not in a purely African identity that lacks American, and hence white, influences. In describing the people reflected in the actual new black music as African American, Jones acknowledges that white culture, in part contributes to the shaping of black identity, though he is hesitant to admit it and continues only to allow as little whiteness he finds necessary into his final model of music.

Text as Resistance: Ortiz’s Notion of Authenticity in The Score

Unlike Jones, the Fugees do not hesitate to include white references in The Score. Bringing in white references is not an act of surrender to a superior form of music. On the contrary, one can see the use of white texts as a way for the Fugees to impose their own meaning on Western forms of expression that have traditionally oppressed black forms of expression. In other words, the Fugees have asserted authority over white texts by re-creating them in the black context. In his essay “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” Simon J. Ortiz asserts that minor literature has, in part, been shaped by oppressive forces and that recognizing the conditions that have shaped minor texts makes these texts most authentic (Ortiz 12). While Ortiz’s argument is intended to discuss Native American literature, his contentions are also relevant in discussing the influential forces at work in shaping black music.

Cultural tradition rests not in purifying minor expressions and ridding them of the oppressive culture’s influence, but in incorporating traditions that have been imposed to make the imposed traditions their own. Ortiz argues that Native Americans have, for instance, “used [imposed] languages on their own terms…. There is not a question of authenticity here; rather it is the way that Indian people have creatively responded to forced colonization. And this response has been one of resistance; there is no clearer word for it than resistance” (Ortiz 10). According to Ortiz’s argument, when the Fugees quote lines from songs by James Taylor and Johnny Cash in their tracks, they are not succumbing to white influence. Instead they are bringing white songs into their own realm, so to speak. The Fugees have the power to impose meaning on the white texts through incorporation and recreation. This recreation it is an act of creation and adaptation rather than an admittance of black texts as inferior.

It is in the adaptation of these texts that minor tradition is made. Texts that bring in and play on white texts are not only a way to resist passively accepting the oppressor’s imposed culture. Using white texts has also lead to a literature “based upon traditional resistance, which has given a particularly nationalistic character to the Native American voices,” argues Ortiz (10). In other words, minor tradition is created by re-appropriating dominant texts and blending them with minor forms of expression.

Recreating Christianity: Incorporating White References as Resistance

The Fugees recreate Christianity to make it more resonant of their culture and religious beliefs by adapting and reformatting Biblical stories. In “Manifest,” the Fugees tell the traditional Christian story of Jesus Christ’s betrayal. Yet they also bring in figures from the Rastafari religion in addition to their inclusion of instrumentation and oral style that are characteristic of rap music. These changes result in a recreation of a Biblical story from the New Testament. They exemplify the way that the Fugees incorporate white texts into their frame of references as a resistance to white texts rather than as a passive acceptance of the imposition of white texts.

In “Manifest,” Wyclef assumes the role of Jesus in the Fugees’ retelling of Jesus’s betrayal. Wyclef describes the anxiety he feels in the garden of Gethsemane before his death: “The time has arrived, the prophecy will manifest/ I saw death, I got scared, butterflies on my chest/ Father, if possible, pass this cup before me,/ But it’s too late I close my destiny in Gethsemane” (“Manifest,” Score). Wyclef places himself in Jesus’s exact location, at the garden of Gethsemane, with words like the ones Jesus spoke before he was crucified to assume the role of the savior. The Fugees recall a Christian story, based in the Western canonical tradition, but by placing a black figure in the role of Jesus, the Fugees set up a new context for understanding a story that is so often retold with a white messiah. In “Stereo Types: The Operation of Sound in the Production of Racial Identity,” Christopher Hight writes that black music was rejected by white listeners as beastly because of its disharmony. The harmonic system, which aimed toward heavenly and pure music, condemned anything straying from this ideology as demonic (Hight 15). In this binary structure, neither black music nor blacks themselves could emulate Christian purity. This imposition of a black messiah is one of the ways the Fugees take white references and recreate them to be empowering to a black audience. That is not to say that other audiences are not intended to listen to the recreated Biblical tale in “Manifest.” However, in replacing the ultimate figure of purity in the Bible, Jesus, with Wyclef, the Fugees work to make a political statement that blackness can be connected with purity, which has, historically, not been an uncommon belief in America.

Though Christianity was pushed on African slaves in America to accentuate any feeling of inferiority they might have, African Americans incorporated Christianity into their culture. African Americans adapted Christianity and used the Christian religion in many of their art forms. For instance, gospels and spirituals were a way for African Americans of the past to recreate Christianity on their own terms. Their incorporation of Christianity into musical texts they created illustrates that “the changing same” occurred and has continued to occur throughout African American history in America. Yet because the Christian religion has become so intertwined with what Gates would call black tradition, the white parts cannot easily be teased out and disposed of, as Jones might like to see in his pursuit of a purely black form of music. Rather, a tension exists between the pull towards God that is expressed in gospels, for instance, and a rejection of the Christian notions of purity.

In comparing himself with Jesus in “Manifest,” Wyclef assumes the most powerful role in Christianity. The Fugees present their spirituality as a strong and active force. Instead of submitting to oppressive forces that might discourage combining purity and blackness, as Hight writes of, the Fugees assert that as blacks, they are capable both of being spiritually righteous and of being black.

Resolving Tensions in Identity through Incorporation of White Texts

Ortiz’s assertion that the inclusion of white texts is a form of resistance is useful in that it allows one to move away of the misguided assumption that referring to white texts is in some way compromising to the legitimacy of black texts. Yet the use of white references is also a way for the Fugees to consolidate the doubleness, a term used by Gates (2429), that they face as blacks in America. Jones’s oscillation between separating and maintaining African from African American is no longer an issue when one recognizes that the American aspect of African American arts forms has become inextricably intertwined in African American forms of expression. The Fugees’ identity is yet further complicated than African American identity, as they declare a Haitian identity on top of their identity as black Americans. (In the next section, I will elaborate on how the notion of a matrix, which Houston A. Baker Jr. proposes in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, is useful in understanding how various layers of the Fugees’ identity come together.) Thus the Fugees use white references as a political act but also as a way of opening up new ways for them to explore their own identities.

The Fugees make modifications and additions to a traditionally Christian story as a political act as I mentioned earlier and also to reflect their own identities and beliefs, which are at least partially influenced by white texts like the Bible. The Fugees infuse the Biblical story in “Manifest” with a heavily percussive backbeat, bridging the separation between Christian, harmonic ideology and African American, percussive sound. Disharmony and Christianity, which were so adamantly distinguished from one another in the past, come together in “Manifest” to create a new conception of religion that allows the two traditions to co-exist.

The Fugees’ inclusion of white texts indicates that they have an understanding that white and black texts are not as mutually exclusive as writers like Jones assert. The Fugees recognize that white and black cultures are intertwined. The created texts reflect this conglomeration. Trying to separate cultural texts encourages artists to censor material they are drawing from to cater it to purely black issues. A purely black focus ultimately stunts the potential creative growth of black artists. Furthermore, denying that white forces have influenced the creation of black American texts means denying part of the texts themselves.

Rather than trying to dismiss any aspect of American culture as inherently oppressive, the Fugees bring American cultural references into their music. They do not attempt to create boundaries between black and white references, as Jones does. Instead, they include both forms in The Score. In doing this, the Fugees eliminate the difficulty that comes with designating black and white cultures as completely separate. The Fugees accept this conglomeration of white and black texts as part of their identity. They are able to create music that can move forward by avoiding the grueling task of trying to separate two cultural traditions that have become deeply intertwined.

Adding a Haitian Identity to the Mix

The Fugees deliberately make connections with yet another cultural identity, which makes the question of an authentic black heritage yet more complicated. The Fugees’ name is short for Refugees, which is a derogatory term used for Haitian immigrants (“Fugees”). The Fugees’ album The Score reflects the amalgamation of their identity as black Americans and Haitians. By opening up The Score to include multiple frameworks of heritage, the Fugees move away from the essentialist notion of race that Jones proposes as well as the racially-bounded tradition that Gates proposes. The music is both a deliberate attempt to reformat white texts to include other cultures and an act of creating a text that is reflective of an entirely new identity.

The Fugees use Rastafarian references in “Manifest” in addition to the Christian references I addressed earlier. Wyclef starts “Manifest” by rapping, “I woke up this morning/ I was feeling kind of high/ It was me, Jesus Christ, and Haile Selassie” (“Manifest,” The Score). Wyclef identifies two religious figures in “Manifest,” Jesus and Haile Selassie, as being present upon Wyclef’s awakening, which symbolizes their combined presence in his spiritual awakening and realization. The Fugees’ incorporation of a mystical religion that grew out of Jamaica does not undermine or negate the Fugees’ investment in the Christian religion that has been so influential in the creation of black music. Rather, these multiple cultural frames exist simultaneously to reflect the Fugees’ identification with both religions.

Embracing “The Changing Same” Without Essentialism

As I demonstrated with the black and white versions of Christianity paired with Rastafari religious texts in “Manifest,” The Score is a complex body of work that is compiled of an abounding number of texts, all of which draw from different cultures. In Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, Houston A. Baker Jr. conceives of the black tradition as a matrix (Baker 2230), which allows us to see black texts as drawing from a framework of moments in a multitude of intersecting ways, rather than as an evolution that is linear, as Jones asserts, or as a bounded body of works, as Gates asserts. Baker’s matrix imagines moments as combined and rearranged to create new texts is useful in understanding how new black texts are created. Nonetheless Baker’s matrix remains deeply rooted in the belief that there is a fundamental black essence that black texts grow out of.

Innovative or “changing” music does not have to come from divine spirits or the inner souls of individuals, according to Baker. “Rather than a rigidly personalized form,” writes Baker, “the blues offer a phylogenetic recapitulation—a nonlinear, freely associative, nonsequential meditation—of species experience. What emerges is not a filled subject, but an anonymous (nameless) voice issuing from the black (w)hole” (Baker 2231). Baker recognizes that artists are incorrect to assume that their personal experiences echo the experiences of all black people. However he still insists that there is a voice “issuing from the black (w)hole” (Baker 2231), or in other words, that there is some black soul that all blacks share. Baker thus shares Jones’s belief that a black text can be inclusive of “[t]he whole people” (Jones 127).

Though Baker remains stuck in an essentialized notion of blackness, his conception of a matrix is helpful in understanding how the Fugees can create a text that retains a black identity while simultaneously moving forward to recreate blackness. Rather than recognizing texts as deriving from pure forms of cultural traditions, Baker argues that there are multiple frames of reference that artists draw from when they are creating art. Baker recognizes the complex interplay between texts that is present in the Fugees’ album. He asserts that language is constructed by “‘production’ as well as ‘modes of production’ [and] must be grasped in terms of the sign” (Baker 2229). As I argued in my section on communal authorship, there is an interaction between different texts involved in both creating and assessing a text. Like the exchanges that occur between audience and author in the creation of a text, moments from various texts interact to create an entirely new text.

Baker argues that each black text is derived from a matrix of other texts. Baker explains, “The matrix is a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit” (Baker 2230). Unlike Gates, Baker sees new black texts as deriving not from an ordinal set of texts that make up the black tradition, but from a plethora of moments in various texts that are chaotically, though deliberately, mixed together and recombined. Baker explains the complexity of the system: “The ‘X’ of crossing roadbeds signals the multidirectionality of the juncture and is simply a single instance in a boundless network that redoubles and circles, makes sidings and ladders, forms Y’s and branches over the vastness of hundreds of thousands of American miles” (Baker 2233). Black texts grow out of an assortment of other texts, which are gathered and can be combined in infinite ways. Baker later continues, “The singer and his production are always at this intersection, this crossing, codifying force, providing resonance for experience’s multiplicities” (Baker 2233). Each text, then, is an example of one instance in which texts have combined to create something new.

Baker’s matrix, which he applies to the blues, differs significantly from Jones’s “blues impulse” in “The Changing Same.” Rather than the singular “line we could trace, as musical ‘tradition’” that Jones speaks of (Jones 119), Baker perceives a variety of texts that artists draw from when creating a black text. His conception of the multiple texts engaged in creating the black tradition moves away from Jones’s problematic conception of a singular black experience. By focusing on variety, artists can draw from different texts to reflect their individual experiences.

Applying Baker’s “Matrix” to an Analysis of the Fugees’ “Zealots”

Using Baker’s matrix, one can recognize that the Fugees re-contextualize old forms of black music in The Score by adding new beats and vocals to old samples. In “Zealots,” the Fugees build upon a sample of the Flamingos’ 1959 classic “I Only Have Eyes for You.” Despite the very clear re-appropriation of the Flamingos’ song, the Fugees draw from a variety of texts to express their conception of black experience. As Baker asserts, it is a matrix, and not a line like Jones argues, that artists draw from when creating black music.

Upon hearing “Zealots,” one’s first impulse might be to say that the Fugees are recreating a popular song by the Flamingos. This direct lineage seems apparent enough. The structure of “Zealots” shares many of the same characteristics as “I Only Have Eyes for You.” “Zealots” begins with the familiar “shoo-bop shoo-bop” of the Flamingos quintet that “I Only Have Eyes for You” is so well known for. The Fugees highlight the tune by beginning “Zealots” with a sped up but still very recognizable sample of “I Only Have Eyes for You” before the Fugees move in with their own contribution to the piece: a heavy bass. The Fugees use the Flamingos’ voices for the background of “Zealots.” The voices of the Fugees take over as the illuminated sound in the foreground of the song to further juxtapose the old with the new. This addition, which is added after having played the original riff on its own, makes the audience aware that the Fugees are reformatting the old rhythm and blues song to make it new. The Fugees are quite deliberate in showing the listener that alterations have been made. There is no attempt to cover the artificial addition of the bass to make it seem natural. If the Fugees wanted to show the audience that they were being completely original, they would not have used a track to cover at all. Re-appropriating another text in “Zealots” is a conscious attempt to recreate an old text.

Seeing the Fugees’ sampling of the Flamingos’ song as Jones might, as a single traceable line from past tradition to a present genre, is not incorrect, but it leads to an oversimplified understanding how black texts draw from the black tradition. Rather than merely seeing one line from connecting the Flamingos to the Fugees, Baker’s matrix allows us to see that there are an indefinite number of interconnections between past and present. Baker uses the physicist as an example of one who has to “choose between velocity and position” to make an analysis (Baker 2237). In choosing one intersection between the past and the present to analyze, the physicist has to “forgo manifold variables in order to apply intensive energy to a selected array” (Baker 2237). In other words, comparing the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” with the Fugees’ “Zealots” involves setting aside other aspects of the black tradition that the piece draws from in order to focus on the connection between these two texts. For example, one could just as easily choose to compare the rhythm and blues sound that is typically used in “pimp rap” (Krims 64) with the Fugees’ use of the rhythm and blues sound in “Zealots.” If that analysis was not particularly attractive to a critical analyst, one could perhaps compare the flow used in “Zealots” to the flow in other songs categorized as reality rap.

There are an infinite number of black texts and an infinite number of aspects within those black texts that can be compared and contrasted with the Fugees’ song “Zealots.” Though Jones recognizes that different kinds of black music exist in his essay “The Changing Same,” he does not elaborate, as Baker does, on the variety of texts that are incorporated in a nonlinear fashion to the creation of a new black text.

A Broader Sense of the “Matrix” in the Fugees’ “Family Business”

It is important to reiterate that thus far, I have used Baker’s matrix to describe the way the Fugees use references from black texts in my analysis of “Zealots.” Baker’s text speaks specifically to the cross-sectioning of moments from the African American tradition. However, as I have already asserted, non-African American texts are also used to create black texts. In “Family Business,” the Fugees expand the sense of a matrix to include non-African American texts in addition to African American texts.

In The Score, the Fugees do not take on the burden of trying to define the black American experience. Rather than trying to distinguish where and how blackness lies in texts, the Fugees focus their energy on creation. By opening up The Score to new conceptions of blackness rather than trying to dig up and reflect upon a defined biological or cultural conception of blackness, the Fugees are able to change black music to move it forward. That is to say, the Fugees recreate conceptions of blackness through their creation of music. They combine aspects from various texts of different cultural traditions to create a new text, which speaks to yet more audiences. The Fugees reformat moments from black texts, yet unlike Jones, Gates, and Baker, they are willing to incorporate non-African American texts in their creation of music as well. The Fugees do not ground themselves completely in any one culture at the cost of other identities. Instead, they consistently use multiple frameworks so as to open up the text to various audiences. Their text, then, changes to moves forward in that it builds upon and expands conceptions of blackness. Like Jones, Gates, and Baker, the Fugees emphasize the significance of community in the creation of black texts but the Fugees focus on a localized rather than a racialized sense of community.

In “Family Business,” the Fugees highlight their expansive sense of the black community in a localized setting. Unlike Jones’s attempts to bring black music back to its African roots in “The Changing Same,” which I discussed in my section on expulsing non-African texts, the Fugees welcome influences from non-African American cultures. Though Baker’s matrix is particularly focused on African American texts, the Fugees throw Caribbean black culture into the mixture of texts they draw from and recreate in The Score.

“Haitian-Sicilians” rings out as the first phrase in “Family Business.” With these words, Wyclef sets the tone for the Fugees’ proud shout-out to their community in The Score. Though I mentioned Omega as one of the speaking personas earlier in my section on the audience as subjects and objects, in terms of the way the Fugees format The Score, Omega first enters The Score in this seventh track. Omega’s participation as a new speaking persona but also as a co-creator of “Family Business” illustrates the constant incorporation of new voices, exemplifying the incorporation of various community members and audiences that the Fugees are creating to and for. Omega raps the chorus in addition to the opening verse and Forte raps a verse toward the end of the song. In using various voices, the Fugees demonstrate that they want to bring in more community, or “family members” than just the three main speaking personas to participate in the creation of “Family Business.” In doing this, they are symbolically, in effect, opening up the text to new audiences. By welcoming new artists to contribute to the creation of their songs, the Fugees implicitly signal their understanding in the importance of inviting to voices to participate in the creation of black texts in addition to the Fugees’ understanding that creation emerges from a communal authorship.

The instrumental aspect of “Family Business” also emulates the emphasis on an expanded black community. In the same way that the listener can count on hearing the voices of the Fugees in each song, the riff works as a stabilizing feature to “Family Business.” Various instrumental and vocal sounds move in and out of the background, much like the different voices that come and go in the forefront of the song.

In “Family Business,” the Fugees actively create a new sense of community. The Fugees do not hearken back to Africa or to African tradition. Though they are part of the rap community, which emerged out of African American forms of music, the Fugees do not commit themselves solely to an African American identity. Their home, they insist, is not in Africa, but in New Jersey. Wyclef raps, “I think of old ghosts, that ain’t even here./ Like Alex Haley take notes on this Biography/ My family tree consists of street refugees/ A ghetto land where we talk slang/ Stolen cars bang/ Like my chitties bang bang” (“Family Business” The Score). In his 1976 book Roots, Alex Haley traces his heritage back to Africa, which initiated a trend in African American culture to embrace African culture (“Alex Haley”). Unlike Alex Haley, Wyclef does not feel completely rooted only in an African heritage or identity. Wyclef says that his community is like Haley’s book about African roots, but not that it is his identity. Yet Wyclef intentionally includes this reference, which implies that he at least partially agrees with Haley’s assertion that black Americans have inherited African forms of expression. Haley’s reference to African texts is part of Wyclef’s identity. The Fugees’ use rap music as their chosen form of expression in The Score and rap is very much linked with old African forms of expression.

Wyclef incorporates African roots into his identity as he asserts with Yet Wyclef also asserts, “My family tree consists of street refugees” (“Family Business” The Score). The term “refugees,” as I mentioned earlier, refers to Haitian immigrants. While Wyclef refers to Haitian immigrants as his family, thus insinuating that part of his identity at least partially emerges out of identification with Haitian culture, The Score is set in America. Despite the Haitian heritage that the Fugees consistently allude to, they do not link themselves to a purely Haitian identity either. The “ghetto land” Wyclef raps about is in America, not in Haiti. Omega also claims that his urban community in America is his homeland. In “Family Business,” Omega raps “The family’s behind you if you’re worthy/ Philosophies developed deep in the back streets of Dirty Jersey” (“Family Business” The Score). The Fugees thus identify with America, as it is the literal setting that The Score takes place in. The Fugees do not assert any one cultural identity as having precedence over another identity. Instead it is in the interplay between these different identities that The Score emerges. The Fugees embrace ties to black culture, Haitian culture, and American culture. The Fugees create their text based on their experience in America, but they also draw from African American musical forms in their adaptation of rap and from the Haitian culture they have grown up with. The matrix they use to create The Score is vested with multiple cultural frameworks, which are drawn from in various ways to create a new text that is grounded in, but independent from, all of the texts that The Score has emerged out of.

Summarizing “The Changing”

By looking outside of black frames of reference, the Fugees are able to recreate the black tradition itself. In The Score, the Fugees incorporate texts from Western and Caribbean culture into their music. Though some might contend that using other texts to create music in some way dilutes blackness and negates a text’s categorization as a black text, I have tried to show that using other texts actually makes black music more expressive of black individuals.

Black music is fluid. It is incorrect to assert that texts from other cultures have not influenced the creation of black texts. American influence has contributed significantly to the formation of black texts. Jones’s essay “The Changing Same” itself was written as an attempt to strengthen black tradition in American society. Jones and his audience reside in America and even the most estranged African Americans are still influenced by American culture.

The Fugees do not hesitate to use what may be termed as white cultural references in their album because they recognize American culture, which includes white references, as part of their identity. Likewise, they recognize their Haitian heritage as part of their identity and incorporate aspects from the Caribbean traditions into their music as well. The Fugees incorporate white and Caribbean traditions into their music not to dilute their true and inherent black identity, but to express their entire identity, which would be partly lost by only focusing on black tradition.

As I have established, a single black identity does not exist. Claiming that an entire diverse group of people has the same identity is limiting, not empowering. Jones’s insistence upon emulating the black experience does not consider any difference in classes, genders, religious beliefs, etc. that may influence one’s identity in addition to race.

Furthermore, denying other traditions keeps tradition static. In recognizing that people and communities are constantly evolving and changing, one must accept that music is continually changing as well. A willingness to adapt and recreate opens up black texts. Recognizing the constant interpolation and recreation of black texts gives artists the freedom to recreate the notion of blackness itself. This recreation is essentially what makes up “the changing same.”

“The Same” as “The Changing”

In examining Jones’s concept of “the changing same,” I have attempted to hold onto the general gist of his claim, which is that black texts manifest, or call upon, old texts to maintain their black identity, while simultaneously working to recreate the conception of blackness. I have built off of Jones’s conception of a type of “sameness” necessary for black texts to maintain a sense of blackness and an evolution that is necessary for the continual creation of black texts. That is to say, black texts must keep their black identity but in order for this category of texts to continue, they must inevitably change. The “changing” aspect of my adaptation of “the changing same,” as I have noted, comes out of the constant creation and recreation of black texts and thus, in essence, of conceptions of blackness. However I have yet to specifically address what it is that remains “the same.”

The constantly persisting aspect of “the changing same,” or in order words, “the same,” lies in the understanding that black texts are always changing. That is to say, tradition rests in the innovation of black texts. Like black people and all people who identify with cultural groups, identity is never static. There is no black core as Jones asserts, nor is there a black tradition with definite boundaries as Gates insists, nor is there even a matrix of blackness that artists use in their creation of new texts. Rather, all new black texts emerge out one permanent and all-encompassing thing: innovation.

In The Score, the Fugees demonstrate an understanding of the interplay between texts that results in the creation of new texts and the recreation of blackness. This acceptance allows the Fugees to move away from the stigmatizing problem of emulating a particular blackness. Jones does not attempt to restrict artists but his focus on “the same,” or unifying characteristics of blacks, rather than a focus on “the changing,” or recreation of blackness itself, holds artists back from what they can potentially do, which it to uproot and actively change blackness itself.

The Fugees, on the other hand, create a text that is devoid of limitations or boundaries. With infinite possibilities as opposed to the limited possibilities of creation that Jones offers, the Fugees can create a new text that offers new understandings of what blackness is. Theirs is a text which is truly exemplary of “the changing same.”

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