Twelve copies. The Fugees’ debut album, Blunted On Reality, moved a dozen measly units in its first weeks in 1994, based on the legend anyway. It was the type of belly flop that could bury a career. Which is why the runaway success of the group’s sophomore LP The Score just two years later was so improbable. Nevermind improbable. Blair Witch improbable. “Gangnam Style” improbable. The Score spent four weeks at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200, eclipsing releases by Alanis, Hootie, and Soundgarden. In under two years it went platinum six times, and won a Grammy for Best Rap Album along the way. “Killing Me Softly” and “Ready Or Not” didn’t make a dent in the Hot 100 at the time, but anyone who lived through that era knows they were as ubiquitous and loved as any of the hits that did. Coming at the tail end of the gangsta years, but before shiny suits and the South’s gold-plated armies took over, The Score filled the void by balancing consciousness and street cred, hip-hop realness and radio readiness. The formula was so successful, its appeal so obvious, that a group like City High could land a hit with a facsimile of it and The Black Eyed Peas would eventually achieve nearly equivalent success by bastardizing it. Just as improbable was the transformation of Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill, and Pras Michel from the hollering emcees of Blunted to the genre-blending craftsmen of The Score. They’d carry this critical and commercial momentum into hugely successful solo endeavors, and subsequently dominate the final half of the ‘90s. As pop stars, they were seemingly conjured out of the ether. And after a handful of years of cultural hegemony, they dissipated back into that mist. A third album never came, nor did a formal breakup. There was no spectacular conflagration or catastrophic implosion. Instead, it was erosion, the elements pounding away over time to reveal little cracks until The Fugees buckled under their own weight, leaving the landscape forever altered. This is how the colossus turned to rubble — and how it might be rebuilt again.

Did Love Take Out The Fugees? Only Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean know exactly when the affair began. It’s impossible to “blame” someone or reverse butterfly effect the story to suss out a defining moment of the band’s disintegration, but the affair between its two strongest personalities certainly catalyzed the process. Before The Score was even done, when the trio was still holed up in the Booga Basement working on it, the married Haitian multi-instrumentalist and the prodigious 20-year-old multi-hyphenate had already racked up enough romantic drama to compel Hill to quit the band. “The group had disbanded. [Hill] had left the group at this point and we didn’t know what we were going to do,” Pras recounted in a 2014 Billboard interview. “She calls me and says, ‘Listen, I’m going to come down to the studio and I’m going to lay down a reference for you guys, a hook. I give you permission to use my hook, my voice, but I don’t want to be a part of this group anymore…Make sure certain people are not around when I’m there.’ I said, ‘No problem.’ She’s laying the reference for ‘Ready Or Not’ and then she goes into the bridge and she’s crying. I see her crying. She stops and says, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ and leaves.”

Her departure was temporary, but by the time The Score hit shelves in February of ‘96, rumors of a relationship between Hill and Jean had emerged. Years later, the public would learn that during the promo and tour cycle for the album in ‘97, Hill had begun seeing Bob Marley’s son Rohan Marley. She became pregnant that year, and the initial confusion over the paternity of the child (Marley was the father) was the tipping point for Jean. According to Touré’s 2003 Rolling Stone exposé, when Hill went into labor, “Jean told a source he was flying to her side to see his new child.” Wyclef would seemingly corroborate this account in his memoir, Purpose: An Immigrant’s Story, claiming Hill lied to him about being the father. “In that moment something died between us,” Jean wrote. “I was married and Lauryn and I were having an affair, but she led me to believe that the baby was mine, and I couldn’t forgive that.” Hill has refrained from detailing their behind-the-scenes soap opera, only alluding to it in song, alleging mistreatment and “abuse” during her time with Pras and Wyclef, or speaking cryptically about it in public. But her devastating verse in The Score closer “Manifest/Outro” was presumably one of the few contemporaneous accounts of the affair, and it indicates just how volatile things already were before the pregnancy: “You see I loved hard once, but the love wasn’t returned, I found out the man I’d die for, he wasn’t even concerned…Diamonds deserve diamonds, but he convinced me I was worth less…I was God’s best contemplating death with a Gillette, but no man is ever worth the paradise manifest.” We’ll probably never know who was doing the manipulating or if they were both playing mind games, but clearly the tryst wreaked emotional havoc on the pair, and the group. Odd man out Pras still felt that the entire experience “brought a form of euphoria” to all three of them, which would sound revisionist if it hadn’t mirrored something Hill said a decade prior, even after openly acknowledging the heartbreak she went through. “The Fugees was supernatural love,” she’d tell Trace in 2005. “That’s the kind of love that can scale mountains, and create paradigms and strange dynamics.” That’s also the kind of love that’s too intense to last. “If it wasn’t the baby, something else would’ve happened, and it would’ve exploded in different ways,” Wyclef later hypothesized.

Did Success Destroy The Fugees? ?“Ooh la la la.”

“Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide. I’m gonna fiiiiind you.”

“I play my enemieees like a game of chess.”

“Strumming my pain with his fingers…”

“I’ll be Nina Simone, and defecatin’ on your microphone.”? Lauryn Hill was responsible for the most indelible moments from one of the most celebrated collections of music ever made, confirming what anyone who listened to Blunted had already deduced: She was the group’s true star. But to the masses, “the star” merely meant the singer, the sex appeal, the bankable face. Pop music’s default narrative is that of the male genius behind the boards bringing his vision to life by grooming the gifted ingenue. If Björk and Beyoncé and Grimes are still raging against that vestige of the patriarchy today, imagine how much more ingrained and insidious it was 20 years ago. Actually, no need to imagine: Rolling Stone, 1996: “Jean, a musical jack-of-all-trades who raps, sings and plays guitar and keyboards, in addition to having written and produced almost all the music on The Score” [One look through the CD booklet — not Wikipedia — shows Hill and Jean had identical production and writing credits.]

He wasn’t off-base, if the lyrics are any indication. The Carnival contained “To All The Girls,” basically Jean’s glib rationalization about stepping out on his wife with Hill. A mere Nerf dart compared to Hill’s eventual truth bombs on tracks like “Lost Ones” (“My emancipation don’t fit your equation / I was on the humble you on every station…Now you wanna bawl over separation / Tarnish my image in the conversation”), “Ex-Factor,” “I Used To Love Him,” and “When It Hurts So Bad” (“Gave up my power / I existed for you / But who ever knew / The voodoo you’d do”). Weeks after her debut dropped, Hill was still brushing off rumors that such lines were about her bandmate, but she’d effectively cop to it by 2005: “You have to remember that I had been through a tumultuous relationship, a painful relationship, and I was still hurting, and I hadn’t healed… Even though I was upset at someone, it was still coming from love.” The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill came out on August 25, 1998, and sold 422,000 copies in its first week, then a record opening week for a female artist. It kept pace with The Score — four weeks at No. 1, six platinum certifications — and then eclipsed it, going platinum another two times over. It was the first hip-hop release to win the Album of the Year Grammy, and Hill became the first female artist to bring home five Grammys in one night. In one fell swoop, she flexed on her ex and outscored The Score. Within weeks of the release, she was being referred to as “the former Fugees singer,” but as late as January ‘99, Wyclef was still talking about the group’s third album as an inevitability. Tellingly, Clef and Hill would appear on Santana’s star-studded Supernatural that summer — on separate tracks. Was It Ms. Hill’s Rebellion That Brought Down The Fugees? “The Fugees was conspiracy to control, to manipulate, and to encourage dependence,” Hill told Trace in 2005. “I was not allowed to say I was great; that was considered arrogance, conceit.” Real or perceived, this toxic dynamic drove her to go the auteur route. Unlike her bandmates’ solo projects, Miseducation existed outside The Fugees’ circle of influence, and Hill even turned down chances to work with established names like RZA to ensure she was seen as the project’s singular visionary. And so The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill was “produced, written and arranged” by Hill, despite the fact that she worked closely with industry newcomers Johari Newton, Tejumold Newton, Vada Nobles, and Rasheem Pugh. Such was the trust, and naivety, among the parties that no paperwork was signed to formalize their partnership. The four would later sue Hill, claiming she didn’t properly credit them on 13 of the LP’s 14 tracks, including as primary songwriters on the single, “Everything Is Everything.” “It went from we to I,” Nobles recalled in 2008. “Everything started out genuine but somewhere down the line, something switched,” “I tried my best to resolve it without lawyers but it became impossible.”