On October 19th, Wyclef Jean released his 4th solo album entitled Welcome To Haiti: Creole 101. As the title suggests this album is not your ordinary album, but ordinary by whose standards? Wyclef is known for pushing the buttons with his music and on this album he does just that. This album is 80% Creole according to Wyclef, he speaks four different languages in all, Spanish, English, Creole, and French. “Whether someone speaks English, Spanish, Creole or French, I wanted them to hear the music and feel like it’s one fluid piece. I could speak Creole but to actually put it in terms where even if you don’t understand, the wordplay still sounds like English but yet it’s Creole, that right there is Creole 101. It took long cause I had to write everything and make sure it was right and I tried to make everything correspond with the 200 years of independence. The theme of this album is the bicentennial in Haiti.”

“I have always incorporated elements of my heritage into my music and videos,” says Jean, “but this album represents a total unification of my two worlds.” For anybody who isn’t Haitian that might feel left out on the album and who might be wondering why Wyclef came out with this album Clef says, “In order for you to ask that, you really not following me because if you have the album The Carnival, and the album The Ecleftic and all of my albums you will always hear a Creole joint, and if you are a real Wyclef fan than there’s no way in hell you can ask why the album is in Creole, that’s like someone on Flatbush Avenue (BROOKLYN) asking why’s the album in Creole. For a fan who’s a “Gone ‘Til November” fan or something like that, that’s why I clearly stated Creole 101.”
Wyclef does have one English song on the album, the first single, “President,” a timely political commentary sure to resonate with the masses during this heated U.S. Presidential election season.

Wyclef has already showcased the “President” polemic in high-profile performances at the Democratic National Convention at Fleet Center on July 28th, the “A Change Is Going To Come: The Concert for John Kerry” at Radio City Music Hall on July 8th and on Comedy Central's enormously popular program “Chappelle's Show” on May 4th and it was premiered on BET and MTV the week the album was released. The album is for Haiti’s bicentennial but “I said if I do a song in English it will be “President” because it goes with the concept of what I’m trying to do. The record goes, “If I was President/I’d get elected on Friday/Assassinated on Saturday/ Buried on Sunday/ They go back to work on Monday/ (If it sounds like, Then go back to work, that’s just Wyclef’s Haitian, it’s They). The song is the story of so many of us, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy.

The album isn’t all that serious and out of this country. FOXY BROWN joins Wyclef on one song where the Trinidadian native twists English and Creole on a song called “Haitian Mafia.” As crazy as it sounds FOXY kills that record in whatever language she spits it. “The Caribbean connection is like a different connection. If you know about the Caribbean connection you know when someone says ‘YO TRINI’ or ‘YO GT’ they act like it’s the last group of people on the earth. Foxy got mad love for Haiti and she’s still the hardest out when it comes straight to spitting like a nigga. Nobody still not seeing Foxy, all she gotta do is focus. She was like ‘Yo Clef I want to do a record with you, she was excited cause she wanted to flip Creole and English. She was like how you say this in Creole and she just went in there and dropped it. When all my Haitians friends hear it they wild out! They were like oh shit Foxy speaking Creole and I don’t know too many females that could pull that off. She’s saying the words phonetically and when she says the Creole words she sounds Haitian.

Welcome to Haiti is the first release from Jean’s newly created record label, Sak Pasé, which means “What’s Up?” in Creole. “This is Sak Pasé’s debut album, so I am determined to make it successful, it’s the blueprint for how I want the label to sound,” explains Jean. I’m not trying to sell 4 million records; I’m all about independence and owning certain things. This is what you call a Cle catalog, I had to make sure I had full ownership of this because ten years from now, if someone has a movie and they want to change the mood and they say, ‘yo go get that Clef Welcome TO Haiti joint’ and they take a song and put it in a scene, I have ownership of that. I thought like that because when I talked to Quincy Jones and he was telling me about the Austin Powers theme, he was like ‘you know how much I paid for that: 20,000, you know how much Austin Powers people gave me for that: 10 million. So ownership of your own publishing is very important. If I put that through a BMG system I would have to give them money. So anything that’s Creole or World Beat has to come out on Clef Records or Sak Pasé Records.

WYCLEF JEAN on THE FUGEES:
The Fugee record is definitely coming out. I don’t know when, it’s like Christ they say, he come like a thief in the night. I know Lauryn is finishing her solo R & B record and after that the Fugees album is the focal point.
So how did they reunite? You gotta understand there’s something called perception, unless I say something or Lauryn says something or Pras says something it’s perception or speculation. I spoke to L before all this, I been in communication with her off and on and I squashed my beef with Pras a long time ago. Like to everybody else it was like “What, what the fuck, no announcement,” but that’s just how the Fugees are. It’s a twisted group there was no deep shit to it, it was like do ya’ll want to go to the Dave Chappelle Block Party and we all love Dave so we all went. And even people that know we were going were like they ain’t gonna show up as a group. Maybe two of them but not all three but we just showed up. As simple as it is that’s as simple as the album would be.
Right Now Wyclef is currently trying to find the best thing he can do to contribute to Brooklyn’s Youth. As a Haitian immigrant coming to Brooklyn, he knows that it’s been a long time since Brooklyn’s kids have had something to do. “I have an idea for a spot called Little Haiti, it’s like a club, restaurant it’s everything from the Caribbean/Haitian culture and everything. The kids need something to do cause I remember as a kid growing up Friday Night I gotta get off the block and I’d get some shoes and some slacks because I was going to see some honeys.”

TO THE HAITIANS:
I’ma tell ya’ll like this, I came hear when I was like 10, I’m 34 now and I’m still whopping every bodies ass. And when my parents came from Haiti the only thing they gave me was culture and the culture is what got me this far and kept me interesting. You can do whatever you do but don’t forget at the end of the day you got that Haitian Blood in you.