VIBZ NATION

area of Brooklyn, New York. "When I got to America," Jean later told Ebony magazine, "I was expecting to see money falling from the sky." But the Marlboro housing projects, where Jean and his family lived, didn't quite meet with Jean's initial expectations. The opportunities for Jean and his family, however, felt limitless compared to those available in their former home. Wyclef, who spoke only Haitian French when he entered the states, quickly learned English from listening to American rap music. Music soon became one of Wyclef's chief interests; his mother sensed his talent early, and gave him a guitar as a gift in the hopes of keeping him away from the local gang activity. The first song he learned to play was Steve Martin's humorous spoof, King Tut. In his early teens, Jean and his family moved to Newark, New Jersey, so that Gesner Jean could assume a post at the city's Good Shepherd Church of the Nazarene. At Newark's Vailsburg High School, Wyclef stayed focused on his passion for music. He majored in jazz, studied the ins and outs of the music business, and learned to play more than 15 instruments. Wyclef, along with his cousin Prakazrel Michel and friend Lauryn Hill, also started experimenting with hip-hop music. In order to afford studio time to record their original compositions, Jean saved up money from his job at an area McDonald's. Jean's talent quickly came to the attention of music executives and, while he was still a minor, he was offered a recording contract. The deal fell through, however, because Jean's father refused to condone his musical tastes. "When I'd come back from the studio, I'd get a whipping from my dad, 'cause I was playing devil's music," Jean later told Rolling Stone magazine.

Famed Musician

Instead, Jean and Michel played for Vailsburg High School's swing choir and formed a rap group called Exact Change, which rapped their positive message in six languages. Changing their name to Tranzlator Crew, they were signed to Columbia Records in 1993. After a legal dispute with another band named Translator, the group renamed themselves the Fugees, a shortened version of the word "refugees." Their debut album, Blunted on Reality (1993), received warm reviews and sold moderately well. Wyclef Jean is the rapper and former member of the Fugees who ran for president of Haiti in 2010. Wyclef Jean was born in Haiti and lived there until age 9, when he moved with his family to the United States -- first to Brooklyn, and later New Jersey. Wyclef Jean learned to play the guitar and rap as a teen, and with his cousin Pras Michel and Lauryn Hill, he formed the group the Fugees early in the 1990s. They became known for their political lyrics and unusual mix of hip-hop, pop and reggae -- what RollingStone.com later called "postcolonial discourse and a gumbo of Afrocentric rhythms." The Fugees' first album, Blunted on Reality, was released in 1994; their second album, The Score (1996), included a hip-hop cover of the Roberta Flack tune "Killing Me Softly (With His Song)" and went to #1 on the Billboard music charts. The Fugees disbanded the next year, and Wyclef Jean went on to a solo career, releasing albums including The Carnival (1997) and The Preacher's Son (2003). He also worked as a music producer with Destiny's Child and Carlos Santana, among others. Perhaps most notably he produced (and sang on) Shakira's megahit 2006 single "Hips Don't Lie," a reworking of Jean's own 2004 song "Dance Like This." In 2005 he founded Yéle Haiti, a charitable group dedicated to helping Haiti. After a 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed 230,000 people and thrust the country into chaos, Wyclef Jean announced he would try to run for president of Haiti in the elections of November 2010. However, election officials disqualified him from running; Haiti's electoral law states that any candidate must have resided in the country for five consecutive years.

Extra credit: Wyclef Jean is often called simply "Clef"... The name Fugees was short for "refugees"... His birthplace, Croix-des-Bouquets, is just a few miles east of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince... Wyclef Jean's father, Gesner Jean, was a Nazarene priest... Wyclef Jean married the fashion designer Marie Claudinette in 1994. They adopted a daughter, Angelina, in 2005... Wyclef Jean's uncle, Raymond Alcide Joseph, became the Haitian ambassador to the United States in 2005.