George Benson said that he had the power to make either jazz albums that sold 50,000 or soul albums that sold a million; that while he’d prefer to make jazz albums, he couldn’t do it to Warner Bros. Well, Wyclef has got the result that Benson probably would have got from WB – BMG refused to issue this album, so he’s released it on Koch’s San Pasé label. As Public Enemy said, “if you don’t own the master, the Master owns you”.
BMG rejected it because it’s a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Haiti’s independence and only a couple of tracks are in English – mostly it’s in French or Creole. Although Wyclef sounds very comfortable in this context, it only managed to get to number 66 on the R&B album chart, which shows how important the promotion power of the major companies is - and how resistant the American public is to anything truculently un-American. There are no plans to release this in Britain; Cardiff shops don’t even have it on their computers as imports, but you can get it from CDX Radyr, Amazon or 101CD - AM
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