Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly With His Song,"
performed by The Fugees

Folk singer Lori Lieberman saw “American Pie” man Don McLean perform his plaintive divorce ballad “Empty Chairs” in concert, and the song she went on to compose was transformed by songwriters Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel and vocalist Roberta Flack into “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” which peaked at the top of the charts in February 1973.

That you can Kevin Bacon your way from Don McLean to The Fugees in three steps is a little amusing — they’re pretty much paragons of, respectively, white and black American music. But “Killing Me Softly” — both Flack’s original and the Fugees’s cover from 1996’s The Score — is full of a poetry far more primal and less self-conscious than McLean’s own. It’s one of the most intimate pop songs to hit the airwaves, and it concerns itself with exactly that intimacy between singer and listener:

I felt all flushed with fever
Embarrassed by the crowd
I felt he found my letters
And read each one out loud
I prayed that he would finish
But he just kept right on

The Fugees’ version is clearly a much better jam than Flack’s, but is it a zero-sum game? Do the song’s trademarks — the bassline, echo and sitar loop and especially the responsive comments to lead singer Lauryn Hill — detract from the affective power of Hill’s impeccable torch song vocals?

Not at all. By updating the tune with hip-hop trappings, the group underscores the basic nature of hip hop: its community-mindedness, its conversational nature. Co-Fugees Wyclef Jean and Pras are there supporting Hill, and, as the whole of The Score shows, each member is there for the others in times of difficulty and of joy. There are virtually no hip-hop artists who record exclusively solo — many are members of a larger collective, official or otherwise, and their side projects usually feature a number of their contemporaries; or, at the very least, they have challenging producers pushing them. It’s a communal art, with abundant room for personal expression and difference of opinion but almost always grounded in a sense of solidarity. The subject of “Killing Me Softly” may be “telling my whole life with his words,” but it’s when you look past the words that you really see what The Fugees did with it.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)