“What, you thought this was another Pepsi commercial?” asks Wyclef Jean on his new single, “PJs”—not an ode to Mickey Mouse onesies, but rather a proud rally cry for anyone who grew up in public housing. Say what you will about this famously cocksure rapper-singer-guitarist-producer, but you can’t accuse him of selling out his own domineering sense of self. As uneven as his stylistically scattershot track record may be, Haitian-born ’Clef continually aspires to the heights he first brushed against when the Fugees conquered America back in 1996. His strummy Bob Marley impression tends to wear thin, but he’s still eminently preferable to Shaggy as an ambassador of reggae-derived crossover pop. If he has yet to make nice with ex-partner Lauryn Hill (whose own new solo outing is worlds away from ’Clef’s heedless eclecticism), at least he’s found a fine backup singer in City High’s Claudette Ortiz, who guests on the tasty troubled-lover ballad “Two Wrongs Don’t Make It Right.” Such island-inflected R&B nuggets may not hit as hard as the grittier jams, but even the clay-mation homies from the PJs are plagued by the occasional heartache.
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