Lauryn Hill paid tribute to longtime good friend and artistic accomplice John Forté following his sudden loss of life at age 50, describing their early bond and shared rise in Hip-Hop as “surreal” and unforgettable.
Forté, a Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter greatest recognized for his work with the Fugees, was discovered unresponsive at his house in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on January 12.
A neighbor found him on the kitchen ground round 2:25 p.m. He was pronounced useless on the scene. No indicators of foul play had been discovered, and the reason for loss of life stays beneath investigation by the state medical expert.
Lauryn Hill, who launched Forté to Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel within the early Nineteen Nineties, mirrored on their early days collectively in New York Metropolis, when Hip-Hop was nonetheless discovering its voice and the Fugees had been simply starting to form theirs.
“I can’t keep in mind the precise second I met John Forté—or Forté, as we used to name him—however I do know we turned quick associates very quickly after,” Hill stated in an announcement. “I beloved him. My household beloved him.”
“Our era of Hip-Hop was younger and on the ascent of its epic rise,” she stated. “We had been each there… collaborating and taking all of it in, full of pleasure and risk.”
Forté, born in Brooklyn in 1975, was a classically skilled violinist who blended his Brownsville roots with prep college polish.
Lauryn Hill remembered him as “a gentleman and a scholar with a robust pen, deep soul and type coronary heart.” She added, “Half Brownsville, half prep college, he had entry to a method of expressing himself with a vocabulary and fluency that was very uncommon for the time.”
Forté’s breakthrough got here when Hill launched him to the Fugees. He went on to co-write and co-produce a number of tracks on their 1996 Grammy-winning album The Rating, which stays one of many best-selling Hip-Hop albums of all time.
He additionally contributed to tracks like “We Making an attempt to Keep Alive” and “Rumble within the Jungle,” collaborating with artists akin to A Tribe Known as Quest and Busta Rhymes.
Hill described that period as cinematic.
“I do not forget that summer time like a film,” she stated. “Me, Forté, Chuck and Edwin had been in every single place in NYC, in love with Hip-Hop, the place it was going and the place it may go.”
Their artistic chemistry prolonged past music.
“We had been inseparable that summer time—music and style connoisseurs, outdoors, determining the perfect methods to speak our specific consciousnesses inside that musical panorama,” she stated. ‘Our escapades learn like a 90s model of ‘Cooley Excessive’ to me.”
Although years handed with out seeing one another, Hill stated Forté joined the final Miseducation-Fugees tour and stepped on stage “like no time had handed in any respect.”
That they had been in contact simply weeks earlier than his loss of life.
“This loss is sudden and surreal and my coronary heart aches… for his household, for his spouse, for his kids, for his associates, and for all of us who had been blessed to know him,” Hill stated. “Love you John. Relaxation in peace light King.”
Forté is survived by his spouse, photographer Lara Fuller, and their two kids.
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