NEW YORK — They never got the tour. Five years ago, Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean announced plans to take the Fugees’ The Score back on the road for its 25th anniversary, scheduling a global tour that would have been their first in two decades.
By October 2021, it had ended before it began. Next Saturday, Central Park will have to serve as the substitute.
Hill and Wyclef Jean will headline the 2026 Global Citizen Festival on September 26, performing together in public for the first time in years. Their set will be framed around the 30th anniversary of the Fugees’ landmark second album.
The festival’s annual Central Park event will also feature Lenny Kravitz, John Legend, Lainey Wilson, Shaboozey, and Tomorrow X Together, along with Victoria Monét and Alicia Keys and Friends. Hugh Jackman will return as host for the 12th consecutive year.
The Score, released February 13, 1996, on Columbia and Ruffhouse Records, has sold 22 million copies worldwide, a figure that includes the multi-platinum domestic haul driven by “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” the Roberta Flack cover that spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains among the most-streamed songs in the group’s catalog. The album won the Grammy for Best Rap Album in 1997, the year the trio dissolved. They have not released an album together since.
The 25th anniversary tour’s collapse in 2021 carried two explanations. The official one was the pandemic. The other was Pras Michel, the third member of the Fugees, who had been under federal indictment since 2019 for illegally funneling foreign funds into American political campaigns. He was convicted on 10 felony counts in April 2023. In November 2025, a federal judge sentenced him to 14 years in prison for the scheme, which prosecutors said involved over $120 million from Malaysian financier Jho Low. Michel is currently incarcerated and appealing his conviction. According to The Hollywood Reporter, President Trump has reportedly considered a pardon, though none has been issued.
Global Citizen’s announcement frames the appearance as a 30th anniversary celebration of The Score rather than a Fugees reunion. That framing is accurate enough, but it also sidesteps the question of what the group is, or whether it is anything at all, when one of its founding members is serving a federal prison term.
What Hill and Wyclef Jean will perform, and in what configuration, has not been publicly specified. The announcement does not detail whether they share the stage simultaneously or perform in sequence, how many songs from The Score constitute the anniversary element, or whether the set extends into each artist’s solo catalog. What a Fugees set at scale looks like in 2026, with whom, for how long, and under what framing, is the part of September 26 that the lineup confirmation has left open.
The festival operates on a ticket model designed to keep that demographic mix accessible. Admission is earned through advocacy actions on the platform, including signing petitions, calling elected representatives, and volunteering, rather than purchased outright. The 2026 campaign is pressing the governments of Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Spain, and Norway to collectively commit $100 million toward education, health care, school meals, and sports programs for two million children through international funds including the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund and Education Cannot Wait. The advocacy framing is not incidental to the programming. Booking Hill and Wyclef Jean for an event built around global equity carries a resonance that a straightforward nostalgia booking at Madison Square Garden would not.
The Score’s original context is part of what gives the booking its weight. The album came out of the Haitian-American community in New Jersey, built on reggae and hip-hop and a political consciousness that had no comparable equivalent in the chart landscape of 1996. New York has had no shortage of large music events this year, but few have carried that specific combination of anniversary significance and civic setting.
The 30th arrives differently than the 25th did. In 2021, the tour announcement was a celebration. The subsequent cancellation left The Score without a proper anniversary moment, and without Pras, the three-person unit that made it. What Central Park offers, five years later, is not a reunion in the way the music industry uses that word. It is something more specific and more limited: two artists performing material from an album that defined a moment, on a stage attached to a cause, without the third member who helped write it.
Whether that is enough to constitute the anniversary The Score never received is a question the performance itself will have to answer.
