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Your support makes all the difference.Wyclef's last album The Ecleftic showed him to be probably the most musically imaginative rapper working today, deftly expanding hip hop's sonic vocabulary with influences rarely encountered in the genre. Masquerade continues in the same exploratory vein, but this time his touch isn't quite as assured: I could do without the corny "Pussycat", with its Tom Jones sample shoe-horned into an ill-fitting breakbeat; likewise, the blend of the Four Seasons tune and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" in "Oh What a Night" is as graceless as its boasts of blowing a million dollars on a pop video and being the only rapper to play Carnegie Hall. But there are moments here which you don't normally hear in rap, such as the oriental melody underpinning "Peace God", the sitar and bongos on "Party Like I Party", and Miri Ben-Ari's violin negotiating the melody of "Apache" on the title track. Wyclef's heart is in the right place: he's one of the few rappers able to contemplate the depressing state of ghetto projects "with the elevators and the piss in hallways" without letting his sense of shame boil over into unfocused anger. "Another young thug's funeral," he muses. "What you thought this was, another Pepsi commercial?" But he struggles to come to terms with 11 September: His adaptation of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" to include references to "the people in the Twin Towers and the soldiers in the Pentagon" is, rather less convincing than his eulogy for his late father, "Daddy".
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