Even when Wyclef Jean doesn’t got it, he flaunts it. Performing in Cleveland recently for the MTV summer concert series "Live at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Presented by AT&T Wireless," the multi-purpose hip-hop star slung a guitar behind his back to pick a solo on "PJ’s," a slow-swinging rap from his new Masquerade (Columbia). Backwards or forwards, the lead wasn’t much — just a simple three- or four-note figure. Yet the ecstatic crowd ate it up. As with so many of his creations, it wasn’t the quality of the craft that counted but the quality of the allusion.

Among other things, this reference to white-boy guitar wankery was a way for Jean to say, "I too love rock and roll" (or at least to paraphrase Parliament-Funkadelic’s classic question: "Who says a funk band can’t play rock?"). Elsewhere, his songs, samples, and showboating flourishes honored salsa and reggae, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Jackson 5, hardcore liberal politics and softcore libertine morals. And almost all of it pumped the crowd higher with a mix as sexy, youthful, brazen, and pluralistic as the attractive young audience itself (though apparently self-selected, the crowd was pure MTV). Near the end, Jean even addressed the 1100 fans directly in an improvised reggae composition, singing, "It feels good to see the black, the white, the Asian/And I feel no segregation/Ain’t no place like Cleveland."

Since he didn’t think to add a verse about Cleveland’s formerly flammable Cuyahoga River, this claim of uniqueness couldn’t be taken too literally. Yet in his career, Jean’s greatest coup has been to make the preposterous feel plausible on some higher metaphorical plane — and on a far larger scale to boot. When the Fugees scored with The Score in 1996, the group’s founder and creative mastermind made hip-hop seem more tolerant and inclusive than it had been in a Dogg’s age (that would be Snoop Dogg, remember?). Even then, his creativity was about pop synthesis on an unprecedented scale — he was like a cultured Puff Daddy dropping a Third World–flavored, ghetto-wise "Internationale" for the unliberated hip-hop masses.

Equally important, Jean’s eclecticism was grounded and augmented by the skills of the Fugees’ co-founder, Lauryn Hill. His first two solo albums skirted her loss by ranging as far afield as possible, snagging just enough original hooks on which to hang tapestries that patched together everything from "Guantanamera" to Pink Floyd. On the second of the two discs, the appropriately titled Ecleftic, the tapestry frayed somewhat as he stretched it thin. But not till now, on Masquerade, has it torn.

Actually, the album fails because it stretches not too much but too little. Jean obviously has felt the sting of hardcore rap’s indifference to his achievements, because he focuses the first half of this 22-track CD on fighting fire with fire (and bling with bling). Where his previous albums were centered on a pan-African carnival of pop eclecticism, here he narrows his focus to "keeping it gangsta," dropping boasts about his street cred, threats to hardcore poseurs, and straight lectures about the fatal attractions of the thug life’s masquerade.

It’s not that Jean’s production skills and stylistic range fail him in this pursuit. Listen close and you’ll get off on everything from the sultry Asian flute chilling out the melancholic "Peace God" to the rampaging raps of guest MCs M.O.P. heating up the menacing title track. But M.O.P.’s free-ranging boasts also show up Wyclef’s deficiency as a serious hard rapper. Although some of his imagery is clever ("You would think rap was rock the way I carry heavy metal"), his tone and flow neither invite nor demand close listening, and that leaves many of these numbers as flat as, well, Snoop Dogg.

By the time "Oh What a Night" rolls around, Jean has shifted to showing off his "yachts and rocks" as he explains how he came to "rule the industry." His bling-bling is even less believable than his praise of Cleveland’s uniqueness, but the shear silliness of this Frankie Valli remake returns him to his strength — creating friendly illusion through a patchwork of allusions. Later, there’s a sly, bouncy pop tune about gangsta cuckoldry ("Thugs like Me") and an audacious remake of Dylan’s "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door" in which he ties together anti-gangsta preaching, his grief for his recently departed dad, and the national suffering caused by September 11. Aside from their general morbidity, the topics don’t really relate, but it’s nice to think that Jean could bring everyone from street thugs to "soldiers at the Pentagon" together in mourning. You know, black, white, and Asian, feeling no segregation.