FEATURE:
Celebrating a Seminal Hip-Hop Classic
Ms. Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill at Twenty-Five
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ON 25th August…
the one and only solo album from Ms. Lauryn Hill turns twenty-five. The awe-inspiring The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill celebrate a quarter-century two weeks after Hip-Hop celebrates its fiftieth birthday. One of the genre’s most extraordinary and compelling offerings arrived in a year when there were not too many standout Hip-Hop albums. Apart from Beastie Boys and Hello Nasty, 1998 was dominated by other sounds. We all knew about Hill because of her time with Fugees. I remember talk of the solo album going around and, when it arrived in August 1998, we had heard the single, Doo Wop (That Thing). If some accuse the song as being slight and one of the less sensational offerings on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, it was an instant and (personally, at least) phenomenal example of her stunning command and invention. I think that Doo Wop (That Thing) is one of the best cuts from Hill’s debut solo record. Number one in the U.S. and two in the U.K., The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill masterpiece inspired women in Hip-Hop artists to broaden their narrative and lyrical arc. Often discussed sex and their experiences of being rugged or rough, Hill was heralded as this icon and almost prophet-like figure. Changing the game instantly, it is intriguing and sad that she has not released a follow-up. Such an important, impactful and successful debut solo album perhaps put pressure on her shoulders. How do you follow it?! I think that the songs on the album could score a great Hip-Hp film set in 1998. A great film with those amazing songs scoring a wonderful and moving script. You can see the legacy of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Seen as one of the best albums ever released, I wanted to explore it ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary next month.
There are a few features about the album that I want to highlight before getting to a review. The Ringer celebrated and dissected The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill on its twentieth anniversary in 2018. After all of these years, it still unveils layers and pearls. They explained how Hill herself is revising and reimagining her debut album – and we are all still finding new ways to understand it:
“Given all that has come in its wake, it is still hard to believe that Lauryn Hill released The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill when she was 23 years old. True, Hill had lived plenty of lives by then, had tried on a variety of roles—straight-A student of Maplewood, New Jersey’s Columbia High School; founder of her school’s gospel choir; promising teen actress stealing scenes in Sister Act 2 and As the World Turns; sole female member of the multi-platinum, Grammy-winning group that the media dubbed “the new conscience of rap”; and of course at her most braggadocious, “Nina Simone, defecating on your microphone.” Yet somehow, none of this quite prepared people in the summer of 1998 for the monumental achievement of her first and, to date, only solo studio album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill—a collection of songs as timeless and disparate as the tough-love anthem “Doo Wop (That Thing),” the break-up dirge “Ex-Factor,” the fire-starting “Lost Ones,” and that tender ode to impending motherhood “To Zion.” When an artist makes such a massively successful, groundbreaking, and format-defining work at a precocious age—think Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at 20 or Orson Welles directing Citizen Kane at 25—it usually inspires the less precocious members of its audience (so roughly, everyone) to feel some combination of adoration and human inferiority: What were you doing with your life when you were 20, or 25, or 23? But maybe, too, there is something inherently youthful and thus reassuringly communal about such be-all-and-end-all swings for the moon. And so I like to temper this vision of an inhumanly precocious Lauryn Hill with the more human hubris of youth. “Lucky for us, like everyone in their twenties,” writes Kierna Mayo, the woman who famously put Hill on the cover of the preview issue of Honey magazine, “Hill imagined herself wiser than she really was.”
This weekend, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill turns 20, meaning it is nearly as old as Hill was herself when she wrote and recorded it. Its success is still staggering and well documented, and well worth documenting again: It sold 422,624 copies the week it was released, which at the time set the record for highest first-week sales by a female artist. It was nominated for 10 Grammys and won five of them (the most in a single night for a female artist at the time, breaking Carole King’s 27-year-old record), including Album of the Year, an award no black woman has won since. Last year, NPR placed it at no. 2 on its list of the 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women, just behind Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and the album was also selected to be included in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. Worldwide, it has sold more than 19 million copies. Here is a paragraph break so the haters can take a breath.
But Hill’s travails throughout the past two decades have been well documented, too. When the album celebrated its 15th birthday, five years ago, Hill was in a minimum-security Connecticut prison serving a three-month term for tax evasion. There have been lawsuits, canceled shows, and accusations about her treatment of backing musicians. But perhaps most deafening, there has been her silence. Hill has released one-off tracks here and there, and her 2002 MTV Unplugged appearance was released as a (polarizing) live album. But she never released another proper album after Miseducation, and when not performing live, Hill has spent much of the past two decades in exile from her stardom, quietly raising six children and devoting herself to various spiritual practices. She rarely gives interviews, but in 2010 she told an NPR reporter who asked why she had stopped releasing new music, “There were a number of different reasons, but partly the support system that I needed was not necessarily in place. There were things about myself, personal-growth things, that I had to go through in order to feel like it was worth it.”
And yet around that time Hill began performing again, usually not new material but versions of the classic songs off Miseducation, reworked, sped up, and rearranged sometimes to the point that they were nearly indistinguishable. These performances have been mixed (I’ve seen her twice: one show was brilliant, the other a disaster, which seems in keeping with the general ratio). There is something both compelling and a little unsettling about how she still seems to be revising, rewriting, and endlessly tweaking the Miseducation songs live, akin to the creative perfectionism that drove Kanye West to continue reworking his 2016 record, The Life of Pablo, as though the album was not fluid enough as a format to contain his creativity. The culture is certainly not finished with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and in some sense neither is she.
As a fan, I have found Hill’s refusal to make another record frustrating and at the same time deeply profound: What can be a louder and clearer message of rebellion than, in a culture bloated with noise and excess, to remain quiet when everyone demands that you speak? Hill quickly and summarily achieved nearly every major milestone in the music industry, and then she walked away from it, as if to show that success is not a proven avenue to personal fulfillment. Hill has sometimes been compared to two other prominent black artists of her generation who disappeared at the height of fame’s demands: D’Angelo (who worked with her on “Nothing Even Matters” from Miseducation) and Dave Chappelle. “Lauryn Hill said something so apt recently,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah mused in an interview not long after she’d written a moving essay about her search for Chappelle. “She was late for her show and people complained that she was selfish in her tardiness and she said, ‘I gave you all of my twenties’”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Anthony Barboza
Before moving on, I was interested in an article from The Independent. There will be a slew of new articles to mark twenty-five years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The Independent spotlighted one of the most important Hip-Hop albums ever on its twentieth anniversary:
“In a 1999 interview with The Guardian, Hill said the record embodied the notion that “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”. Yes, it dealt with heartbreak and love, but really, it “was meant to discuss those life lessons… those things that you don’t get in any text book, things that we go through that force us to mature”.
From the moving, slow intensity of “Ex-Factor” (“You said you’d die for me, give to me, give to me, why won’t you live for me?”) to the (admittedly, respectability-heavy) lessons of “Doo Wop (That Thing)” (“Look at where you be in, hair weaves like Europeans, fake nails done by Koreans”), it was – in the 1990s – ahead of its time. So far ahead, that Ms Hill, as she now refers to herself, is still touring almost exclusively off the back of it.
It has not been an easy path for Hill. One odd rumour surrounding the album on its release was that Hill did not want her music to be purchased by white people (a falsehood later attributed to a caller on The Howard Stern Show). The notion that she, with her dreadlocks, Fugees background and distaste for fame, secretly hated white people, was a satisfactory narrative for people who could not reckon with her success. That no one had seen or heard her say it did not matter. Hill and her neo-soul ilk created music that was not only distinctly black in sound, but also in social commentary, and that was enough of a threat in itself.
These days, Hill is, sadly, almost as well known for her tardiness and financial issues as she is for her first and only solo record. Having cemented her superstar status with a US No 1 album, she soon retreated from the public eye, accompanied by a swirl of rumours. Her MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 album – a stripped-back, and at times, rambling, but no less beautiful project teeming with observations about the perils of fame – only increased the whispers.
After a brief Fugees reunion in 2005, Hill ramped up her touring in the wake of a three-month prison sentence for tax evasion in 2013. Hill was back: albeit with frenzied live performances of the classics. And sometimes, there was no performance at all. In 2016 after showing up hours late for a concert in Atlanta and only performing for 40 minutes (a regular occurrence), Hill attributed her lateness to her issues with “aligning her energy with the time”. Disputes over crediting producers, writers and musicians have also plagued the star for some time, with Grammy-nominated pianist Robert Glasper recently suggesting that she had less input into her recorded work than people realised.
That aside, The Miseducation has had a rebirth of sorts this year. “Ex-Factor” was sampled twice – in Cardi B’s “Be Careful” and Drake’s hit feminist-lite anthem “Nice For What” – renewing conversations about the lasting legacy of the 1998 album.
In an interview with Rolling Stone on the 10th anniversary of the album, Hill spoke of her desire prior to its release, to “write songs that lyrically move” her. She wanted us to be “able to hear the scratch in the vocals”, and the “thickness of sound”, as well as creating something with “human element” strong enough to make the hair on the back of her neck stand up. And she did.
There’s a reason that this album refuses to fade into the background. So groundbreaking was it, with its penchant for infusing social commentary with R&B, soul and hip-hop beats, that you could argue that Lauryn’s The Miseducation, like Erykah Badu’s Baduizm the previous year, was one of a small selection of albums responsible for changing the face of soul and R&B as we know it”.
There is one more feature I am keen to uncover. The Quietus shared their thoughts in 2018. Even though The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is primarily a Hip-Hop album, it also leans into Neo-Soul. It is such a rich album that is still teaching us after twenty-five years. One that you should listen to now and experience afresh. It is an absolutely dazzling work from one of the music world’s most potent and important poets:
“So vast has been the expenditure of ink and breath over the years that it's difficult to approach the task of celebrating Hill's magnificent debut with a serious expectation of adding anything to the discussion. The back story has been exhaustively, if inconclusively, mined: from the Fugee rapper-singer's hard-fought battle to get her own music heard, how the doomed affair with bandmate Wyclef Jean bled in to the lyrics of around a third of the record's songs, to the acrimonious fallout with the hitherto unknown crew of producers and musicians she assembled to record it that inevitably diminished its legend. And Hill has remained an enigma, the fulfilled promise of Miseducation apparently coming from a place she has no intention to revisit, even as the approach she minted has continued to have a direct or implied influence on almost every artist who has sought to combine elements of soul, hip hop and pop since.
And yet the music remains, for the most part, the least-explored aspect of this record and what it has come to mean. It's almost another way in which the record was prescient - prefiguring today's increasingly narcissistic public square, where personality and perception carry a far higher price than content; where rumour and innuendo are considered more absorbing and vital than hard-won insights. All this, of course, says more about us than it does about Ms Hill; and none of it is very encouraging.
Instead of retreading that familiar if contested ground, then, let's go back and listen to a record more often talked about and cited than thoughtfully engaged with. In it we find an artist of uncommon gifts caught in a moment of breaking free - personally, emotionally, politically and contractually, from ties of friendship and business constructed with others and from mental and psychological bonds that span centuries and bound billions. Hill's genius in this moment was to be able to capture all these essences inside single, simple phrases, sung and rapped with a lack of affectation that ensures each feels relevant, raw and real.
After an intro setting up the schoolroom scene - of which more later - 'Lost Ones' is an aberration: a combative, predominantly hostile sentiment on a record characterised by its equanimity and empathy. What gives? In one sense it's like putting the bonus track at the beginning rather than the end (and there are already two superfluous, if fascinating, extras added at the back end: a cover of 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You' reportedly sung from an only partial memory of the original by a recumbent, eight-months-pregnant Hill, and the slight if sophisticated, but very definitely off-theme, 'Tell Him'). Yet in another, this anger-tinged yet ultimately measured - though still deeply biting - snap back at Wyclef is still a song of upliftment. And it definitely fits the education theme: 'Lost Ones' is Lauryn teaching her ex a lesson, not just literally but metaphorically - her delivery's acid sting hitting harder and digging in deeper than all but a handful of battle rappers are capable of. And, as we shall see later, there are moments where we probably need to have seen these bared teeth: later on Hill will position herself as a spirit of, if not vengeance, then watchful enforcement; to believe her, we'll need to be convinced from the start that this young mother isn't just going to nurture her newborn infant, but will defend him to the death.
They say the great ones have to suffer for their art, and, from a contemporary perspective, that's certainly been the case for Lauryn Hill in the decades following this moment of undimmable greatness. And yet, as an audience, our pressure on her has been thoughtless and unrelenting. Instead of acknowledging the obvious - that The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill was a destination, not a waystation on a journey - we continue to expect, even demand, more of the same. This near-perfect record will continue to dispense new lessons if we approach it with open ears, minds and hearts - yet since its release, Hill's fans have craved more of the same. Her returns to the record racks have been few and far between, and nothing she's put out since has sounded like this LP - but why should it? This record is remarkable, in part, because it's a coherent, complete thought; a unique and singular response to a convergence of people, places, incidents and inspirations - lightning caught in a bottle, a one-off.
Meanwhile, a subset of the mainstream media seems to have made her a particular, peculiar focus. Which other artists, decades on from their moment of worldwide commercial acclaim, have their very infrequent live dates reviewed in daily newspapers, almost always for the purpose of timing the gap between doors opening and artist arriving on stage so that the headline can be about how late she was? She's also criticised frequently and extensively for playing versions of these songs in concert that deviate from those captured on the album - as if the purpose of live performance was to offer a carbon-copy of the past, not allow the education to continue (for both class and teacher) by discovering what new things these songs might be able to mean in different musicians' hands, different historical and political contexts. Outlets seem to believe their readerships demand coverage of Ms Hill, yet publish only those stories that build and rebuild the irrelevancy of her being irascible, obstinate, "difficult" - forgetting how she told us, almost a quarter of a century ago, that 'diva' (that term routinely applied to any woman who won't just jump when told to by a man) is simply another word for 'bitch', and apparently oblivious to what made Miseducation both great art and a huge commercial success was the very fact that Lauryn Hill had to fight tooth and nail to make sure every last note of it - and every aspect of the lives it flowed from, including that of her first child - was the way she wanted and needed it to be”.
I want to finish with an example review for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It received massive acclaim across the board in 1998. I think, rather than expect new music or look at whether Hill will create a second album, we need to spend more time with her debut and take guidance from. The world has changed since 1998. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill has inspired so many women and empowered countless people, and yet the world has stayed still in other ways. I feel The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill can keep teaching lessons and making society better. Rolling Stone had this to say when they reviewed Ms. Lauryn Hill’s dazzling 1998 debut. Rolling Stone note how, if Fugees started out slow or underwhelming with 1994’s Blunted on Reality, their final album together, 1996’s The Score, took them to new levels. Hill kept that movement going with a Hip-Hop/Soul album that has a broad reach and appeals to a wide audience:
“After The Score, I was sure the Fugees had made a deal with the devil. A lackluster 1994 debut, Blunted on Reality, made them near-laughingstocks – imagine Digable Planets lite, if that's possible. But with The Score, they served more than 11 million customers – them's Kenny G and Celine D. numbers, mom. In a lightning moment, the three Fugees went from being known as those two Haitian dudes hanging out with that cutie from Sister Act II to being worshiped as musical genius Wyclef, beautiful songbird L-Boogie and moneymaking Pras. It was such a rapid and total metamorph that if it had happened in a movie, you'd say, "Oh, please." There had to be help from below.
Just as Blunted gave no hint of the commercial dam buster to come, The Score, dotted with smart interpolations, left little hint of the creative earthquakes ahead. But with Wyclef's stunning The Carnival and, now, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Lauryn and her Fugee brother have established themselves as leaders in the genre of hip-hop soul. After pushing the commercial envelope, they've returned to push the aesthetic one.
Hip-hop soul is the music of Mary J. Blige, D'Angelo and Erykah Badu, a genre in which artists interpret this generation's experience through hip-hop's beats and outlook folded into soulful melodies and tenderness. Though some artists, like Clef and Lauryn, sing and rhyme, in hip-hop soul the singing and rhyming do not clearly demarcate hip-hop and R&B; – hip-hop soul is fluid enough to largely escape simple definition, though you know it when you hear it, and, generally, what you hear is greater musical ambition and courage than in most traditional hip-hop.
The chocolate-skinned twenty-three-year-old working single mom named Lauryn Hill – blessed with a beauty that attracts the fellas without turning away the sistas – is that rare artist who can be righteous and not self-righteous, who thinks a lot of herself without ego tripping. That's partly because she's so very honest – "Every time I try to be," she says in the title song," what someone has thought of me/So caught up, I wasn't able to achieve" – and partly because within her self-love message you can hear her implicitly saying "Love yo'self." Her confidence – "You can't match this rapper-slash-actress/More powerful than two Cleopatras.... MCs ain't ready to take it to the Serengeti/My rhymes is heavy like the mind of Sister Betty [Shabazz]," from "Everything Is Everything" – makes you feel confident. She sounds like an artist you could, should, look up to, like Chuck D back in his heyday.
She sounds like that before you even realize what she's rhyming about, because the very timbre of her voice – that deep, oven-roasted sound when rhyming, the sweet, melancholy-tinged midrange she owns when singing, the way she always comes confidently from deep within her chest – it communicates a self-respect and self-love. The sound of a woman who takes herself seriously. A sound that recalls, for me, the sharp, strong voice of Joni Mitchell. Joni seems a musical North Star for Lauryn, with her biting honesty, her musical innovativeness that's never exposed in an ornate or showy way, her confidence to keep it simple. Both speak universal truths from a definitely female perch.
Lauryn's epic, adoring tribute to her young son, "To Zion," is one of the album's high points. While the legendary Carlos Santana plays a sweet acoustic Spanish guitar behind her, Lauryn speaks of weighing whether or not to have her baby: "Woe this crazy circumstance/I knew his life deserved a chance/But everybody told me to be smart/'Look at your career,' they said/'Lauryn, baby, use your head'/But instead I chose to use my heart."
She goes on throughout the record vacillating between hip-hop-based shoulder shakers like "Everything Is Everything," dramatic ballads like "Nothing Even Matters," with hip-hop-soul king D'Angelo, and smooth and infectious joints with the warmth of old Stevie Wonder, like the hidden track "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" and the title song. It's an album – like few hip-hop albums, like most hip-hop-soul classics – that you could play at a family reunion, or any sort of multigenerational party, and get everyone bouncing and singing along without anyone ever having to cringe. Lauryn is the sort of young woman whom the old women smile at lovingly, their eyes saying, "With people like you around, this generation, and your music, might just be all right, after all." Maybe it wasn't a deal with the devil. Maybe it was with an angel”.
Turning twenty-five on 25th August, the mighty and iconic The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill will get new celebration and love. I opened by stating how Hip-Hop is fifty on 11th August. A fortnight after, one of its queens and daughters will discover how the world embraces anew her genius debut album. Since 1998, there is always talk about when she will bring us a second album – or whether it might never happen. We need to be thankful for what she gave us in 1998. It is this invaluable and essential music document that we need to…
LOOK back on in order to move forward.