She Begat This
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Praise for She Begat This: Twenty Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
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“Joan Morgan schools like no other. While reading this masterful, rich, and amazingly concise cultural history of the “Nina Simone defecating on your microphone” Nineties, I learned two lessons. One, you cannot tell the story of hip hop or Black womanhood in the 1990s without a deep understanding of the prototype for Black Girl Genius that is Lauryn Hill. And two, you cannot tell the story of hip hop or Black womanhood in the 1990s without the fiya-spitting, Jamaican, Bronx-girl pen of Joan Morgan. Lauryn gave us the soundtrack, the artistry, and the permission. Joan and her crew of badass, pioneering hip-hop journalists, many of whom are featured here, continue to give us the language and the frameworks to understand the singularity of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Black cultural production. Absent either of these Black girl geniuses, the story is incomplete. Indeed, she begat this.”
—BRITTNEY COOPER, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
“Pioneer hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan takes on Lauryn Hill, the complicated star whose monumental album changed the world, and we finally get the loving, vibrant, critical attention the artist, her work, and her generation has been due. This book is a listening companion with attitude and a sure-shot conversation starter. You may never hear Ms. Hill the same again.”
—JEFF CHANG, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation
“The dope shit always needs a remix, if only to be reminded of the brilliance of the original joint. And if you were on the scene back in ’98, you knew it would be Joan Morgan who would remix The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, because who else would it be but a Caribbean sister stepping in the world fly AF and with the gift of verse? Lauryn might have Begat This, but Joan Morgan is giving it back to us all lovely and new and as vital as it was that summer of ’98.”
—MARK ANTHONY NEAL, Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University
“With She Begat This, Joan Morgan brings the full lyrical prowess of her unstoppable flow and ferocious prose to tell the multilayered saga of Lauryn Hill’s seminal masterpiece. Morgan serves up an intimate artistic portrait that is compassionate, unflinching, and imbued with the razor-sharp analysis and from-the-heart truth telling that made her a legend of hip-hop journalism.”
—DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER, New York Times bestselling author of Shadowshaper and Dactyl Hill Squad, winner of the International Latino Book Award
“A new book by Joan Morgan would be cause for celebration whether it was about Lauryn Hill, Bunker Hill, or ant hills. But for hip hop’s founding feminist and most incisive critic to apply the force of her intellect, the power of her memory, and the dexterity of her cultural mixology to a record so fraught with meaning and misunderstanding makes me feel the way I did the first time I heard the needle drop on ‘Lost Ones.’ In fact, I’m dancing with one fist in the air as I write this.”
—ADAM MANSBACH, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Part storytelling, part cultural commentary; part cipher, part praise-song, Joan Morgan’s She Begat This is perhaps the most necessary read for the present Black cultural moment. Twenty years after the release of Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Morgan’s frame of the moment solidifies its importance as hip-hop zeitgeist occurrence—as catalyst to our age of fierce Black outrage and millennial Black claim. That it also serves to re-establish Morgan as hip-hop feminism’s high priest must be recognized, and we mean it in the manner of hip-hop imperative . . . Recognize!”
—ROGER BONAIR-AGARD, National Book Award nominee and author of Bury My Clothes and Where Brooklyn At?
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THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY SON, SULE MURRAY, WHO IS ALWAYS THE REASON AND OFTEN THE INNOVATION. I AM #FOREVERTEAMUS.
Foreword
2018
“I invented millennials” is something I’ve been known to say on occasion. I say it because it’s actual, factual, and, I think, funny—if not a tad bit juvenile. But the younger people I sometimes feel compelled to say this to don’t find as much humor in the snark. I’m still chuckling. My bad.
Let me clarify. By “I,” I mean “we.” And by “we,” I mean the black women of the hip-hop generation. The once twenty- and early thirtysomethings, who, like me were both shaped by hip-hop culture and did the shaping—from the margins and the popping-ass center. Consequently, we set a new world order in motion. When I say we invented millennials, it’s not because a new generation of black women and men aren’t incredibly dope unto themselves—inspiring even. It’s because we were the first ones who, without much armor, reported live from the crossroads and through the cross fire of race, class, and gender during the explosion of a global multibillion-dollar industry. One that was built on our backs. Remember when you looked up and it seemed like black culture just became culture? For better or worse, that was our export. While our younger sisters in particular claimed much-needed language to navigate a post–hip-hop world (hey, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, hey) in the 1990s, we were the mavericks. We manifested the politics of a spanking-new Black feminism and told her she could bring alla her homies—contradiction, agency, image, desire, power, media, sex, white folks—to the hood and the academy. And we did all this while steeped in a cultural ecosystem that was developing at warp speed, fueled by the machinations of young men that were often toxic. Young men that we loved.
Pause.
(Thank you, Joan Morgan. Have I said this before? You’re a hero. Before actually knowing you, your culture reporting made this hostile hip-hop world make sense for twenty-two-year-old black girl me. What were you, a full twenty-five? Your brave, early, sometimes girly, always womanly voice made it less crazy-making to be all the impossible things I was—which was in love with a problematic thing. In your work all those years ago, you saw both the magic in my red lipstick and my Timbs, and your ability to see that sparked everything. And by “my” I mean “our.”)
Women of the hip-hop generation were the frontliners of what we now know to be Wakandan warriorship. It’s an easy reference at the time of this writing, looking back to the future, but honestly, how can one resist making the comparison between this unique generation of women and the Dora Milaje—the battalion of fighter women in Marvel’s 2018 film Black Panther? Purist hip-hop culture and its burgeoning conversation between young black America and the other America were T’Challa and Killmonger. But be clear. It was us girls who fought and saved the nation.
(And that is how we gave birth to millennials.)
1998
There was a late-summer day in 1998 when all hell broke loose. Everyone in the music industry and in the world of hip-hop journalism knew it was coming, something solo from Lauryn Hill, but how could we have known?
For context, the better of us had already conceded that Hill was the best emcee in the Fugees, the three-man/one-woman “New Jerus” rap group led by the impressive music man, Haitian-proud Wyclef Jean. With the exception of perhaps being a few too many things to Hill—leader and lover—if you were Wyclef at the time, the biggest problem with your artist was likely that she was great at a lot of shit. As deft and raw a singer as Hill was an emcee (and a compelling actor as well—do
watch Sister Act 2 on Netflix), over the years there was a distinct evolution of her artistry in the context of a group. Her star didn’t just sit higher in the sky; it was brighter. When the Fugees dropped The Score in ’96, the ante was all the way upped. The group was enjoying critical acclaim and the streets couldn’t have loved them more. Clef and the crew took home the coveted Grammy for Best Rap Album that year, yet both musically and personally, it was becoming clearer that a black woman needed her space. The album’s outlier moment belonged to Hill. Really, that was it: her exceptional cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” was the canary in the coal mine. It was Wyclef’s production, but unbeknownst to him, it also the beginning of the Fugees’s end. More than anything, the song solidified the feverish anticipation about what the unicorn might attempt on her own, and where she would take things if given the chance. She was just that bad, “bad” meaning “good,” and the world was bursting at the seams with curiosity.
I can’t assert that Hill was the first woman to ever say to the thing that confined her, “Who gon’ stop me, Boo?” But in the space of time between 1996 and 1998, it sure felt like she was the first to say it.
Completely free of the band, the man, and their not-so-well-kept secrets, Hill quickly transformed from girl to woman. She fell in love with Rohan Marley (son of Bob) and became pregnant with her first child. She was self-actualizing before our eyes, essentially proving at just twenty-two years old that she was a black magic woman capable of anything at a time when few believed female artists—especially those in a hip-hop world—could do just anything and sell millions of records. Many of us murmured regressive, sexist thoughts. How will she mother and rock crowds? And she was just about to blow up! It was shameful. But on that August 1998 day when The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill finally hit airwaves? Oh my God.
Lucky for us, like everyone in their twenties, Hill imagined herself wiser than she really was. That egotistical sense of righteous natural-womanness and Hill’s expanding spirituality colored the musical journey she took us on. It was everything and it compelled her to preach. Of course, we understood that her messages weren’t always prescriptive. How could they be? She was messier than she ever owned—but they were always her truth. What Hill had traversed and triumphed in the two years before Miseducation all seemed to make its way to the studio. Every ounce of the album was soaked in the personal. Her broken heart and her missteps. Her fierceness and new no fucks to give. It was as if she knew what was wrong with men, women, the race, and hip hop too. Ase. It was one of those rare times that a black woman was speaking and the world had sense enough to listen.
If only we could calculate the place x time x impact equation of Beyoncé’s 2016 album Lemonade and measure it against the place x time x impact of 1998’s Miseducation. Perhaps then more cynical minds, those who missed it in real time, might fully grasp the gravity of the Miseducation moment. Above the fray, with a baby in tow, and in a single chess move, King Lauryn called “Check.” And she did it minus the future technology, the kind that allows a present-day artist to personally control the timing and instrument of distribution. Lauryn Hill, a black woman straight outta hip hop, had disrupted everything. Immediately upon release, the album hit number one on the Billboard 200. Week one sales (more than 420,000 copies) broke the record for female artists of all genres. By 1999, Miseducation had ultimately represented many female firsts: eight times platinum, ten Grammy nominations and five wins, making it quite literally both the album of the year and the Album of the Year.
I did not say rap album.
1999
Perhaps because culture calls for witnesses, Joicelyn Dingle and I launched Honey magazine in that same year when Miseducation really took root. Billed as the first national magazine for the women of the hip-hop generation, it was a long time coming. Naturally, it was Hill’s full head of jet-black locs that filled the frame of the publication’s coveted preview issue. With her back against a honeycomb set, a Tiffany silver bee dangling from a necklace and her head tilted just so, Hill was photographed nibbling on her finger pensively. Frozen in time and with thoughts of her own, Hill was all of us. She was a perfect encapsulation of what we were as a new tribe of black women and girls pushing all kinds of boundaries: sweet, thick, pure, brown, sticky. The cover line simply read, “Taste the Future.” As Honey’s first editor in chief, I take enormous pride in our prophetic lens. The future was about our seat at the table.
That preview issue wasn’t sold on newsstands; it was an early promotional piece for “influencers,” long before that’s what they were called. By the launch of our first national newsstand issue in 1999, it fully felt as though a black-girl movement was afoot. It was a feeling affirmed by the rise of “hip-hop feminism” and the rise in “hip-hop journalism” and confirmed by the timely work of godmother proper to both, Joan Morgan. “The enormous task of saving our lives falls on nobody else’s shoulders but ours,” she wrote in When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down—then the spot-on curriculum for the Hip Hop Women’s Studies 101 course Hill had already preregistered us for. Now it’s a seminal read for anyone who seeks to understand some of the bigger questions before our generation’s feminist intellectuals. In that very first issue of Honey, prescient as we were, we interviewed Morgan, who said, “I really wanted a book and a title that wasn’t about victimization or blame. I wanted to create a space where women feel comfortable, but also talk about the way that we are, if not responsible, then complicit in our situation. It’s not just strong women versus weak women. It’s a combination all the time.”
If I am gushing here, allow me to acknowledge that it is a great privilege (and a moment that’s full circle AF!) to be asked to write the introduction to another work by Joan Morgan, She Begat This, a book about what, twenty years later, is still arguably the greatest album of a generation—my generation—the work of a young black woman who rose to fame through hip hop and who also happened to grace the cover of my first big thing.
Note: What follows on these pages shouldn’t be confused with a dissection of Lauryn Hill (the forty-three-year-old woman, mother of six, and grandmother of one) or of her assorted and sundry personal choices and life events in the many seasons since Miseducation. It is not that. Like me, Morgan has spent a good portion of the time since then nurturing and teaching and being nurtured by and learning from a new wave of black feminists. The process is often both a breaking down and a building up of today’s powerful young women—women who are reminiscent of both the Lauryn Hills and the Joan Morgans I recall from my twenties. “Everything,” I’ve been known to say to them, “in its place and time.”
She Begat This is a reminder of place and time. It calls attention to the importance of the holistic context of the subjects from yesterday, the ones we want to parse apart and understand today. This is critical when your audience is prone to see through the lens of the Internet of things. She Begat This considers time and place and place and time while exploring the full 360 degrees of not only The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill but also the ideas and movements behind the masterpiece’s cultural universe. This is essential, lest some younger, duly creative folk try to imagine a world where, say, being in a ’90s generation of fly, black women with natural hair was the same as being in Generation #teamnatural.
Because it wasn’t.
Miseducation arrived in a time before the hashtag. To be a caesar-cut-rocking Joan Morgan (as she was back then) or dreadlocked L-Boogie, a hip-hop generation naturalista, was to be part of a glorious, unspoken sisterhood—one not popular enough yet to be affirmed by aisles upon aisles of products, hair-texture ranking systems, A-list black celebrities, white women’s magazine covers, or the very men of hip hop that too many of us desired but who gave us very little attention. It was an intentional choice, often burdened mistakenly with assumptions about one’s personal politics and with nowhere near enough freedom to be merely a hairstyle. Imagine. A path with no hashtag or phenomena to affirm what we c
ollectively always knew but hadn’t yet dared publicly call forth: We were both a trend and a dope-ass movement. But don’t cry for us, Argentina. A generation later, that’s been covered.
The point here is that the twentieth anniversary of Miseducation is a cause for celebration, for more reasons than may be immediately apparent. In addition to being worthy of recognition as the profound, historic musical moment it was, this anniversary, for a specific swath of black women in America, is a remembrance. For us, it is a harkening back to a complicated, truly iconic era when real-life personal timelines were pockmarked by sweeping cultural moments: booming, resounding, no-going-back, ready-or-not moments that seemingly created new possibilities overnight. For these black women, it is a recalling of not only what the release of Miseducation symbolized to the world, but also the myriad of beautiful notions it set off in ours. As such, it is my humble honor to connect for you the teeny-tiny dots between the #BlackGirlMagic prequel era, if you will, and the contemporary critical thinking of a certain hip-hop feminist about Lauryn Hill’s first and only full studio album two decades ago. That connection matters. And Morgan, by including the lengthy reflections of women whose cultural critiques and creative contributions have helped define and articulate the ’90s or interpret it today—writers and editors Raquel Cepeda, Joicelyn Dingle, Karen Good Marable, dream hampton, Akiba Solomon, deejays Belinda Becker and Lynnée Denise, image activists Dr. Yaba Blay and Michaela Angela Davis, movement makers Beverly Bond and Tarana Burke, reggae superstar Nadine Sutherland and hip-hop feminist Dr. Treva B. Lindsey to name a few—has given us more than a celebration of an auspicious musical anniversary. She Begat This is a reflection point for two intersecting generations of black women.