She Begat This

by Joan Morgan

  Because even if the worldwide fervor during Miseducation’s release missed you in real time, it isn’t as though you don’t know its very crevices. At some point, the urgency of Carlos Santana’s guitar riff meeting Lauryn’s pleas on “Ex-Factor” has probably taken you out, and the soulful beauty of D’Angelo on “Nothing Even Matters” has made you desperately yearn for something or someone you knew you shouldn’t—at least once. You’ve probably done the imaginary (or real) dick grab when L-Boogie murders the very opening line on “Lost Ones.” And no matter who we love today or what gender expression they are, we’ve all felt sorry enough for ourselves and have been summarily healed by listening to “I Used to Love Him” again and again.

  Right?

  Well, knowing and loving this extraordinarily special album is not the challenge, even after all this time. Finding widespread agreement that it belongs in the canon of “Classics of the People” along with joints like Stevie Wonder’s Hotter than July, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Mary J. Blige’s My Life or A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory isn’t so hard. To speak of the great musical resonance of this work, for the music critic, will be infinitely par for the course.

  The challenge, here and now, is simple. Blast this entire masterful curation, all sixteen tracks, one lazy Sunday afternoon when the sun is piercing your windows so gloriously that cleaning almost feels like joy. Do that and . . . remember the time. It doesn’t take firsthand memory to reverently consider the state of, the world of, the grace of black women and girls who were once on the cusp of a new millennium. All it takes is the music and will. With Morgan as our guide, this cool, critical book puts us, so sweetly, on a path toward knowing, really knowing, the brilliant, singular offering of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Let’s make it our portal to reflect on all that has and hasn’t happened to black women and girls in the past twenty years.

  —Kierna Mayo, Long Island, New York, 2018

  1 / Everything Is Everything

  L-Boogie’s “Superstar” rises from behind the bar of Chez Lucienne and cuts across the din of the Lenox Avenue restaurant. It’s a Tuesday night, which means the strip is poppin’ and the spot is predictably filled with thirty- to seventysomethings, all sporting the particular mix of blackness so signature to Harlem. A quick scan reveals well-heeled professionals and government workers, sartorially inclined artists and wizened old hustlers, wide-eyed recent transplants and a seasoned old guard. The accents that pepper their revelry expose antecedents that span the global South. Mississippi to Mali. Accra to the Antilles. Brixton to Bed-Stuy. Still Harlem, despite the increasing number of white faces or the proliferation of new eateries boasting fussy fusion menus and downtown priced cocktails. In deference to this fact, the bartender assists the evening’s transition from the cocktail to dinner hours with a predictable mix of ’70s cookout classics, ’80s R&B, and an amalgam of ’90s soul and temperate hip hop. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the apparent fave; all sixteen tracks woven diligently throughout. This is a realization I greet with an audible “Fuck.”

  That came out wrong. I loved Miseducation, at least as much as the nineteen million or so folks who’ve brought it since 1998. I’d even go as far as to say I probably loved it more than every mofo in those governing bodies that bestowed it with seventeen cumulative Billboard, American Music, Grammy, and MTV awards. Why? Because I was one of the score of hip-hop-loving and/or pregnant women who swore the album was soundtracking her life. And I still love it enough that when, almost twenty years later, a 2017 NPR roundup, “Turning the Tables: The 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women,” ranked it number two, (Joni Mitchell’s classic Blue was number one) I decided to give that decision a pass—although I’ll leave it to the article’s writers to defend how Miseducation managed to beat out Nina Simone’s I Put a Spell on You, Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, and Carole King’s Tapestry since that’s a claim I’m sure not even the woman currently known as Ms. Hill could reasonably stake.

  My response was prompted by fatigue. Ever since I’d agreed to write a book on Miseducation’s twentieth anniversary, the album had been on heavy rotation. Tonight’s dinner was supposed to be an escape. The goddaughter, thirty-two, and my dining partner for the evening, found the attempt to find respite here both amusing and naïve.

  “Well, what did you expect?” she asked, referencing the amount of middle-aged folks in the crowd. “This is exactly her demographic.”

  “I mean, I get it,” she continues. “I loved it too. When I was thirteen.” The silent, but definitely implied, “Before I knew better,” begs a follow-up question.

  “And now?” I ask. “Do you still listen to it?” “No,” she responds. “Not really. Nowhere near as much. I mean the whole thing is just so Hotep. She’s so judge-y.”

  The admittedly froggy “Fuck you mean judge-y?” that instinctively runs through my head is a function of well-honed, former hip-hop journo reflexes, the kind of shit that’ll always take place when someone critiques one of your top five. And when it comes to best emcee barometers, that holy trinity of lyrics, delivery, and flow—L-Boogie circa 1996–2002 was one of the best emcees of all time. Pause and note: I did not say one of the best female emcees. And I did not stutter. One of the best to ever do it and during the era routinely referred to as hip-hop’s golden age. The bar was set mad high. To put her arrival in context, when The Score, the Fugees’ critically acclaimed sophomore album, dropped in 1996, it joined a cohort of bangers that included Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, OutKast’s ATLiens, Nas’s It Was Written, Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core and Foxy Brown’s Ill Na Na, which were all released in that same year. Punctuate that with the hand claps it deserves.

  Commercially speaking, the genre had also worked through some of its growing pains. The ’90s was the decade that hip hop broke through its previously gold ceiling to become a billion-dollar industry, hitting the dual sweet spots of artistic achievement with all the material trappings of platinum success. “We were definitely in this arrogant phase of weeding out the bullshit,” says Schott Free, former senior vice president of A&R at LOUD Records and the executive producer of era greats like Mobb Deep, Dead Prez, and Roc Marciano. “At this point, if you put in the time, came up with a masterpiece, and packaged it right, you were going to get your just due. If you were making something worth hearing and that people loved, it was going to speak for itself.”

  By now, the framing of the Fugees’ (comprised of Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Pras Michél) origin story as the greatest thing in hip hop that almost didn’t happen is a well-known tale, but it is one worth recounting here since, at least according to Jayson Jackson’s recollection, it was Hill’s noteworthy talent on their otherwise meh debut (Blunted on Reality, 1994) that helped save the group from getting dropped. Jackson, one of the producers responsible for the Oscar-nominated documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, was Hill’s former manager and close friend. “At the time I was an intern at Columbia Records for a product manager. We had four groups,” says Jackson. “The Fugees was one of them. I remember listening to Blunted on Reality and feeling like it was all over the place, but one particular song, “Some Seek Stardom,” was a standout. It was just Lauryn. The shit that she was saying, the way she was rhyming and singing it, made me go, ‘Yo. This girl is incredible.’ Lauryn was still filming Sister Act 2 at the time, but it was completely clear that as an artist, she was doing some new shit. She had a distinct voice. She was a star.”

  Of the four groups assigned to Jackson’s boss, only one, the ’90s girl group Xscape, was performing well enough to stay on the label. As Jackson watched the other two groups get unceremoniously dropped, he urged his boss to do something. “There was this Mega Banton song, ‘Sound Boy Killing,’ that was on the radio and [was] hot at the time. I was like, ‘yo, get the motherfucka who did that.’ ” The “something” was a remix and the motherfucka in question was a Caribbean-American producer named Salaam Remi, whose trademark was a sonic ability to seam
lessly cross the cultural hyphen to traffic dancehall vibes between urban sounds. In a Hot 97 interview, radio deejay Charlamagne Tha God playfully referred to Remi’s production as “the green card for Jamaican artists.” Remi, whose long roster includes Super Cat, Mega Banton, Patra, and later Amy Winehouse, Nas, and Fergie, sees it that way too. Referencing a moment in the ’90s where dancehall and reggae enjoyed an unprecedented popularity in American music, Remi said, “It was all the stuff that was coming out of Jamaica that needed to get on the radio for hip hop and R&B. A lot of those songs were stuck at the airport, so to speak. I got them the visas that [helped] them get through.”

  Auspiciously for the Fugees, Remi agreed to do the remix for the relatively modest price of five grand, but it was money that they didn’t have. In a display of typical hip-hop ingenuity, Jackson hustled the PR budget and said they were throwing a party. Instead, they used the money to pay Remi, who dug deep into the old-school hip-hop crates, sampled Harlem Underground’s “Smokin Cheeba Cheeba” and flipped a lukewarm “Nappy Heads” into a fiyah bun remix. “They sent me the Fugees because they were Haitian, and they needed that bridge to figure out how to get this group into the mainstream,” said Remi. “They had talent. They just hadn’t figured out how to channel it. We were coming out of a moment in hip hop where groups like Onyx, who rhymed really fast, had a lot of success,” Jackson explained. “But there was a shift going on. Hip hop was slowing down a bit more and Salaam knew it. He told the Fugees to slow their shit down, let people understand what they were saying, and add a catchy hook. Then he just bodied it.”

  The remix set the groundwork for the success of The Score. Journalist and dancehall expert Rob Kenner recalls a recent conversation with Wyclef regarding the concept behind the album. “Wyclef said they wanted to make a sound system project. The first draft of the award-winning cover of “Killing Me Softly” was originally conceived as “Killing a Sound Boy,” said Kenner. A sound boy clash, for the uninitiated, is the Jamaican concept of battling deejays and the musical antecedent for deejay battles in hip hop. “If you go to a dance in Jamaica,” explains Kenner, “they’ll play anything from Peabo Bryson to Celine Dion to ‘Tainted Love.’ ” It can be the corniest, poppiest record and they’ll make it dancehall just by the way they present it. With The Score Wyclef was very explicitly taking up the Fugees as a sound system and incorporating the very Jamaican idea that “Any record that we pull out of the box can be dancehall-ified once we put our flavor and attitude on it.” Despite its success, it was never meant to be a pop crossover record. It was very much conceived to be a “soundbwoy fi dead” record.” That moment had been a long time coming, one that began with an ease in US immigration policies in the late 1960s that led to a dramatic increase in immigrants from the Caribbean, a significant number of which congregated in the ghettos of the Bronx and Brooklyn.

  For reggae superstar Nadine Sutherland the Fugees embodied the paradigm of Caribbean people who live in America who embraced the duality of their culture. “The Fugees embodied the Caribbean experience in the diaspora,” explained Sutherland. “I know that Lauryn Hill is American, but she’s part of that movement and people identify her with that dual paradigm, that syncretic merging of the two cultures. It was the Fugees who helped me realize that Caribbean people living in the US could be like “Yeah, I’m Caribbean. I love my country and I love my reggae, but I am also into hip hop and there was no major shift in their psyche to say it. They didn’t feel as if they had to embrace one identity over the other. They were okay identifying with both.” The introduction of cable television to Jamaica also gave Jamaicans on-island a new cross-cultural fluidity. “When BET came to Jamaica, we got access to everything that was happening in America. You could see people switch between cultures at the drop of a hat. Now it was nothing to see a Caribbean kid dancing to rap music and then turn around and dance to dancehall. It was an interesting paradigm.”

  Certified six times platinum in domestic sales alone, The Score made the Fugees one of the bestselling hip-hop groups in history, an accomplishment many attributed to the distinctiveness of the band’s femmecee. There was no question that Lauryn Hill had heads on notice. Her award-winning cover of “Killing Me Softly” proved her mettle as a vocalist to contend with—and her valor. In the words of my girl Kierna Mayo, “No one is supposed to be able to touch Roberta Flack and survive.” Lauryn did and subsequently hand-delivered the soul legend, wrapped anew, for an entirely new generation. When asked about her ability to flex deftly between emcee and songstress, Schott Free sums it up bluntly: “If Mary [J. Blige] is the queen of hip-hop soul, I don’t know what we can call Lauryn, because Lauryn can actually rhyme. Mary can’t rap. So, what do we call Lauryn? The influence?”

  Even more significant for Free was the fact that it was accepted that Lauryn was writing all her own lyrics—at a time when the same could not be said of the two most popular female emcees. “People said that Jay-Z was writing a lot of Foxy [Brown’s] stuff. If you go back now and listen to the flow you can hear it. And we already know the deal with Kim because I was right there watching Biggie do it. I’ve never heard anybody say, ‘Oh I wrote Lauryn’s rhymes.’ ” In the current era of feminist critique where women—in both scholarship and shit-talking—recast Lil’ Kim as the transgressive architect of a new liberated sexuality in hip hop, Free’s point is worth underscoring. That Kim could spit was never in question, but Free is not the only one convinced that at least some of the bars allegedly freeing the proverbial “P” were scripted by the same genius force that bought us “Dreams of Fucking an R-n-B Bitch.” A fact worth putting in your feminist theory and fucking with. Along with the fact that Hill wrote her own rhymes and she wrote for and with her crew in an egalitarian, mixed-gendered, collaborative approach that was rare for hip hop at the time. By the time she dropped the “Ready or Not” verse that infamously invokes Elliot Ness, sess, witches brew, voodoo, and hexes then likens herself to Nina Simone right before firing the scatological shot heard around the world, it was Wu-Tang clear: Lauryn Hill was nothing to fuck with.

  This was in part due to the utter uniqueness of Hill’s components. Black. Female. Ivy Leaguer. A Columbia University English major blessed with a broad literary arsenal that simultaneously reflected her dexterity as a wordsmith and her acute understanding of the latent but deadly power in the economy of words. Lauryn was nice with hers. She had rhyme schemes that could stalk a lyrical adversary with panther-like precision. With a singsong playfulness, she could engage her silky alto and disarm anyone who made the mistake of taking her too lightly, then spit a death blow with the percussiveness of machine-gun rounds or metronomic machete swings, depending on her mood.

  The Score’s success placed the Fugees in league with The Roots—the biggest live hip-hop act at the time—comparisons were inevitable. Jackson saw it as apples and oranges. “With The Roots, people really weren’t stressing their beats so much. It was more about their live instrumentation and the fact that these niggas, Black Thought and Malik B., could rhyme for hours. The Fugees,” he continues, “were the poor man’s Roots. Clef had the guitar. Jerry Duplessis was on the bass. Sometimes they had a drummer and a deejay. Sometimes just a deejay.” Unlike The Roots, who were considered masters of live performance, the early Fugees shows were a mess, peppered with “cultural” acts of randomness meant to illustrate the group’s ties and affinity to the Caribbean, and Haiti in particular. “Sometimes they’d bring a goat out on stage to give props to their Haitian roots. It was weird shit. The audience would laugh at them every time. People thought they were a joke.” The laughter, however, would quickly end as soon as the crowds heard Hill crooning from backstage, a strategy that the group quickly implemented. “Clef and Pras would come out rhyming and people would still be drinking and talking like, ‘Whatever. These niggas is whack.’ Then Lauryn would start singing from behind stage and the audience would go quiet, every fucking time. That’s when it would be like, ‘Okay. Now let’s start the show.
’ ”

  The demand for Lauryn to go solo would start almost immediately, but Jackson, who watched the group’s collaboration process almost from the beginning, felt assertions that Lauryn was carrying them with her talent were at best short-sighted. “I think the idea that her talent was being pimped to make a name for Clef and Pras began with the live shows. Then the press would write reviews of songs and claim Clef was a musical genius, which he is—that nigga can play every instrument, sing in four or five different languages—but then they’d start to write things that made it seem like Lauryn was just an instrument to his genius. Really, they were more like The Beatles. Clef was Paul and Lauryn was John. They were best together, but apart, they were some motherfuckers too.” Time would bear this out. Wyclef Jean’s first solo effort, The Carnival, was released in 1997 to wide critical acclaim and eventually certified at double platinum with two Grammy nominations. Miseducation followed it with ten nominations and a record-setting five wins, breaking the one set for female artists by Carole King and her album Tapestry in 1971.

  There is more of course. The kind of things that become clearer after two decades of hindsight. For example, as critics we made much ado about the fact that Miseducation weaves a tapestry of sound that borrows liberally from soul, reggae, and hip hop but what is really more remarkable is that Lauryn was able to do that because she envisioned an identity for herself that was rooted in a diasporic blackness that seemed to not only travel seamlessly between Ethiopia, Newark, Brooklyn, Brixton, and Kingston but also through decades, pulling from black musical traditions of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s at will. Much of this has been shallowly attributed to her time in the Fugees and later her common-law marriage to Rohan Marley. But while her bandmates, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michél, bear the hyphenated negotiations of identity common to first- and second-generation immigrants, Lauryn Hill is strictly African American. There was no ackee and saltfish and boiled dumpling cooking in the Sunday morning kitchen of her childhood. No parents rousing her out of sleep with sharply punctuated patois. Instead, she deliberately wrote herself into the discourse of diaspora, drew on the global nature of black music, and fashioned herself a citizen of the world. She took from that legacy what she wanted and asked no one’s permission, in part because she treated hip hop itself for what it is—a Caribbean-American art form. Understanding its roots, L-Boogie explored its routes. As a result, her blackness, and its reach, was ubiquitous.