by Joan Morgan
She was also arresting. And not just because she arrived as a working actress (she had a reoccurring role on the soap As the World Turns and a lead in Sister Act 2 under her belt), one who understood presence and how to werrrk a camera and command a stage. To quote writer, activist, and filmmaker dream hampton, “Lauryn Hill was our most beautiful pop star from that era. Line up Whitney, Janet, and Mariah. Lauryn was the most beautiful. Those wedges. Those legs. Those thigh-high shorts. She was just this perfect little thing.” But while beautiful pop stars are the stuff of cliché, it was the type of beauty Lauryn Hill possessed that made her as much of a visual intervention as she was a musical one. Deep chocolate brown skin with a mane of dreadlocks, she was the type of post–fly girl pretty common to pregentrified Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy, but was completely ignored by the mainstream media. And if we are to be nakedly honest—and really, after twenty years in, why not?—by plenty of hip-hop era black men in ways that were demonstrated by both their dating and video casting choices. In a sea of sew-ins and relaxers, Lauryn was a naturalista long before YouTube tutorials talked black women through the radical choice of actually liking and growing our hair the way nature and our gene pool intended. And way before the twenty-first century’s natural hair revolution created a half-billion-dollar industry of conveniences to support that choice.
Lithe and leggy, Lauryn was a fashionista deeply invested in a personal style, who liked nice things but seemed to flow above the fray of ghetto fabulousness and its accompanying tendency to serve as high-end designers’ billboards. She liked her hip-hop tinged with a rootsy glam and hints of an ethereal ’70s sexy grounded with sobering touches of militancy—a combo that was deceptively accessible, simultaneously aspirational, and ultimately inimitable. Making cover-girl moves where no dreadlocked black girl had gone before—Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan. Shit. Essence—we have Lauryn Hill to thank for the present-day Gucci models who sport TWAs (teeny-tiny afros) and Saint Laurent girls showcasing blackety-black-black cornrows, the kind without extensions. In short, Lauryn was the visual precursor for #BlackGirlMagic and #BlackGirlsRock. We turned to her for soul affirmations that we were more than enough before the digital revolution granted us hashtags that enabled us to harness archives of similar fierceness easily on Instagram and Tumblr.
Routinely lauded for its themes of self-love, empowerment, and broken-heart-bounce-backs, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill has earned itself the rank of classic in contemporary American popular culture. And yet, two decades after its debut in 1998, so little has been written about where and when Miseducation entered. More specifically, that it was sired by a ’90s kind of girl at the end of a century that would dismantle the Berlin Wall, witness an act of American-on-Americans terrorism in Oklahoma, and usher in a digital age that would change the dynamics of human interaction and intimacy as we formerly knew it.
And because she was a ’90s kind of black girl, she came into adulthood watching the police receive passes for brutalizing black bodies—the murders of Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpurs and the beating of Rodney King—in ways the next century would render routine enough to warrant a #BlackLivesMatter movement. She saw a million black men march on Washington and watched Los Angeles burst into riotous flames. She also saw a lone black woman stand firm against the nomination of a black Supreme Court judge and far too many black people dismiss her claims of sexual harassment as a Jezebel’s coercion with white racism. Specifically, as a black woman she would watch the white president who was jokingly (and ultimately ironically) referred to as the first black one, sign in legislature—the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act—that would devastate her community both politically and economically, systematically destabilizing the structural conditions necessary for #BlackLove to thrive for decades to come. She also saw a president whose own love triangle played itself out in a public scandal of an impeachment trial while the pain of her private one gifted a generation with its own vehicle for healing and catharsis.
And make no mistake about it. If you were a hip-hop-loving black girl in the ’90s you were deeply in need of some healing. You’d already started steeling yourself for the battle ahead when hip hop, in its quest for commercial dominance, chose corporatization as its bedmate. By the time it was revealed to the world that virulent misogyny (not to mention homophobia) were going to be mainstay ingredients in its increasingly formulaic recipe for SoundScan success, you’d already peeped the writing on the wall. You, the black and brown women who’d helped create the hottest party of the late twentieth century were being summarily written off the guest list, while Becky and Barry Middle America were greeted at the velvet rope with VIP wristbands.
The music you loved rebranded you the sacrificial cow and left you to a careless death—one by thousands of lyrical lacerations. You were not alone. The ’90s was the era when what was formerly “black” got rebranded as “urban.” In turn, it opened up shop and rolled out a welcome mat and passed out flyers with hooker-level solicitations: “We sell culture here! Feel free to appropriate!” Meanwhile entire black music departments disappeared at record labels, absorbed and neutralized under the auspices of “pop.” By the time Biggie and Pac were gunned down six days apart (1996 was a mixed bag like a mothafucka), you could hardly keep track of what you were crying for. We were still trying to create the language—for what it meant to love hip hop, black men, and still hold on to yourself.
But back to the judge-y goddaughter.
I’m feeling a bit defensive. After all, judge-y is the lack of grace millennials fail to grant the generation prior who didn’t grow up with “binaries are bad!” and “gender is fluid!” as givens. The one that came of age before postblackness was a thing and PhDs in queer and hip-hop studies were possible. These were theories we had to learn, sometimes in the midst of creating them. I mean this literally. In 1998, I was home finishing the final edits on the book that would birth hip-hop feminism. And yes, I was listening to Lauryn.
Looking back, we were already barreling toward the shades of gray that millennials and the iGeneration see their world in. The shift from black and white was unsettling, full of conflicts and even more contradictions. For example, ’90s blackness still had deep investments in respectability politics and often found itself in conflict with hip hop’s penchant for valorizing the hood. At the same time, they were middle- and upper-class kids and rappers claiming ghetto authenticity, even if they had to lie about it. Journalist Akiba Solomon, who had just started her job as an assistant editor at The Source magazine when Miseducation dropped, recalls Lauryn being one of the few middle-class rappers who was actually honest about it. “Remember that line in ‘That Thing,’ ‘Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem’? It was one of my favorites,’ ” said Solomon. “Nowadays people would dismiss that as ‘She’s being a Hotep’ and indulging in the politics of respectability or whatever, but back then it was really helpful for me to hear a woman say that—especially a woman like Lauryn who was undoubtedly from the culture and loved the culture but was making a commentary on girls ‘acting hard.’ It was the era of the gangsta bitch,” Solomon explained, “and a lot of girls in hip hop identified with this hypermasculine idea of ‘soldiering.’ Kim and Foxy were the hot female rappers and they were rhyming about carrying drugs in your cooch on a Greyhound. Well, that was interesting imagery, but it didn’t represent my experiences. Lauryn was a middle-class girl from suburban New Jersey who talked about class—working and middle—in her lyrics. For somebody like her to talk about the fullness of black experience was important and brave because at the time, there was a whole swath of people in hip hop pretending that they weren’t middle class. Middle-class people were trying to hustle backward, and hood people were trying to appear wealthy. It was a weird and I would argue, self-destructive, take. Black people, and black women in particular, have multiple sides. Even the so-called hoodest of us also have middle-class concerns. Lauryn
’s lyric felt like air to me. The whole album did.”
Similarly, the purists were obsessed with authenticity and called out the sellouts. The backpackers lamented they didn’t see the same kinds of commercial success as the hard core.
And everybody wanted a magazine cover. In response, the decade seemed to organize itself by binaries and chose its camps accordingly. Everything seemed to be evaluated by markers of versus back then: East Coast vs. West Coast, positive vs. negative, gay vs. straight, hoes vs. queens. Even the Fugees’s success was partially due to the ways they were positioned as the positive alternative to the violence that claimed Biggie and Pac’s lives. Just like Lauryn’s pedestal was partially built on a distinct fear and loathing for Kim and Foxy’s hypersexuality. This was a practice that, to her credit, dream hampton knew we would ultimately have to undo. “I tried to get at it, even back then, in a review I wrote about Digable Planets,” she laments. “I mean, what made us think that the person who was listening to Arrested Development wasn’t also the same person who was listening to Ice Cube?”
I feel myself cutting the goddaughter some slack. The twenty years between us is the critical difference between the generation that grew up with hip hop as a given and the one that watched it move from subculture to center. And it wasn’t just the music. With a hustler’s spirit inscribed deep within its DNA, hip hop made new lanes and created new career possibilities. In turn, we got real carpe diem with our shit, dubbed ourselves the culture’s keepers, and became its deejays, producers, music executives, writers, editors, publishers, entrepreneurs, directors, stylists, and designers. We were arrogant, opinionated, and indebted because hip hop changed our lives. I’m sure this made us judge-y as shit.
Besides, anyone who’s ever listened to “Doo Wop (That Thing)” knows that Lauryn could be judge-y. Wrapped within the sweetness of its Motown-inspired melodies lies a lyrical smackdown of certain black girl aesthetics that heads are still in their feelings about. “Yup,” laughs deejay Lynnée Denise, who admits to being “one of those gay women who was in love with her. That deep raspy voice and the way she would flip her looks between masculine hip-hop gear and then something really femme made me feel like Lauryn was challenging gender binaries early. But then she hit me with that.” It was a conservative position on “fakeness vs. authenticity” that Lynnée felt she couldn’t afford. “I’m sure Lauryn grew up with black women in Jersey who shaped her fashion sense—women who were wearing fake nails and weaves. Besides, she had fake locs.”
(Wait. What?)
Lyrically she is guilty as charged, but the video for “Doo Wop (That Thing)” reveals a trickster’s play, and the didactic morphs into a delicious dualism. “It’s interesting to revisit it twenty years later,” says Lynnée. “The split screen has new meaning. I associate it with her being a Gemini and her natural understanding of the power of dualism. Lauryn as rapper/singer, artist/scholar. There’s a darkness to it that speaks afro-futurism, a kind of time travel and speculative re-telling of black folk’s history in New York City in the last century. All the elements of us are there. She catches the spirit of NYC summer community gatherings. She’s gesturing toward Brooklyn, home of the block party, or maybe NYC black life as a whole.”
There’s the obvious dualism of the two time periods, of course, the ’90s vs. the ’60s. It’s a split screen but the two eras aren’t equally weighted. Its aesthetic has more in common with 1970s cinematography—gritty with muted colors that still manage to pay acute attention to the range of tonality and texture in black skin—much more akin to old-school black and white than ’90s music-video cinematography. It was the height of ghetto fabulousness, in a time when hip hop was invested in the cache of being able to show the world that blackness could move seamlessly in and out of multiple worlds—from the Hamptons to the hood—and using shinier, big budget optics to do it. The visual choices in “Doo Wop (That Thing)” (much more cinematographer Bradford Young than director Hype Williams) however, seem to be a subtle rejection of that. Even the sartorial choices it makes for the ’60s—brothers are dressed in sharp, clean suits and brims (hey, Mos Def, hey) and the women are in Jackie O tea-length, A-line dresses—is a veneration of the past that even the present seems captured by.
And then here comes Lauryn, slaying in double time and flipping her own respectability politics on its head. On the right side of the screen she’s that L-Boogie effortless sexy that became her trademark: wedge-heeled platforms, thigh-high miniskirt with a matching spaghetti-strapped tee topped with an oversize denim shirt—one that she selectively shimmies out of to reveal gorgeous chocolate shoulders and accompanying décolleté. On the left side she’s serving us ’60s girl-group perfection in a zebra print swing coat and matching trapeze dress and—wait for it—a flawless swoop bang beehive. Simultaneously reserving the right to indict hair weaves and fake hair while wearing a straight wig. “She’s a shape-shifter,” Lynnée reminds me. “Much like the science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s character Anyanwu, and she wears each shape masterfully well.”
She’s right. Dismissing Lauryn here as purely judge-y and hypocritical is too flat of a read. When Hill rhymed that she was only human she was advocating for her right to be complicated and beautifully contradictory—and ours too, whether she realized it or not. “It’s like this,” says Dr. Yaba Blay, scholar, image activist and creator of the popular web series #ProfessionalBlackGirl. “What made that video so powerful was her saying I can be both of these seemingly contradictory things and they’re both real. I can criticize it and still rock it. The video also gives us these images of the beauty salon and the barbershop, which are traditionally safe spaces for us to have these kinds of conversations. Lauryn was moving us away from those harsh spaces of judgment and closer to where we are now, which is more ‘I know it’s a problem but that don’t mean I don’t like it. Can we talk about it?’ It’s very similar to the work you do in Chickenheads: when it [came] out the following year and you told us you needed ‘a feminism that fucked with the grays.’ It’s that moment in the late ’90s when [we] get that shift and we’re being encouraged to see ourselves as dynamic, fluid human beings that are both/and, not either/or.”
Both, Goddaughter. Judge-y and liberatory.
So many female artists now are just talking about competing with each other for dick and a lot of black female artists [in the] ’90s were making albums that were essentially all about “I love myself so much.” But not all of us needed that. Some of us needed someone who represented us in all our contradictions and pain and could put it in a well-mixed album that sounded good. Lauryn was that girl. Her image was just really relatable. A lot of women could relate to being nice—as in being on top of your game—being beautiful and being in love with the wrong man. She was inspiring because she was like, “I’m dope. You can be dope too . . . But I am doper than you.” Obviously. Oh, Lauryn had a little stankness to her, but I feel like women—women of color and black women in particular—can relate to that.
—Akiba Solomon
2 / That Thing
Ask a black girl to recall her favorite Lauryn Hill memory from the ’90s and at least one of them will probably recall a magazine—big, beautiful, and glossy. The end of the ’90s was the print era’s last stand. That’s not to suggest that it was ever a neat divide, but in the predigital age the distinction between newspapers and magazines was this: Newspapers were what you turned to find out what was happening, but magazines were what you turned to figure out what mattered. Charged with the lofty duty of not only reporting but also interpreting culture, what a magazine chose to report not only rendered it visible, it also rendered it legible. Magazines had cultural capital.
If you were a black girl (and a writing or editing one at that), you waited anxiously to see if this was the month your favorite glossy would finally acknowledge your existence, all the while knowing that your appearances were exceedingly rare. If you were a black girl of the dark chocolate/dreadlocked/afroed/caesar-cut/hip-hop gen
/afro-bohemian/nose-ringed/ghetto-born/Ivy League–schooled/Gucci-and-Timberland-loving variety, you already knew better than to try to find yourself in Essence, let alone Elle. In the case of the former (for which I wrote regularly), a frank, early convo with an editor who wanted to see me succeed produced this bit of wisdom: “Do yourself a favor,” she said. “When you pitch story ideas here, think of the Midwest and not of your five girlfriends in New York who you meet for cappuccinos.” Again, this is before the ubiquity of Starbucks, when coffee in New York was that thing sold in Greek cups in bodegas and cost fifty cents, and cappuccino-drinking black girls were so singularly rare MC Lyte dropped a whole track extoling the drink’s virtues in 1989.
The ’90s was the decade that publishing, advertisers, and the film industry hadn’t been entirely disabused of the lie that black faces and stories could not sell to mainstream (read white) consumers. An example? Essence, the leading black women’s magazine in the nation couldn’t get the same fashion advertising as Vogue—despite the fact that both had a subscriber base that exceeded 1 million and research consistently demonstrated that black people’s combined buying power was an estimated half trillion. (It currently hovers at 1.3 trillion). Even when presented with these numbers, they countered by saying that black women weren’t their desired consumers.