by Joan Morgan
Hip hop went on to disprove that when fashion houses discovered that Gucci on a rapper could transform its entire accessories market base, and Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale proved publishers’ long-standing argument that blacks didn’t read was false as hell—a revelation that gave birth to new genres like urban romance and hip-hop lit. It also paved the way for a new wave of black filmmakers including Spike Lee, John Singleton, and the Hughes and Hudlin brothers. Even with numerous successes, it was a battle that had to be fought time and again. Why do you think we organize and ride so hard for black filmmakers we want to see win on opening night? (Hey, Ava DuVernay, hey) Hopefully Black Panther’s success as, at least at the time of this printing, one of the highest-grossing superhero movies of all time will kill that convo once and for all.
So it meant something that by the end of the ’90s, Lauryn Hill was not only on the cover of countless magazines, she was on covers that mattered. In 1999, when Time put Lauryn Hill on its February 8 cover, it had placed only seventeen black figures on its covers throughout the ’90s—out of a total of 525 issues. Only five—including Bill Cosby, Bill T. Jones, Toni Morrison, and Oprah Winfrey—worked in arts and entertainment. Lauryn Hill was the only musician. (See “Deconstructing: Lauryn Hill’s Rise and Fall, 15 Years After The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” Max Blau, Stereogum, August 23, 2013).
Akiba Solomon has a story she loves to tell: “When I first started out in magazines, I was at Jane. I remember going to my editors and saying, ‘I think we really need to do a feature on Lauryn Hill.’ They were like, ‘That Fugee girl? No. What’s the story?’ Then she came out on the cover of Bazaar, and I was like. ‘Fuck y’all.’ I was so happy because Bazaar was considered high fashion, dope and adult.” The Harper’s Bazaar double cover was a thing of tremendous beauty, featuring a solo image of beaming Hill in white slacks, red boots, and expertly flip-curled locs on one side and a denim shorts, faux fur, and beret-wearing Hill surrounded by gorgeous little black kids on the other. The cover was a radical departure for the magazine, which, despite being led by the legendary and absolutely visionary editor in chief, the late Liz Tilberis, was categorically whiter than white.
“But it wasn’t just that people outside the culture were starting to see Lauryn,” Solomon reiterates. “It was also how she showed up. She went on that cover and she was still Lauryn. She was like ‘Y’all come to me.’ She was really the first black woman artist that I’d ever seen do it like that. Like, ‘I’m not bending, and I’m not worried about what these white people are going to think. I’m here and I am fashion. I’m just going to put some rollers in my locs.’ The corny people at Jane [didn’t] get her but these people at Bazaar, who are fucking dope, get it.”
Dr. Yaba Blay remembers three things about 1998. It was the year she moved back to New Orleans for graduate school after leaving the city at age thirteen, traumatized from incidents of colorism. It was also the year Miseducation dropped and Sudanese supermodel Alek Wek appeared on the cover of Elle magazine. She was the darkest-skinned person ever to do so. “In fairness, I don’t want to paint a picture like, ‘Oh, woe is me, I’ve never been seen as beautiful,’ ” says the Ghanaian-born and NOLA-raised Blay. “Prior to Lauryn, Foxy was the redeeming person in the mainstream to validate darker brown sisters’ color in a very public way. Seeing her being considered as beautiful meant that the potential existed that I could be seen as beautiful as well. But then there was this shift. Foxy was brown with a long weave. She gave you that girl and I loved her. But what made Lauryn Hill different from Foxy Brown to me was that Lauryn was real in a way that I could relate to. She was natural.” For Blay, who’d watched Lauryn’s hair grow from a short natural style with the Fugees to long locs, Lauryn offered much-needed confirmation that dark brown women with natural hair could also be considered beautiful in a way that Foxy Brown did not.
Furthermore, watching New Orleans, a city she’d known to be plagued with colorism, embrace Lauryn allayed a lot of her anxieties about moving back. “A lot of my childhood memories of New Orleans are riddled with colorism and very much wrapped up in people’s negative reflections of me. The first time I heard Lauryn, I was in New Orleans, and of course, she’s the hotness, and everybody’s into it. Lauryn also represented some level of ‘conscious’ which was also encouraging.” In a city that had been largely all about bounce music, Blay felt that Hill and other members of the neo-soul movement made room for other lifestyles and aesthetics. “It felt like New Orleans was catching up, so to speak.” Shortly after her return to the University of New Orleans, she discovered that she might have spoken too soon. “I get there, we’re rocking with Lauryn, I’m feeling good and I’m not feeling the colorism stuff as much, if at all. I’m making new friends and feeling good about myself.”
And then that November Blay saw Alek Wek on the cover of Elle. She was delirious with excitement. “I remember, very clearly, being in the checkout line of the A&P grocery store with one of my very best male friends and when I see the magazine, I literally start jumping up and down. It was the first time I’d seen a woman [with] my complexion on the cover of a magazine and somebody was calling her beautiful.” Blay was elated until she saw that her friend, who was also black, had a distinctly different reaction. “This Negro was pissed. And I was like ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ ” His response was a quick and hurtful reality check.
“White people making fun of us,” he said. “They know she’s not beautiful.” It was in that moment that Blay realized that Lauryn or no Lauryn, “We’re still here. We’re still here.” Even still, said Blay, Lauryn meant a lot to her. And she means a lot still. “Aesthetically for sure, but she also opened up a vibe that allowed a lot of people in New Orleans to be different and to think different. To come up off the ignorance for a little and think critically about ourselves. I’m not going to lie, though. That in that moment in that A&P line . . . That shit hurt my feelings in some real ways.”
I can relate. In 2001 I was the executive editor at Essence magazine when we made the decision to put Alek Wek on the cover. It was the 2000s and the reign of the supermodels as cover subjects was long over. That ground had been ceded to celebrities. Still, the editorial team decided the cover was both an affirmation of Wek’s beauty and recognition of the pioneering role she was playing for dark-skinned black women, both within the fashion industry and out. The Essence fashion and beauty team, particularly dedicated to combating negative beauty narratives about black women, rose to the occasion and created one of the most stunning images of Wek to date. It was the lowest-selling issue we had that year, accompanied by copious angry letters consistent with Blay’s A&P friend. It was heartbreaking and still my worst experience at the magazine in twenty years.
Alek’s story is relevant here, lest anyone discount the weight of the iconic position Hill occupied. Her image wasn’t just black, and it wasn’t just beautiful. It was uniquely relatable in a way that allowed black women to stitch themselves into her narrative and rewrite their own. The nature of beauty being what it is, a cultural currency unfairly assigned by the luck of the genetic draw, the impact of Lauryn’s beauty on other black women is rare. Beyoncé is undeniably a stunning woman but, as countless think pieces can attest, her beauty tends to be more polarizing than not. Lest this be relegated to merely light-skinned vs. dark-skinned shit, remember that Lupita Nyong’o’s, Anna Wintour “It Girl” moment immediately following 12 Years a Slave did not produce a similar phenomenon. We were able to stitch ourselves into Lauryn’s narrative because she had “That Thing,” that intangible every-black-girl thing that was indisputably us.
Time for a confession. It was never just how Lauryn looked. It was the way the men in hip hop looked at her, in public and with desire, that gave us hope for ourselves—especially at a time when lyrical misogyny was rapidly increasing and media reports about black women’s desirability and declining marriage statistics warned us that we might be moving from waiting to exhale to simply . . . wai
ting. Karen Good Marable remembers the first time she ever saw Lauryn in person. “I had just moved to Brooklyn in 1993. I was with my boy 8 Ball, who was from Jersey, and Lauryn drove through Spike [Lee’s] block party. She was behind the wheel, so beautiful and diminutive, in this big body truck, and my boy latched on to her window. He was like, ‘I love you. I love you. I love you.’ ” Good Marable laughs. “He couldn’t stop saying it.”
Jackson remembers his first time like this: “She was as fine as cat hair, so of course I was trying to holler. But Lauryn had an ability to shift that dating energy to friendship energy easily. Part of it was that she was truly special and gifted. Before she even made records she had that kinda beauty and emotion that would elicit the best outta people.” His favorite example is a run-in with the Wu-Tang Clan before the Fugees blew up. “They were leaving their gig on a bus back when buses subbed as green rooms. The Clan ran up on their bus and it was kinda dangerous for a moment, like niggas was gonna set it off. But, then they saw Lauryn,” Jackson recalls, “and the energy immediately shifted to ‘Yo, yo, yo. What’s up shorty?’ Everybody starts trying to talk to her. And Clef, he’s got no wins in this because nobody’s supposed to know he and Lauryn were fucking with each other. So Lauryn is just handling each motherfucker that comes at her. Left. Right. This one. That one. By the time it gets to [Ol’ Dirty Bastard] the whole situation is just comical. She was able to disarm him and they just ended up having a long, quality conversation as friends. She’s truly gifted in that way.”
Jackson continues, “I think that for a lot of black men, Lauryn represents the love you have for your mother, for your grandmother, for your sister, for your nieces. And, also represents the sexual feminine energy that you have for your girl. You can literally see a lineage of black women in your life fucking with Lauryn. I say all of that to say she had the ability to elicit strong sorta familial urges in men in addition to sexual ones. There was a softness and a sex appeal that women respected. She [didn’t] use it like a tool. She wasn’t over sexualized. Women wanted [to] be like her and men wanted her. That’s a big part of why it worked.” For those women whose coping strategy for hip hop’s growing misogyny was the kind of denial needed to convince themselves that rappers were only talking about “real” bitches and hoes—They’re not talking to me. They’re talking to the women who were like that—Lauryn was the illusion needed to fuel the fallacy that the proper amount of consciousness/righteousness/bawseness exempted you from what was obviously problematic. Of course it was a lie. No amount of #BadBitchery can inure you from the possibility of heartbreak. Don’t fault us for this logic. We weren’t versed yet in resisting cisgendered, heteronormative institutions steeped in patriarchy. Back then we just wanted so desperately to be chosen both by hip hop and by the men who made it. So did Lauryn. And if Hill, who was arguably the baddest pop star on the planet could have her heart broken and land on a road called Hope, then just maybe we could too. But this is a lesson each generation of women seems to have to unlearn. Cue Lemonade if you don’t believe me.
But back to magazines.
Hands down, my favorite Lauryn Hill magazine moment was receiving the inaugural copy of Honey magazine with her on the cover. Honey was as much a product of place as it was of time, recalls cofounder Joicelyn Dingle. It was heavily influenced by Spike Lee’s ungentrified Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “It was so black and something I’d never experienced, even though I’d been in other black situations. I’m from the South and I went to Hampton. It was bold and audacious and fun and sexy. Black people owned businesses. We just walked around looking like we loved ourselves. A lot.” For Dingle, working as the manager for Spike Lee’s store, 40 Acres and a Mule, amplified that feeling. “I saw people come from all over the country and I saw how important it was to have black things. And how much they honored Spike’s work. After they bought the book, they bought the clothes. It wasn’t just the store, it was the culture he helped to usher in with his films. I got to see black people who lived that way. Men who loved being black. Who loved their corner store. Who loved the dude [who] ran the corner store. It was something I fell in love with.”
At this point Joicelyn and Kierna had been working on Honey for nearly five years. Even though the dream was still far off, they knew Lauryn was the only choice for the cover. Part of it was principle: “With Honey we were trying to bottle what we now understand to be black girl magic. Back then we used the language of goddess to refer to powerful black women. I think it reflected our interest and intrigue with alternate African religions that was directly related to an upsurge of cultural consciousness among black women,” says Mayo. “Lauryn was an important touch point in all of that. She was the intersectionality we were looking for. In terms of our flyness, everybody wanted permission to be sexy, and hot, and fly as well as woke. All the things young women today take for granted. But it was our collective internal question mark. Which side would you choose? What could you give yourself permission to be? Honey was our attempt to say we are all of these things. We are intellects, we are radicals, we are fashionistas, we are wearing hot pants and red lipstick. And hip hop was this boy world that was evolving around male identity, which left us hovering around, never ever being fully centered but driving so much of the conversation. The essence of this combination was far more complex than even pop culture had recognized at that point, let alone the world. Lauryn just felt so unboxed and as women who were partaking in hip-hop culture, we needed that. We needed to be affirmed on the global stage.”
Turns out the US wasn’t the only place struggling with its binaries. Nadine Sutherland, a former Bob Marley protégé, a culture studies scholar and the daughter of a longtime Rasta reflects on the global impact of Lauryn’s image, particularly as it pertained to black women’s expressions of their sexuality: “Lauryn Hill was a culture shifter in a lot of ways, even for us here in Jamaica. Remember we are a country that still struggles with the restrictions of a patriarchal environment. She helped usher in a new school of dawtas. For young women who liked the concept of Rastafari but didn’t fully buy into all of its philosophies and ideologies, Lauryn Hill gave them a different narrative. In the ’70s anyone who wore dreds was a Rasta, if you saw a female reggae artist with dreadlocks, she was Rastafarian. Take for example the I-Threes, who of course were the back-up singers for Bob Marley and the Wailers.
“For a young person who was growing up in the ’90s and liked that natural look but didn’t want to identify as Rasta, there was really no example until Lauryn Hill. She was a conscious singer who wore dreadlocks but didn’t subscribe to the orthodox practices of Rastafari women that say women must cover themselves. She was 43sexy, but she wasn’t selling sex. She could wear a batty rider, but she wasn’t overtly Babylonian. She did show some skin—God, I just remember those legs. That girl had incredible legs.”
What cannot be discounted here is Hill’s impact on an island that, although predominantly black, has a legacy of colorism. It always used to make me laugh that friends who hadn’t been to Jamaica expected to see an island full of dreds. In the early ’90s I could find more dreds on the streets in Brooklyn than I could in Jamaica. A woman who chose to cut off her hair was considered equally heretical. A woman in Kingston once hailed me up from across the road just because we both had short hair. The binary wasn’t just Rasta vs. Babylon. It was that natural hair equaled being unkempt and straight hair was polished, which played into the leftover mentalities of colonization. For most of Jamaica’s history, its reigning beauty standard has been mixed race or “browning.” For confirmation, peep its longest-running Jamaica tourism ad featuring the honey-colored and straight-haired Trinidadian beauty Sintra Arunte-Bronte, the absence of darker-skinned women in adverts, or the ongoing choices for Miss Jamaica and Miss Universe. All are light-skinned or racially nondescript, with straight or curly hair. Consider gorgeous and unapologetic afro-rocker Davina Bennett, the second-place runner for 2017 Miss Universe, Lauryn Hill’s love child.
“Sh
e gave those young women a different imaging of what could be because of how she presented herself. In Jamaica, a lot of young women discovered a voice because of Lauryn Hill, one that allowed them to be themselves, to be sexy with a natural hairstyle. We now have a movement. Young women now feel like they can wear a natural hairstyle and still be considered sexy without the ideological and religious baggage of the Rastafarian movement of the 1970s. Beautiful black women are wearing their hair natural and feeling confident and sexy. That’s because they now have a choice: they can be rootsy with long skirts and blouses that cover their elbows, or they can wear their natural hair with haute couture, or they can wear it with a batty rider in the dancehall. Our current Miss Universe wore an afro. We have Lauryn Hill and to some extent, India.Arie, to thank for that. She took our black aesthetic and made it beautiful and fashionable and sexy, and that? That helped us with the process of undoing a mind-set that taught us to hate ourselves.”
In part, the decision to put Hill on the cover boiled down to access.
Lauryn was a mega enough star to launch the magazine and a star they had access to. Joicelyn and a not-yet famous Lauryn met and became friends in Spike’s store. They bonded, not surprisingly, over fashion. “She dressed like a boy, a hip-hop boy, and I didn’t.” Joicelyn laughs. I think she was still trying to maintain some credibility because with hip hop she was working in a very male-oriented world. “I had on a miniskirt and she was like ‘I really wish I could wear stuff like that.’ ” Hill occasionally hosted Joicelyn’s poetry readings, and Joicelyn told her that she’d like her to be the first cover. Hill agreed. But that was a ’96 convo pre-’97 fame. By 1998, when the magazine was finally ready to launch, securing Lauryn got complicated in the way things do when friends get famous and have to manage label demands. Time constraints and managers, publicists and various others all have a say.