by Joan Morgan
Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, and I were all pregnant at the same time. I had just moved back to New York from Alabama, where Kaia was conceived and born. While I was pregnant, I’d had a really terrible breakup with her dad, who was my high school sweetheart. I was struggling financially and emotionally. I was staying in the living room of my mom’s house. I was at what I thought was the height of my career. It wasn’t. It was really just the start of it. I was part of a group of youth activists across the country who were doing significant work and traveling around the country. I [had] just started to be recognized for my work in Africa and throughout the South. When I got pregnant, I can’t say the response was exactly supportive.
I was twenty-three. I’d just graduated college, had a job, and was having a baby with the love of my life who, mind you, I’d been with since 1990. In my mind, I was grown, but everybody—my elders, peers, and family—was very much like “What are you doing? You’re poised to accomplish this and that. Why would you have a baby right now? It’s just going to slow you down.” My mom definitely wasn’t thrilled, which of course, she denies now. Even my movement folks were like, “This is not revolutionary. It’s selfish.” I felt like the most revolutionary work I could do was raise this little girl. We say that we’re doing this movement work to create better communities for our people. How are we going to do that if we don’t create examples of what the lives in those communities can look like? If I don’t rise to the challenge of raising a child who is filled with love, kindness, compassion, respect, and one that has a critical consciousness, then I’m not doing my job in the beloved community. Don’t tell me that it’s not revolutionary to be pregnant. They were all so full of themselves, especially the men. Mind you, all of those Negroes are professors now and married with children.
Of course, now I can see that twenty-three is clearly still a baby, but back then, I was determined to prove everyone wrong. I was going to show them that my pregnancy wasn’t going to stop anything. I went to Cuba with the Malcolm X Grassroots Collective when I was four months pregnant. The sponsors tried hard to stop me, and I was like, “I’m going.” I went to the Million Women’s March in Philly when I was eight and half months pregnant. I had to drive because my doctor wouldn’t give me permission to fly. It was the dumbest thing I could have ever done but no one could tell me different. That continued even after Kaia was born. She was always with me, right by my side. To some degree, she’s much better for it. It helped shape the person she’s become. But I think I was also trying hard to prove to myself that my career wouldn’t stop. I have to acknowledge now that it did. My peers from that time went on to do all types of stuff that . . . I just couldn’t. At some point I made a decision that I wanted to be a certain kind of mother and that meant I had to say no to a lot of opportunities. I couldn’t just pick up and go to Africa for three weeks anymore. Because when you’re a mother you have to ask yourself those real questions like “Are you bugging? You’ve got a two-year-old at home.” I credit my mom with being the voice of reason at that stage because she’s the one who would say, “You’ve been gone for three weeks. Where is your daughter?” Me answering, “She’s with the community. The community is taking care of her”? That wasn’t going to cut it. I had to stop. So, I did, but I still clung to “To Zion.” I would sing it to my daughter and change the words to “Beautiful, beautiful Kaia.” “To Zion” was our little story. It resonated with me deeply. It still does.
This interview was conducted on October 7, 2017, the same day Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer Lisa Bloom resigned, hoping to distance herself from Weinstein’s mounting allegations of rape and sexual assault. On October 15, actress Alyssa Milano acknowledged Tarana Burke as the founder of the #MeToo movement and hashtag that has continued to galvanize women and demand accountability from industries across the country. On December 6, Time magazine named Tarana Burke one of “The Silence Breakers” honored in 2017’s Person of The Year issue.
She did not stop.
I don’t want to hear anyone say the word “defecate” anywhere near Nina Simone. Ever.
—dream hampton
4 / We Told Her She Was Nina Simone
The dénouement of the Miseducation moment seemed to start almost as rapidly as it began. By February 1999, New-Ark, the production team consisting of Vada Nobles, Rasheem (Kilo) Pugh, and twin brothers Johari and Tejumold Newton, filed a lawsuit in Newark federal court against Hill for allegedly failing to give them sufficient production credit and royalties for their work on Miseducation. In what they’ve since described as a “handshake deal” (otherwise known as the fastest travel route for friendships that want to arrive at a bitter end), they were paid $100,000 for publishing rights. After Miseducation blew the fuck up, they felt they were owed millions.
The “truth” of this is hard to determine but what is incontestable is that the accusation was definitely a blow to Hill’s credibility. Much of the album’s critical acclaim was rooted in the idea that she was a rare triple threat, but her collaborators were now claiming that they’d helped arrange all but one of the tracks on an album where she was credited as writer, producer, arranger, and sole executive producer. A year later, bassist Vere Isaac, who worked in sessions with Hill and Aretha Franklin on “A Rose is Still a Rose,” filed a similar suit challenging Hill’s claim that she was the Grammy-nominated hit’s songwriter, claiming he’d written the melody.
In the case of New-Ark, the contention on both sides seemed to be a matter of degree. Miseducation did credit New-Ark with “additional production” several times on the album, as well as “additional musical contribution” and “additional lyrical contribution” on various songs, but the producers and their lawyer, Peter C. Harvey claimed their contributions were much more extensive and required a skill set far outside Hill’s wheelhouse. “She is not a musician, she is not an artist,” said Harvey to the Los Angeles Times. “[New-Ark] will make another album and everyone will see that they were the ones responsible for this album. I dare say that if you put Lauryn Hill in a studio alone, she couldn’t do it again. Album number two for her is not going to sound like this.” Two years later, the lawsuit was resolved in an undisclosed settlement from Hill, members of her management team, and record label. As for Harvey’s speculation that a second album from New-Ark would prove their allegations, that never happened. The group never produced an album that rivaled Miseducation. Neither did Lauryn Hill.
dream hampton, one of the few critics that didn’t like Miseducation, thinks Hill’s claims were largely true because she considers the album’s production its greatest flaw. “I love Lauryn, but I don’t like that album,” she says, noting “I Used to Love Him” and “Nothing Really Matters” are the only two tracks she enjoyed. “And I’m sure D’Angelo helped her produce ‘Nothing Really Matters.’ I actually like music, so I care about production,” hampton continues. “Not that I wanted her locked in a relationship that was abusive, but she’s under-produced. That’s one of the things Wyclef did well for her, and it was missing on Miseducation.”
Part of hampton’s critique, she stresses, is steeped in the standard bearing legacy of black women who are singers, songwriters, and producers. “I’m nitpicking when I say I don’t like it,” says hampton, who compared Hill to Patrice Rushen in an early review. “I invoked Patrice Rushen because that’s the level of mastery I think you needed. Production means more than tracks. Think about Puff producing Faith’s background vocals for Mary’s My Life album. Puff spent time with Faith—I’m talking two or three months, five and six hours a day, getting those background vocals. It was a production. He wanted Faith to sound like a whisper. He wanted it to sound like birds in a tree. I’m not saying it was the same thing as Cissy Houston singing background for Aretha, but it was some shit. There was real intention,” she concludes. “When it came to production, I thought Lauryn was just playing around in the studio.”
Reflecting back, hampton thinks that Hill’s insistence on full credit may have been informed by
the very gendered creative dynamics between Hill and her fellow Fugees. “Of course, this is me armchair diagnosing, but I think Lauryn was very insistent on having full credit because she’d been denied credit in the past. She was writing for the dudes in her group. She was writing Clef and Pras’s lyrics and I don’t think she always got credit for that. I think she wanted to appear in control—whether that was true or not. And I believe that to a large extent that it was because if Lauryn had real and experienced producers, someone like Kay Gee from Naughty by Nature or some other Jersey dudes, they would have talked her out of some of the poor choices she made. She didn’t have anyone in the studio to pull her back from what I think are awful moments,” hampton says, screeching an off-key bridge from “To Zion” to illustrate her point. “That was so bad. It stopped Miseducation from being a perfect album for me and it’s not an album I listen to today.”
In fairness to Hill, Miseducation was not her only writing and production effort. In addition to the contributions she made to Wyclef’s solo debut The Carnival in 1997, for which she has producing and writing credits, she also wrote for CeCe Winans, Aretha Franklin, and Mary J. Blige with considerable success in 1999. However, whenever the extent of her musical capacities is discussed, the conversation gets reduced to the lawsuit. “People were challenging Lauryn’s ability to produce and write her own lyrics; meanwhile she was out here producing three major giants,” remarks Lynnée Denise. “ ‘A Rose is Still A Rose’ was a great song both musically and symbolically because Aretha is known to be obsessive and difficult to work with—as she should be. She’s earned that. Besides, we already know that when women know exactly what they want it’s read as ‘difficult,’ ” she says. “But what we also know is that Aretha Franklin is a supreme musician and therefore super specific about her production.” And while the deejay concedes she wasn’t impressed with the record’s overall feel, she recognizes its importance. “It was a tad corny and a bit simplistic considering Aretha’s long-standing relationship with complex composition, but I understood this duet to be the ultimate head nod toward Lauryn’s ear and her evolving potential as a musician. What can’t be denied,” she concludes, “is that Lauryn made enough space for Aretha to feel at home in her runs. She gave those classic Aretha runs some hip-hop appeal.”
Hill also continued her penchant for troubling musical genre binaries by blessing Winan’s gospel track “On That Day” with a stone dub beat. The song was written while Hill was pregnant and is absolutely reflective of the late ’90s moment broadly informed by a diasporic approach to black music and pregnant, like Hill, with possibilities. Lynnée Denise agrees, “ ‘On that Day’ is a solid, well-produced, and composed track that goes back to the work she did with the Fugees where she essentially Caribbeanizes these black American spaces. On this song Lauryn connected both [herself] and CeCe Winans to an accessible kind of global blackness. And she did it well. It was like Sister Act meets Kingston, or Black American church meets Kingston meets hip hop. That was a signature L-Boogie touch and straight out of her pages to add a reggae-inflected gospel track.”
Connections and intersections. The point is underscored with the release of Chant Down Babylon in 1999. Produced by Bob Marley’s son Stephen, the album features a mix of rappers—Guru, Rakim, yard bwoy Busta Rhymes, MC Lyte, The Roots, Chuck D (and the curious addition of lone rocker Steven Tyler)—all playing lyrical homage to the great Robert Nesta Marley. Its most touching moment is when Hill, mother-to-be to five of his grandchildren records a duet with a posthumous Bob on “Turn Your Lights Down Low.” Given the spectator sport that was Hill’s life just one year before, the moment is significant on multiple levels.
It confirms the identity of Hill’s baby daddy, Rohan Marley, in a stunning music video that was partially shot from her newly declared address on Hope Road. Directed by Hunger Games trilogy director Francis Lawrence—who also shot music videos for Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Will Smith, Lil’ Kim, Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and a few others, including fellow Fugees Wyclef Jean’s “Gone til November” and Pras’s “Ghetto Supastar”—the video is an odd moment of historical irony that mirrors Hill’s leanings toward triangulated loves. Bob Marley wrote it for his lover, the 1976 Miss World, Cindy Breakspeare, the center of a celebrity love triangle—Bob, Cindy, and his wife, Rita Marley—that captivated spectators internationally. It was a complicated and, ultimately, well-negotiated cohabitation that lasted until the end of the elder Marley’s life. Despite the sensationalism, history has also proven it a generative affair, resulting in two of Bob’s most revered love songs—“Turn Your Lights Down Low” and “Waiting in Vain”—and their son Damian, an accomplished reggae musician in his own right and arguably the heir apparent. Similarly, Rohan Marley was also rumored to be married at the onset of his and Hill’s courtship, however his marriage dates only really reveal that he wasn’t divorced. The status of his relationship with his ex is unclear.
Hill and Rohan were never legally married during the course of their twelve-year relationship, but the video was clearly an attempt to marry their diasporic legacies, and it was full of visual signifiers selected to move seamlessly between past and present. It opens, for example, with a grainy sequence of then present-day Marley playing soccer, one that attempts to replicate vintage footage of his father playing soccer with the Wailers and company on Hope Road. The modest apartments where both Hill and Rohan each prepare for their date is another attempt, uniting their respective black histories with tchotchkes of both Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican ancestor of US black nationalism, and Bob, whose music served as a global ambassador to the vision of black liberation.
And while the visual of some woman jumping on the back of some fine-ass dred’s bike is both common enough to hover around cliché and frequent enough to be hella real (it is certainly the point of my own son’s origin) there is no question that both Rohan and Lauryn are just so stunning while doing it. Like fresh jelly coconut water, and sweet as chopped cane, Lawrence faultlessly captures the romantic dreamy beginnings of an on-island relationship. Slightly sticky, and slightly sweaty, it harkens back to the ephemeral point in love when everything is still beckoning and blurry and lacks all the peskiness of sharp focus and precise angles that inevitably develop with time and (five) kids.
Overall, the end result is a much more authentic use of place than the early Fugees videos for “Fu-Gee-La” and “Ready or Not,” where Haiti was reduced to a nondescript backdrop for exotic, high-tech action capers. Here, Jamaica is front and center. Lauryn, by contrast, is seamlessly integrated into the culture as the video moves from recording sessions with the Marley brothers and the I-Threes to a bona fide reggae bashment—successfully bringing the latter to US hip-hop audiences a decade and change before Rihanna’s “Man Down” in 2010 and “Work” in 2016. And since we’re indulging in the game of hindsight, it seems worth it to note that Rihanna’s versions—stylized, sensual, and sexier—are an easier read. Lauryn’s, by comparison, is almost chaste. Even the dub with Rohan feels like the courtesy extended to a well-received and accepted visitor—a visa instead of citizenship.
Truth be told, Chant Down Babylon also served to massage an old wound. When Bob sang “play I on the R&B, I want all my people to see” on his song “Roots, Rock, Reggae” in 1976, it was a heartfelt plea to black American radio to give the Wailers airtime. Prior to his death in 1981, Marley struggled to connect with black American audiences, even agreeing to be the opening act for a 1979 tour with the Commodores—despite the fact that the Wailers were inarguably far bigger players on the world stage. Bob Marley died a few days shy of my fourteenth birthday. It was almost four decades ago, but I still clearly remember the shock of listening to New York’s WBLS and hearing deejay Frankie Crocker play one of his songs in tribute. It was the first time I’d ever heard Marley played on black radio. As a first-generation Jamaican immigrant growing up in the Boogie, that moment to me is as clear and as significant as the first time I ever he
ard hip hop—“Rapper’s Delight” to be exact—played on the radio. It marked the beginning of a substantial cultural shift and one that I could feel. Anti-immigrant sentiment was still real—it wasn’t like people all of a sudden stopped telling us to get back on our banana boats. We were still coconuts, but I knew my teenage peers were now exposed to something that was culturally and politically so important to me. We could share it and talk about it.
So, Chant Down Babylon has a lot of resonance for me because it’s literally the embrace Bob longed for by the children of the generation he failed to get it from. That the album’s pinnacle love song is produced by his son Stephen and performed by the black American woman who was inarguably one of the biggest stars of the world—not just famous but like, white famous—was a moment that couldn’t be ignored. This is not a universal sentiment. “C’mon,” laughs Lynnée Denise. “MC Lyte is doing ‘Jammin.’ ” I’m thinking about all those people who did covers on that album, and there’s not one I want to hear more than I want to hear Bob. But I do think you’re right about the video’s Jamaica treatment.” She pauses, then adds, “Honestly, I don’t know what my thing is around Lauryn and her joining the Marley family, but I’ve been afraid to look at that.”