by Joan Morgan
I think about her hesitation and wonder if it has less to do with the Marleys than it does with that time period marking the untimely exit of accessible every girl L-Boogie for her more distant avatar, Ms. Hill. She made her appearance slowly, in a series of events that left fans with a palpable sense of loss.
In a July 21, 2001, live performance on the MTV Unplugged series, Hill opted to forgo her signature blend of hip hop, soul, reggae, and extensive live instrumentation and premiere twenty-two new songs accompanied only by an acoustic guitar and skills that were at best, nascent. Lyrically, the songs were a drastic departure from the universal themes explored in Miseducation. More aptly, they were strummed, esoteric sermons that critics found not only scattered and unfocused but deeply unsatisfying to audiences (and a label) who’d already been waiting three years for a Miseducation follow-up. The album MTV Unplugged 2.0 was released the following year and sales were comparatively lackluster. It initially debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, but sales petered out at around 500,000. It’s since gone platinum but back then it was widely considered both a commercial and critical failure.
It did have its fans. “You were one of the few people that like Unplugged,” I say to hampton. She explains, “I’m more interested in it. I like the acoustic sound she was presenting and I saw an artist who was discovering herself. I think it’s a more interesting album than Miseducation. There was a manifesto aspect to Miseducation that just wasn’t interesting to me. Maybe it’s because I was down with the hoes it was talking about. I’m down with the ones who were drug dealing, I’m down with the ones who were wearing weaves,” she concludes. “Those are all my friends.”
“What, Joan? Her MTV Unplugged performance? C’mon!” says Lynnée Denise when I tell her how I feel about the record. “The way she brought the guitar on stage randomly and all of a sudden? We’d never seen that from her before and she wasn’t even afraid. She brought the guitar into conversation with her musicality and told us she was in the process of learning. And she shared that process in a two-CD album with just her and her guitar.” Yeah, Girl. Not a fan. Unplugged was bold and bad. Still (hindsight, again), I also think the album is weighted in discussions about Hill’s legacy in ways that are probably unfair. It was never meant to be evaluated as the end of an oeuvre. The performance was meant to be a snapshot of Hill’s creative and spiritual state. It was a moment. One that got rewritten as an epic failure.
The lawsuit and Unplugged were followed up by a series of high-profile events that caused Hill to languish in the court of public opinion. She was invited to the Vatican in 2003, where she delivered a scathing indictment of priests who commit child abuse, an act that stunned some fans and alienated others. An over-promised Fugee album and an accompanying reunion tour failed to manifest. Her highly anticipated follow-up record was ghost. Hill also did herself no favors. In the summer of 2008, she kept more than two thousand ticketholders waiting for almost three hours with no more explanation than, “I have a problem with procrastination. I have a great deal of difficulty deciding what to wear. It’s a woman thing.” Lateness soon became a regular practice along with complaints from fans and critics who found her performances increasingly erratic and unsatisfying. Hill, a former media darling, soon earned a reputation as difficult, capricious, unreliable, and perhaps most damning, insensitive to the time, pockets, and desires of the fans who’d remained loyal throughout her career. In 2012, Hill was convicted of tax evasion after failing to pay $1.8 million in federal taxes and she was sentenced to three months in jail.
Fans, fueled by a nostalgia for Miseducation, wanted the Lauryn Hill icon they’d fallen in love with. Instead they got an artist who would only perform reinterpretations of their favorites and often at speeds that made them unrecognizable. “I saw her at the Blue Note,” Good Marable remembers. “We waited a couple of hours for her to get onstage. And then when she got there, it just felt like she really didn’t want to be there. The way she performed the songs was so angry, almost frenetic. Just very chaotic, and so fast you could barely recognize the song. [If] I’m honest, there was a part of me that wondered if she was well,” Good Marable confesses, recalling wigs, fashion choices, and makeup that seemed, to her, to border on bizarre. “Something happened. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was, ‘I’ve got all these damn kids and people are on me wanting things from me all the time.’ Lauryn gave a lot and I’m sure she wanted some respect,” she concedes. “And I get that, but I also feel there was a lot of arrogance. Because no Lauryn, you aren’t Nina Simone. And even Nina was not three hours late for a concert.”
Hill, it seemed to some, had become undone and there were fans who looked for someone to blame. Tracing the trajectory of Hill’s spiral, Solomon admits she was one of them. “It started with the second pregnancy. Then the release of ‘Turn Your Lights Down Low,’ which was followed by the complete scandal of Unplugged,” says Solomon, who confesses she’s still unable to watch it. “I was at the African Street Festival in Brooklyn the first time she arrived three hours late for a performance. She sang that lyric from Unplugged—the one about how she’d even thought about turning to women and everybody was like ‘Oh my God, that Marley turned her into a lesbian!’ ” For the record, it was a big ol’ leap. The lyric in question—from the song “Adam Lives in Theory”—talks about a symbolic Eve who is so disappointed with Adam’s fuckboy-ness she considers bisexuality, but nothing in the song suggests that she’s talking about herself. Still Solomon’s recollections are hilarious. “Then there was the guitar playing. That wasn’t good. There was something about it and her attempt at Rasta-ness that made me feel like her pull toward this culture was starting to make her a bad artist. Because before this she wouldn’t have been onstage trying to pluck a guitar with Rohan peeking out from backstage. She would have gotten [music]—or stolen [it]—from decent guitarists.”
As Solomon continues, her attempt at levity settles into something much more somber. “The idea that bad choices can affect what you produce as a woman has always really bothered me. Even though it’s true, I don’t like to admit it. I don’t like the idea that if I’m fucking with somebody who’s really fucked up that I’m going to make terrible things. It just seems like Lauryn’s taste in men really affected who she was as an artist. The admission that even the great Lauryn could be reduced to making poor art and poor music and looking crazy and being late, over and over again, because of some random Marley . . . To me that felt like a betrayal.”
“I think that Lauryn was mad at us,” Good Marable offers by way of explanation, “But it was misdirected anger. I think she was really mad at herself and mad about her circumstances. I think she was pissed at the situation and she took it out on everybody else. I mean, ‘call me Miss Hill’?”
I met Ms. Hill for an Essence magazine cover story I wrote in 2009. And yes, I did receive written instructions that she was only to be addressed as such. And yes, she did arrive late—which was typical of 99 percent of my experiences with rappers—but what was atypical was that she was late by weeks, not hours. Within minutes of her entering the room it was clear that Ms. Hill was not the Lauryn of Miseducation. This was a notably prickly and less cuddly incarnation, but what remained was also far too substantive to be written about with ridicule or as a has-been. I wrote this about our encounter: “When Ms. Hill finally emerges for the interview she is beautiful, petite, with an air that is palpably vulnerable, fragile even. Over the course of our hour-long conversation, one thing becomes exceedingly clear: Not only has L-Boogie left the building, but the Lauryn Hill icon we helped create may very well also have been an illusion. Her decision to become Ms. Hill liberates both herself and us from who we needed her to be.”
And twenty years later, the truth that lingers is this: Ms. Hill refused to be what we wanted her to be and she was well within her rights to do so. We, however, were still years away from accepting her verdict. Or understanding that we were also at fault.
Think about it for a
minute. Lauryn Hill was a twenty-three year-old girl who bared her soul and made a stellar, grown-ass-woman album. We were the ones who turned it into our bible. Then with gratitude and with ignorance, we did what we do with celebrities: We turn mortals into gods—queens, if they’re only women—and then summarily pick them apart at the first hint of disappointment. So we told Hill she was royalty and crowned her the next Nina Simone. And then right after we thanked her for saving our souls, we summarily stripped away her humanity by demanding she do more. Make another Miseducation. Come back Lauryn and save hip hop. With five kids. Battling a lawsuit. As she was being carted off to jail for a conviction of tax evasion. And when she couldn’t we began with the whispers. Difficult. Jailbird. Side chick. You knew he was married right? No, not just him. The other one two. Crazy. Controlling. Demanding. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. I can only imagine that Hill must have also felt betrayed—by us. Perhaps twenty years later we can finally look at Miseducation and see where our culpability lies.
As black women, we really should have known better, but instead we did to Lauryn what the world does to us. Asks us to save it and when we do? It asks us to save it again. For present-day evidence look no further than the last presidential election, when 52 percent of white women voted for Trump and black women voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. Despite the fact that many of us were conflicted about her political centrism and corporate cronyism, we still showed up and did it like Yoncé, #InFormation. Why? Because black feminism has not only created and gotten intersectionality, we’ve done the work to make sure that black folks understand that every political possibility has to be measured by the variables of gender, race, and class to ensure an outcome that doesn’t further endanger the lives of the marginalized. It’s also a memo we’ve been sending to white feminists for years, and one that they’ve summarily ignored or forgotten to circulate. After the election results came in, what did white feminists so? Asked black women how to fix it.
Need more? It’s common knowledge that Democrat Doug Jones owes us his 2017 victory over Republican pedophile Roy Moore largely because of the 96 percent of black women who not only turned up for him at the polls but organized other voters to make sure they did too. In a Washington Post article, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez broke it down like this: “Let me be clear: We won in Alabama and Virginia because black women led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we can’t take that for granted. Period.” And then what was the ask mere months after that? Oprah Winfrey made a beautiful, empowering, #TimesUp speech at the Golden Globes decrying sexual assault and white America responded by asking her to run for president. As if the 52 percent of white women who didn’t vote for Clinton, a woman who, arguably, was one of the most experienced presidential candidates in US history and one who looked just like them, were going to suddenly vote for a black woman without white feminists once again, failing to do the critical work of intersectionality. C’mon, y’all saved the world once. Can’t you just do it again? And again?
Didn’t Zora Neale Hurston warn black women that we were the mules of the world? How wrong were we to jump on Hill’s back and attempt to ride her? “I wish people would stop the public Lauryn yearning because if she has any anxiety, depression, stage fright, whatever it is, having people create this standard for her is not only going to not make her do anything different,” reflects Solomon. “It’s probably only going to make her feel bad. Also, I think people just got mean with it. She needs to get it together. She’s late all the time. Because Lauryn seemed to have it so together. Because she was the It Girl, it looked like she’s just fucking up, but I don’t think that’s what it is. I do know that Lauryn went to jail for owing money and people never talk about what the impact of that must have been. You’re Lauryn Hill and you went to jail on some IRS shit. That is so traumatic. You had five kids and you had to go to jail? That is so embarrassing. Then you come out and have to deal with Wyclef and his stupid book? And people complaining about every show you do? I’m kind of like, ‘Leave her alone.’ Both the mean part and the ‘Oh my God Lauryn, why won’t you come back?’ Maybe she just can’t.”
This is a struggle that Nadine Sutherland, who’s been performing since she was a child, knows well. “I think that Lauryn is a sensitive artist who’s misunderstood. I don’t know if she felt burdened by all of those things that she was responsible for—creating a new narrative of African-ness for women in different places in the world, but I do know that we deify people and put them on this pedestal. The pressure of that is unbearable. And I know this because I’ve lived it.” What about the lateness, Nads? Missed dates? “I’m not hearing this complaint. I’m not hearing any of that. Because in all these reviews people were giving Lauryn the middle finger. I am an artist,” she continues. “And as an artist, what I see is an insecurity to face my crowd. I see the insecurity in having to wonder if they still like me. Do they still want me? Those are the struggles that I hear. As an artist who is struggling with all of that, I can definitely say that it hurts when somebody says something about me that’s not true. It freakin’ hurts. And I’m not even on the kind of world stage that Lauryn Hill was on.” Sutherland concludes with the simple request that twenty years later we take some ownership. “We have to be honest about some of the stuff that was said about Lauryn Hill. It hasn’t been kind. Even I look back and I’m like, I’m so sorry that I judged you, Lauryn. Because I did, when I saw her in Jamaica. I was like ‘Girl!’ I’m gonna be like singing, and she’s gonna be singing along! But she didn’t, and I couldn’t and I was pissed because [I], the consumer, the Lauryn Hill fan, wanted her to act in the way that I expected.
“Lauryn Hill is a human being with human struggles. But when she walks into a room everybody wants her to make them feel as though they [are] still twenty years old. Everybody wants her to make them feel young and empowered. So they zone in on her instead of zoning in on themselves. Instead of zoning in on their relationship with God. That’s a big responsibility, man. She is not here to make your life better. You are responsible [for making] your life better. So I don’t think the emptiness [is] Lauryn Hill’s. I think the emptiness is people who live in this world. Why do you need a savior? Why don’t you save your damn ass self?”
“I remember thinking, ‘I wish we could deal soberly with Lauryn,’ ” reflects hampton. “We should have been more sober about how we took her on, which should have been as a really good artist. In some ways, I look at Alicia Keys similarly. I remember Q-Tip saying, ‘I wish Clive Davis would give her two or three more years.’ Because if singing off-key has won you all these Grammies and all this attention, you’re not going to stop at your ten-year point and say, ‘You know what, I need vocal training.’ Clive put her out too soon.” hampton has a point. Elton John said something similar, and he was crucified for it. Keys has made some beautiful music, but she also made “Girl’s on Fire.”
“Or you get Lauryn Hill performing records at 140 beats per minute and manic,” hampton continues. “How does this happen? It happened because we celebrated something that we considered the absence of something. She was the absence of the hoochie, the absence of the chickenhead, the absence of the rap ho. And we did that at the expense of looking at what was actually there, which was a solid egg that could have grown. What we did instead was crown her fucking Nina Simone. We did the same thing with D’Angelo. We told him he was Marvin Gaye and we told Lauryn that she was Nina Simone and they each had one fucking album. It wasn’t fair to them because they started to believe it. But the Marvin Gaye we’re talking about is the one that did a three-album suite that began with ‘I Want You,’ followed by ‘What’s Going On’ and ‘Let’s Get It On.’ They were really experimental, lovely, and meandering, but those three albums were made after a dozen albums with Motown. And Nina Simone did dozens of records, hundreds of records before we were like all ‘Oh my God!’ about ‘Mississippi Goddam’ or ‘Little Girl Blue,’ if you like the quieter stuff. There’s t
his way that we crowned Lauryn. We really did. Look up articles. You might have written it. I might have written it. But we invoked people like Nina Simone way too early and we conferred her with this legendary status that she had not earned yet.”
This was as much a reflection of our shortsightedness as it was the time, claims hampton. “Certain eras, the ’80s, the ’90s through the early 2000s, have a different scale. It’s not unlike trying to compare later films to those made in Hollywood’s studio era. These later things had their own value, but we wanted something big. We wanted our own Madonna. We wanted our own big pop star. And Lil’ Kim could’ve been that, but we just revert to our Christian shit so quickly. I’m sorry, what makes a ho again? Because Kim was fucking a married man? Well so was Lauryn. She was sleeping with someone’s husband. Two someones’ husbands because Rohan was married too.”
hampton continues with a memory. “I remember once [the writer] Rob Marriott and I were walking in the Village and we saw this girl who was dressed kind of hoochie and she had a weave. Rob said, “If her hair was natural, it would be a totally different look.” And it’s like, Yeah man. If you look at Kim, Foxy, and Lauryn’s outfits side by side, I bet Lauryn’s shorts were a total of four to six inches. But she had locs, she was brown-skinned, and [she] did her makeup better. She wasn’t trying to look like a Barbie doll. She was talking about fake hair and getting your nails done by Koreans—and I’m not even sure what’s wrong with that—and we said, “Okay, that makes you good and makes these other women bad. And we need that right now because all this badness has killed our heroes and our icons. Lauryn Hill was messy, but she was exactly the kind of messy you’re supposed to be in your twenties.”
Say what you want about Erykah Badu, but Mama has always embraced her flaws. Rocked her messy like tribal scars. I often think about the kind of artist Hill could have become if she’d allowed herself to be free of our expectations, be beautifully messy and revel in her contradictions. Instead we put her up on a pedestal and then ordered her to remain there. And she did. Stuck. Much to her detriment and ours. hampton, however, reminds me that we had help. Hill, she says, was complicit. “I think that Lauryn thinks of herself as a prophet and I think we helped her to do that, and by ‘we’ I mean the public and the people who were writing about her. Because you’re also alluding to the kind of protection we gave her and the ways we projected our desire for some kind of solution to what should have never been a problem. The bad girl isn’t a problem. But there’s always going to be that binary we create and project onto women who are just trying to live their lives.”