She Begat This

by Joan Morgan

  Sometimes I think that Hill made such a strong commitment to upholding that version of herself that we almost had no choice but to hold her to it. I do wish she’d just given herself permission to just be, so that the next record didn’t have to be birthed by a goddess. That to me is the core difference between Miseducation and A Seat at the Table. Whether or not we’ll be talking about the latter twenty years from now, I have no way of telling. But I do know that the most liberating part of that album includes how humble and honest Solange is about her process. What we’re seeing and what she’s sharing, she reminded us at the 2017 Black Girls Rock awards, is a journey. One that is solidly rooted in not having all the answers and being tenderly public about it. That singular admission deads our mule shit and allows both Solange and her art to grow.

  There’s a critical part of The Miseducation we seem to forget. The album at its core was always about love, both the deciphering of it and the search for it. It’s significant then, that during that opening snippet when the teacher, played by then-poet and now mayor of Newark Ras Baraka, reads Lauryn’s name during roll call, she is the one student who is absent from class. Insistent and rebellious, she opted out of that protective environment and chose instead to learn those difficult lessons while being out in the world. “That’s the reason I think Miseducation still holds up,” says Jayson Jackson.

  “A lot of people felt like Lauryn was telling us who she was on that record, but I’d argue that she was telling us who she wanted to be. You’re hearing the hopes, dreams, and desires of a person both in a worldly and a spiritual sense. That’s why we named it The Miseducation.”

  Whatever the public’s complex relationship may be to Ms. Hill, whatever the lingering, nostalgic lust for L-Boogie may be, it’s important to underscore this: The Miseducation remains a revered, iconic piece of work. Twenty years after the fact. Good Marable has some thoughts about why. “Miseducation is a lot like Thriller to me. Thriller was not my favorite Michael Jackson [album].” Because Off The Wall is so much better. “So much better.” She laughs. “But the thing that made Thriller amazing was the same thing that made Miseducation amazing. It turned a corner and shifted the culture. It was unlike anything that was happening at that moment. Lauryn made herself so vulnerable that it was super-empowering and that uplifted women. But Lauryn also disappeared, and I think there’s a tendency to mythologize people who are gone too soon. We saw that with Biggie and Tupac. Lauryn was in her prime. It would be like Beyoncé disappearing after she had Blue Ivy. When you disappear, people tend to romanticize who you are and what you can do. Maybe she felt she had that Sade thing. That ‘I’m going to drop an album and I’ll see you in another ten years.’ ” But very few people can do what Sade does.” Sade is bad as hell, I remind her, but even she didn’t disappear until she’d dropped four consecutive albums and every single one of those was a banger.

  I’m curious how Solomon feels, if she still plays the album. “I still play ‘Nothing Really Matters’ and ‘Everything is Everything,’ ” she says. “And I’ll definitely sing ‘Ex-Factor’ at any karaoke moment. That said, I don’t play the entire album. I’m not going to play ‘To Zion’ for a range of reasons but mostly, I’m a childless, single black woman and that doesn’t help me. But I’ll put it to you this way, if the album comes on because I’m at whatever restaurant and they’re playing the whole thing, I’m happy.” She pauses for a moment, then confesses there is more. “When it comes time to choose music, I need it to put me in a certain mood. One thing that I didn’t pick up on then that I can hear all through Miseducation now is that Lauryn was really depressed. Now I can listen to depressed singers—Donny Hathaway is my favorite singer of all time—and I don’t know why Donny’s okay, but Lauryn isn’t. Maybe,” she concludes, “Lauryn hits too close to home.” Do you think it still holds up, Akiba? “Musically? Certainly. It is still 99 percent better than most of what I hear today. But as a piece of emotion, it takes [me] to a place that I don’t really like to visit by choice.”

  I ask Good Marable what she thinks, ultimately. Was Lauryn Hill ever our Nina Simone? “We have to be careful of calling someone a legend. When you’re as young as Lauryn was, that could be tough. We gave her all these accolades and I think they were deserved because the girl was bad. Make no mistake, the girl could write her ass off. She was bad as hell and we gave her her flowers. I think Lauryn does come from that same space of black genius as Nina Simone. But Nina had longevity and Lauryn did not.” Solomon concurs, “I’ve heard people make comparisons to Nina Simone. I don’t think it’s all that, but I will say that nobody is touching what Lauryn did as a vocalist on that album. Not even Lauryn.”

  Mostly, however, what Solomon would like is for people to let the L-Boogie Lust go. “I’m not going to go see Lauryn in concert. I don’t want to see her be really late and then sing songs in ways that nobody likes.” But she also conceded that it’s twenty years later, and that Lauryn might have been capable of things that Ms. Hill and her protective armor are not. “I would like another Miseducation, but Lauryn might not be capable of doing that. That happens to a lot of artists. It’s an unfair burden. But I can leave it there because nothing in the world can unmake that one album. She gave it to us. That’s her gift to the world.” She leaves us with this bit of advice. “Just say thank you. And fucking keep it moving.” She’s right. We should. Because Lauryn Hill has done enough.

  But there are other reasons to let go of the nostalgia. Holding on to L-Boogie while refusing to acknowledge the reality of Ms. Hill is a fatalistic surrender to the mistaken belief that black girl magic is an exhaustible entity, that the best isn’t still yet to come. Twenty years later black female rappers are still breaking records. Cardi B’s single “Bodak Yellow” marks the first time since 1998 that a solo female rap single has reached number one on the chart since Lauryn cleared that hurdle with “Doo Wop (That Thing).” There’s been a lot of bellyaching in the comparative, the repeated complaint that Cardi’s skills in no way measure up. Of course Hill is the superior emcee. That for me, however, isn’t the point. Cardi is a girl from the Boogie who single-handedly turned herself from a stripper to one of the most recognizable artists in the world, on her own terms and with no fucks given to black respectability politics. There’s a freedom in that, just as there is in the decision to love her “as is,” in the way she chose to show up. Free, messy, and refusing to save the world.

  My girl, journalist and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda, and I discuss our musing, thinking about what our ideal iGen raptress could be. For Cepeda it looks like this: “My dream raptress would be somebody that was the baby of [a] Lauryn Hill and a Cardi B. Somebody who can be, say whatever she wants to say. Including ‘I don’t give a shit motherfucker.’ Who talks about sex any way she wants, but can also rhyme about the last book she read.” Cepeda is hoping that the future will bring somebody “that’s well-rounded. That doesn’t have to tame herself. That can use social media in the successful ways Cardi B has. Own that she’s a stripper but also have some introspection.”

  That, I agree, would be the 3.0. “The 3.0 and the artist that would make me bang down record label doors and try to become an A&R, because she’s the missing one. That is it. The one that can say, ‘Yeah, I’ve fucking held a gun. I have a temper. I’ll fuck a bitch up. Whatever, but I want you to understand why I’m violent, and why I have anger issues. And I want to understand where we’re at now . . . And that I like to fuck, and I like to read.’ ”

  There are already hints of this, I think, as I listen to Cepeda. The Knowles sisters, for one. Solange in all the ways that we’ve already discussed but Beyoncé also. Because if you had told me twenty years ago when I was home writing the book on hip-hop feminism, back when most black women still considered it the other f-word, that one day there’d be a black female international pop star mastering global domination performing on stage with the word “feminist” towering mega-feet high behind her, I would have told you you were crazy. I also th
ink of their actress counterparts, outspoken self-proclaimed feminists like Amandla Stenberg, Yara Shahidi, Zendaya, who are unapologetically crafting their feminist narratives and, in turn, creating new playbooks for us to follow. Lauryn Hill begat this. She paved the way for these girls. We all did.

  5 / She Begat This: A Musical Guide to Remembering

  It seems right to end this how it began, bookended between a few rare nights out and in the company of my favorite millennials. Wynwood is not Harlem, but still the Miseducation is ubiquitous. Unlike most of the members in the canon of American classics, the kind we usually only play at home and fit neatly in the heart spaces relegated for nostalgia, nothing about Miseducation is dormant. No matter the night, no matter the venue, Lauryn Hill plays everywhere—whether the deejays are in their twenties or their forties. The album fills up real time and active space, shaping and informing human interactions.

  This is a distinction I share with Douglas, who at twenty-six, finds this less surprising than I do. He remembers the first time he heard Miseducation. He was six years old, living in the Boogie, and he listened to it for the first time on his older cousin Maxine’s Discman. Later, he remembers it always playing in her car and on the radio. Then, like now, it seemed to be everywhere.

  “Miseducation was made twenty years ago, but I think, whether she knew it or not, she made that album for today.” Intrigued, I ask him to explain. “Back then, it was a perception-shifting album, no doubt. But if you look at it now, and you look at what’s going on in music, there is direct correlation. I think the things that she was trying to get across, the things that that group of individuals who collaborated on that album were trying to get across, still stand true today in a lot of ways—especially for millennials.”

  “Take a song like ‘Superstar,’ ” he says, which he finds less judge-y than apt. The ’90s he says, was the last real decade of live instrumentation in pop music. “There was no way we could have seen what was going to happen over time, the evolution of music, or how it would change. She was preaching about the music in her time and asking it to raise the vibration, but as millennials we can ask ourselves the same question today. Why are we stuck in the lower hertz level? Why is it not being used in a creative way to enhance consciousness or awareness?”

  I think about this for a bit and decide to shift the convo’s gears to love. Like the students who were in the album’s skits and sharing their nascent reflections, Douglas was in elementary school. They’re now in their late twenties to early thirties, veterans of love’s game and intimate with its many contours.

  The album dropped right at the brink of the digital age’s explosion. Nobody was breaking up via text in 1999, I tell him. The observation makes him smile, so I continue with a confession. “I remember watching Sex and the City and being absolutely appalled when Berger broke up with Carrie via Post-it. That was like, a thing that very shortly after became routine. It seemed like everybody was carrying out their romantic affairs via email or text message.”

  Two thousand eighteen does love differently than 1998. Connections still meant telephone calls at least, if not a face-to-face conversation, I tell him. Then we laugh at the part in the “Everything Is Everything” video when old girl slams the receiver of the pay phone down, over and over and over again, clearly provoked by some fuckboy shit. “That existed,” I said. “And if you were supposed to meet at the bridge in Central Park on the Upper East Side and you got stood up, your emotions didn’t go immediately to pissed because anything could have happened. A delayed train, an accident, a string of broken payphones, the lack of a quarter. Now you can clarify all of that with a text.”

  “Yeah, I do think about that,” he says. “Especially the fact that Lauryn was absent from the classroom and what she missed that day. The rest of the students got a place to think about love where they were protected by an unconditional love. I think she was absent because she was also fiercely independent. She needed to figure that out for herself, so she went to outside sources to get an alternate education.” Hmmm. Love without the early safety net. I think about that and all the implications it has for a generation that is, from art to policy, reaping the ’90s’ gifts and its burdens.

  “Our generation also had that alternate education. We had the Internet, the digital age, and Google. And because of it we seem much less able to connect.” And he thinks, a little less patient than the generation before. “Because if you had to meet me in Central Park, on the Upper East Side at that bridge, there was no way for you to know if you got stood up, or if I missed the train, or if I had some kind of emergency until we talked or saw each other again.”

  So does Miseducation and its detailed chronicling of the heart still matter to them? He finds the question amusing. “I am sure there are plenty of millennials who grew up listening to Miseducation who couldn’t wait to have their hearts broken so they could know what Lauryn was talking about. Our perception of love hasn’t changed,” he continues. “I think what’s changed for us is its functionality in a culture of constant connectivity. I think ‘love’ for us is a way to disconnect from that constant connection. Love for us now, is the ability to sit in silence with someone.” He elaborates, “No TV, no music, no phone, just super uncomfortable but comfortable silence. That for us, is love.”

  Note: This is different from “Netflix and chill.”

  * * *

  Whatever one’s opinion is of Lauryn Hill, let’s close this out with the indisputable: As an early prototype of #BlackGirlMagic and an example of how to walk through the world as a black girl who rocks, we owe her. So I asked Beverly Bond, founder of Black Girls Rock and keeper of black girl legacies to close this out with a playlist honoring Lauryn’s musical influences and the artists she paved the way for. Like Lauryn, Bev is a woman who also “begat” and she did it by challenging limited narratives about what a black woman could be, not by investing in binaries of good vs. bad but by offering up alternate examples of leadership, excellence, and most of all, black girl love. Because Bev’s first language is music, and as a deejay she is legendary, I asked her to close us out with some love songs. Here’s what L-Boogie begat:

  The “She Begat This” Playlist by DJ Beverly Bond, Founder of Black Girls Rock, Inc.

  “Everything is Everything” by Lauryn Hill

  “Ex-Factor” by Lauryn Hill

  “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” by Nas and Lauryn Hill

  “The Score” by the Fugees

  “Keep Ya Head Up” by Tupac

  “The Sweetest Thing” by Lauryn Hill

  “Sweet Thing” by Rufus and Chaka Khan

  “Sweet Sticky Thing” by Ohio Players

  “FEEL.” by Kendrick Lamar

  “untitled 03” by Kendrick Lamar

  “Nothing Even Matters” by D’Angelo and Lauryn Hill

  “Feel Like Makin’ Love” by D’Angelo

  “Zombie” by Fela Kuti

  “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley

  “Waiting in Vain” by Bob Marley

  “Welcome to Jamrock” by Damian Marley

  “Moonlight” by Jay-Z

  “Weary” by Solange

  “Didn’t Cha Know” by Erykah Badu

  “Womanifesto” by Jill Scott

  “You Got Me” by The Roots featuring Jill Scott (Live)

  “Heard ’Em Say” by Kanye West

  “Champion” by Kanye West

  “Four Five Seconds” by Rihanna (featuring Kanye West and Paul McCartney)

  “Dear Mama” by Tupac

  “My Life” by Mary J. Blige

  “Have a Talk with God” by Stevie Wonder

  “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” by Nina Simone

  “Nobody” by Rapsody (featuring Anderson .Paak, Black Thought, and Moonchild)

  “Be Free” by J. Cole

  “Get By” by Talib Kweli

  “Umi Says” by Mos Def

  “Be Real Black for Me” by Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack />
  “Pieces of a Man” by Gil Scott Heron

  “Sponji Reggae” by Black Uhuru

  “Just Like Water” by Lauryn Hill

  “Spanish Harlem” by Aretha Franklin

  “Masterpiece (Mona Lisa)” by Jazmine Sullivan

  “Me and Your Mama” by Childish Gambino

  “Rush Over” by Me’shell Ndegeocello and Marcus Miller

  “Poetry Man” by Phoebe Snow

  “Her Holy Water” by Imani Uzuri

  “Love and Affection” by Joan Armatrading

  “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman

  “Bad Habits” by Maxwell

  Joan Morgan:

  So, B Bond, is Lauryn Hill a #BlackGirlWhoRocks?

  Beverly Bond:

  Lauryn Hill absolutely rocks. And she rocks hard.

  JM:

  Tell us why.

  BB:

  When she speaks, she speaks truth. And she’s uncompromising about it in a way that’s spiritual and speaks to our hearts. She dug deep to find her truth and then she shared it from a black girl’s lens and from a black girl’s experience. That was beautiful and unique. Lauryn Hill is an artist that walks in the most authentic version of herself, free from other people’s expectations and burdens. And that’s inspiring.