EYE OPENERS presents odes to outstanding albums that have dramatically changed my life in some way. Today it’s an education in endurance with Lauryn Hill.
‘Troubled.’ ‘Unprofessional.’ ‘Erratic.’
These are descriptors that inevitably make an appearance in media discussions of Lauryn Hill. In the broad strokes painted by publications, Lauryn Hill’s narrative is a simple one of rise and fall. Her failure to deliver a successor to her lauded first album, followed by a withdrawal from music altogether after a — unfairly — critically-panned live album, the 2013 prison sentence and the inconsistent nature of the few stage performances she did undertake, all meant she was quickly branded her one of the many dimmed lights of the entertainment industries, joining others who’d flared too brightly for their own good and found themselves burned out as a result.
Music tends to rest on stories of winners and losers. You’re a Justin Timberlake or a Brian Harvey.
There’s not room to acknowledge that ‘success’ can exist on spectrum ranging from Taylor Swift riches, to simply overcoming undisclosed illness and seemingly endless institutional barriers of racism and sexism, to slowly rebuild a career that had once seemed all but finished. From refusing to be forced off stage by an unresponsive audience age 13 on Showtime At The Apollo, to managing to create a five-time Grammy winning album while blacklisted from the majority of the industry by a bitter ex, Lauryn Hill is the embodiment of a survivor.
It was this survival instinct I unconsciously connected with upon hearing The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in the summer of 2000, repeatedly zooming up and down the M4 as my mother incrementally moved my five-year old self, two-year old sister and all our worldly possessions four hours away from our Eastbourne home, the hole left by my absconded father, and her position as a university lecturer. We were off to a new existence in the heart of Herefordshire countryside where she planned to carve out a career as a self-employed yoga teacher. This was before yoga became a cash cow as the preserve of the fit and financially stable and ‘zen’ didn’t come loaded with connotations of irritating Instagram hashtags. In short: it was unprofitable and she had two mouths to feed.
Miseducation had been released a year earlier and instantly recognized across the globe as a landmark album, a statement both fantastically political and personal, produced by a young woman so suffused with passion and soul there seemed a very real danger she might explode thanks to force of her emotions.
My first brush with Lauryn Hill was relatively uncomplicated. I was six-years-old. At that age, I was unaware of how Miseducation tapped into a much wider discourse of black womanhood, from a centuries old struggle for agency to learning the wholly new language of maternal love. Instead, what caused Miseducation to lodge itself permanently in my emotional memory was the resilience and zeal with which Lauryn Hill delivered her missive to the world. The record is beautifully sewn together; melodies and production all testament to a furious talent, particularly when viewed with the knowledge that her team was built by herself, home grown. As Rohan Marley remembered, in 1995, Lauryn Hill was music’s persona non grata.
“Nobody else wanted to work with her,” he explained to Rolling Stone. “There was little feud going on and Wyclef was telling people “You work with Lauryn, you don’t work with me.”
Above the messy backstory and backroom recordings though, rose The Voice. Hill was tart and unforgiving on cuts like Final Hour and Everything Is Everything, lulling and loving in the lower register on Nothing Even Matters and To Zion and earnestly urging on self-respect screed Doo Woop. It was a revelation.
Then there was Ex-Factor.
Orpheus Speaks 