The Education of Listening to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill Still
Friday is fun because it's music - so there's a playlist (or two or three). And today a look at a classic album, and a book that helped reconnect me to it.
I still remember exactly where I was in this world when I heard The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill for the first time. In a flat on The Terrace. It wasn’t always going well by the way. But the day I heard Miseducation was a good one. A friend popped in, told me she had this new album and I had to hear it. She was interested to know what I might think.
I was utterly blown away. And almost instantly. The first song hadn’t finished and I was sold.
This had last happened to me a few years earlier when another friend had played me the start of Portishead’s Dummy and I’d hopped down the stairs and into town while the album was still playing on my stereo at home, I was back with my own copy from the shop in town while the friend’s tape was still playing.
How many times can we remember exactly where we were when we heard a seminal album for the first time?
I’ve never forgotten about that first time hearing The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It hit me hard. And I fell heavy.
You see, I wasn’t that much of a fan of The Fugees actually. I didn’t hate them. But I just wasn’t too wrapped up in it all. I thought the Killing Me Softly cover was kinda cool, but kinda pointless. There were a couple of songs on The Score I liked. But not really. It just didn’t capture me. But it was everywhere, so I knew enough about it. And I totally accepted it. It just wasn’t quite my thing.
But Lauryn Hill’s solo debut blindsided me. I wasn’t expecting something so good – so great!
Earlier this week, I caught up with the book, She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It was released in 2018. And I had been meaning to read it. That means I’d been meaning to read it for five years now. Which also means Miseducation is actually 25 years old in just a few months time.
This slim volume was written by Joan Morgan, an academic and author who has been concerned with the intersection of feminism and hip-hop through much of her work. The perfect person to explore the lasting impact and appeal of this amazing album, a landmark in hip-hop and neo-soul.
Morgan’s book not only had me listening to the album again (It’s never that far from reach), it also had me listening through The Fugees and Hill’s strange follow-up to Miseducation.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as let down as when I heard MTV Unplugged No. 2.0. It was 2002 and I was managing a record store, I was also writing reviews for Wellington’s Evening Post. And I was so excited to hear the new Lauryn Hill. It arrived as both a DVD and CD, and featured 20/ish brand-new songs, presented by Hill solo. She’d only just learned the guitar – one of the bits of between-song banter informed us of this – and some reviewers decided the rudimentary strumming was brave, and the ultimate example of the MTV Unplugged format. Others decided it was crude and almost close to perfunctory. I was in that camp.
But Morgan has persuaded me to try again. And she’s probably right. We weren’t ready for it at the time. And I’m not really even close to saying that it’s a lost classic or anything like that, but it definitely makes more sense now.
Morgan’s book also reminds me why I love reading about music. Why I love reading books that decide to shine a light on a particular album or an era for an artist that was written off at the time. It also reminded me why I love writing about music.
Passing on the feeling of that connection is so important.
Sharing recommendations.
Processing the appeal and sharing the information.
Participating in the excitement.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill found me at the right time, sure. That’s easy to say. But it would have found me anyway. I’m pretty confident about that. The good stuff shines through. Always. But it’s definitely also an album of its era – for a start, it’s far too long. An album made in the peak of the CD era was always too long, and it has skits too. Skits were always better in the rearview mirror.
But it contains so many bangers. And it turned me onto someone whose work had basically escaped me. Through this album, I came to appreciate the Lauryn Hill that had co-created The Fugees, and ultimately been the (vocal) star. I came to learn about the Lauryn Hill that contributed to Wyclef Jean’s solo album, and wrote a hit song for Aretha Franklin, and started working on songs with Whitney Houston.
And yes, there was also the Lauryn Hill that was sued by a production and songwriting team that felt they were unfairly underrepresented on her finished product. And there was an out of court settlement. The press delighted in giving us a Lauryn Hill that was “going crazy”, or that had “ideas above her station”, that equated herself with the god-like greats and therefore could not be trusted. And again, it was hard not to get swept up in that. I probably quoted some of that rhetoric in my newspaper review of the Unplugged album.
I certainly bought into the idea that Hill had hooked up with one of Bob Marley’s sons as a way of connecting herself with that chain of musical royalty.
Would I have ever said that, or even thought it, about a male musician?
Joan Morgan’s book manages many things in its brief few pages. But one of the best articulated points is the impossible standard we all set for the likes of Lauryn and contemporaries like Erykah Badu, D’Angelo and Maxwell. They were the greats of the neo-soul movement. They had killer albums that we lapped up, that sold well, and were mostly reviewed positively too.
But there were the lines about this one being the new Nina Simone and that one being the latest Marvin Gaye. Nina made dozens of albums and not all of them were knockouts. (You can’t write Mississippi Goddam every time. It’s a goddam miracle it was even written once!) Marvin middled out with at least 10 Motown albums that sounded largely the same before he reinvented himself with a run of absolute classics.
The new breed was given one album before they were compared.
Ridiculous.
So I thought about that more than I ever had when I listened through to The Miseducation. It’s a brilliant and baffling album. It’s still too long, the skits still leave me cold. I get bored a wee bit. But I also feel the hairs on my arms spike as soon as Lost Ones kicks in. A killer-good diss track and album opener. Ex-Factor is one of many songs to pick up on the feel of the Donny Hathaway/Roberta Flack duets. To Zion remains an intriguing religious epiphany and personal prayer – it’s also the last time I ever cared about Carlos Santana’s playing (and he was my guitar guy right through my teens. My first proper guitar hero). Doo Wop (That Thing) kicks in hard and just doesn’t stop. Over the last 25 years, for me, that’s become the most enduring song of the album bar none. It is every kind of song for every kind of person. Or close to it. Play this song to a doubter. It will convince them. Want beautiful balladry? There’s still the title song, and D’Angelo duet, Nothing Even Matters. There’s still When It Hurts So Bad, and the brittle hip-hop skip of I Used To Love Him (with Mary J. Blige doing her slay).
And that’s just the obvious delights. Just the easy highlights. Line it up with any album of its era (and I was listening to big albums by the Beastie Boys and Beck and Bjork and Massive Attack and Faith No More and Wu Tang Clan and so many others) and it competes. It knocks most of them to the sea. But it certainly rubs shoulders with, at the very least, any of them.
I thought about all of this as I listened to the album again and read the book; as I found the Fugees far more compelling in 2023 than had been the case in 1996.
And I thought about where I was in 1999. A few months after the album was first released. Sat on a mattress on my bedroom floor. A cigarette in my hand, while one still burned in an ashtray nearby. My poetry scrawled through maths books, both awkwardly private and desperate to be shared with anyone that just happened to momentarily stop by. My journalism school year falling away right in front of me, the inertia of leaving my room becoming crippling – me settling for being sure that I would find the world outside on another day.
And then Juliet came to visit. And she brought with her a copy of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She was sceptical as to whether I’d liked it but cared enough to ask.
And it was part of my education. Which is ongoing. And infinite. And everything. And forever.
Beautiful, beautiful Zion
Joan Morgan’s book concludes with a playlist. A most wonderful extrapolation of the world of Lauryn Hill, everything that came from and went into her first solo album, and some connections spiralling out from it. So I have included that here.
And as always, there’s another playlist: Vol. 114 of A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good!
Are you a fan of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill? Do you remember where you were when you first heard it?