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Music: Hip-Hop Nation: Lauryn Hill

5 minute read
Christopher John Farley

Strange that something so alive now could have begun in a museum. In late 1997, Lauryn Hill was visiting Detroit to produce a song that she wrote for her childhood hero, Aretha Franklin. On the way to the airport, she stopped at the Motown Museum. The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5–these were the performers she was reared on. She could picture their 45s scattered across her bed. “It was incredible to me and really inspiring,” says Hill. Now she was ready to push forward on her own solo album.

Looking back, looking back. Hill grew up in South Orange, N.J.; her father was a management consultant, her mother a grade-school English teacher. From an early age, Lauryn (she has an elder brother Malaney) was into singing and performing. When she was in middle school, she was invited to sing the national anthem at a high school basketball game. “People went wild,” says LuElle Walker-Peniston, Hill’s guidance counselor at Columbia High School. “I don’t think we had a winning team, but she was inspiring.” Fans liked her rendition so much that recordings of it were played at subsequent games.

While still in high school, Hill landed a recurring role as the troubled runaway, Kira, on the TV soap As The World Turns. In 1993 she was cast as a difficult teen in Sister Act 2. There’s a scene in that film in which Hill’s character reels off a rap as her classmates look on. “None of that was scripted,” says director Bill Duke. “That was all Lauryn. She was amazing.” While in high school, she formed the rap trio the Fugees (short for refugees) with classmate Prakazrel (“Pras”) Michel and Wyclef Jean, who went to a nearby school. The group’s debut album, Blunted on Reality, sold poorly. Hill spent about a year at Columbia University but left school when the Fugees’ second album, The Score, took off. It has sold more than 17 million copies worldwide.

But Hill wasn’t satisfied. In the studio, she and Jean were “innocently competitive,” gently sparring to see who could spin off the wittiest rhymes. Hill was eager to see what she could do solo. She booked a recording studio in New York City and gathered up every instrument she could think of–a harpsichord, a timpani, a trombone, a Hammond B-3 organ. She wanted to create hip-hop with live instruments.

She still needed another spark. So she flew to Jamaica. Hill is engaged to Rohan Marley, the son of reggae superstar Bob Marley and the father of her two children, one-year-old Zion and three-month-old Selah. (“We haven’t been in front of a minister yet, but we will be soon,” says Hill. “Our marriage right now is more a spiritual one.”) As part of the extended Marley clan, she was allowed to record in the studio in the Bob Marley Museum. She says she could feel Marley’s spirit as soon as she arrived. The first day there she wrote Lost Ones. As she began to rap, the various young Marley grandchildren who happened to be wandering around that day joined in, chanting the last word of every line. Everyone could feel the energy.

Hill says that before Rohan, she had “dysfunctional” relationships. She tried to channel the pain of those experiences into her music. “It wasn’t someone writing for me; it wasn’t someone telling me what I felt,” says Hill, who wrote and produced the songs on Miseducation. “It was exactly how I felt the moment I felt it.” Her maverick vision hasn’t been without controversy. Late last year a group of four musicians who worked on Miseducation filed a suit claiming they deserved additional songwriting credits. Hill denies the allegations. Gordon Williams, who worked as the sound engineer on every song, says, “Definitely the driving force behind that record was [Hill].”

Her colleagues worry about Hill’s frantic pace. “She’s a workaholic,” says Williams. “She doesn’t stop. To be a mother, two times, and then have all this stuff going on is crazy. Sometimes I just look at her and go, ‘Lauryn, take it easy.'”

But Hill plans to push ahead. She says the Fugees “definitely aren’t broken up,” though the members have to “sit down and see where all our heads are at.” She has her own production company, and she might steer it in a unique direction: “I’m looking to produce black science-fiction films.” Then there’s her tour. She’ll perform her first solo show in the U.S. on Feb. 18 in Detroit. But she’ll take time out to attend the Grammys in Los Angeles on Feb. 24, for which she has received 10 nominations. “There are kids in the audiences now who weren’t born when there wasn’t hip-hop,” says Hill. “They grew up on it; it’s part of the culture. It’s a huge thing. It’s not segregated anymore. It’s not just in the Bronx; it’s all over the world. That’s why I think it’s more crucial now that we, as artists, take advantage of our platform.”

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