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Hill is one of the performers set to take hip-hop into the new millennium. Born and raised in South Orange, N.J., she met her fellow Fugees, Pras and Wyclef Jean, in high school, then spent two years at Columbia University before dropping out to pursue music. On the old-school-funky Every Ghetto, Every City, one of Miseducation's best tracks, she pledges to remember her roots: "Way before the record deal/ The streets that nurtured Lauryn Hill/ Made sure that I'd never go too far." Hill isn't out to create bourgeois hip-hop lite; she constantly strives to connect her message to the street. The album veers from rapping to singing, from hip-hop to neosoul, from African-American argot to Jamaican patois. Part of the CD was recorded in Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, where reggae rebel Bob Marley recorded.
The album's central topic is love. Not the sappy sop of pop ditties, but a tough, confessional examination of relationships such as cultural critic Bell Hooks describes in her book Talking Back: Thinking Feminist/Thinking Black: "Love can be and is an important source of empowerment...to face the ways in which we dominate and are dominated... To change our actions, we need a mediating force to sustain us." Hill's songs try to be that mediating force. On Ex-Factor, she examines her own attraction to psychologically hurtful men. "Who I have to be/ To get some reciprocity?" she pleads. Later, the meditative title song gives an answer: "I made up my mind to find my own destiny."
Listeners like her message. Roberto E. Gooden, urban-music supervisor for the HMV store in New York City's Herald Square, says Hill's CD is racking up heavy sales: "The people who are buying it are all ages, all backgrounds...but I've noticed a lot of adult, together women buying this CD. Lauryn Hill is their peer, and so they want to buy her album."
Hill is part of a new wave. The late '90s has seen the rise of a different kind of hip-hop star, a performer with global appeal who is finding success beyond hip-hop. As S. Craig Watkins, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin, who has written about hip-hop and black films, notes, "The interest generated by hip-hop culture has cleared the way for more black people to express themselves in other areas of pop culture." All three Fugees have recorded solo albums. Wyclef's went platinum, and Pras' forthcoming CD, Ghetto Supastar, has generated a No. 1 single in Switzerland, Belgium and several other countries. Hip-hop mogul Sean ("Puffy") Combs is preparing to co-star in a movie with Al Pacino and planning to launch a line of urbanwear in 1999. Beastie Boys has a record label, a magazine and a clothing line. Rapper Master P is set to co-star as a computer specialist in Takedown, a movie from Miramax's Dimension Films about computer hackers. Master P may play a gangsta on his CDs, but in Takedown his character will work alongside the FBI. Says Andrew Rona, vice president of production at Dimension: "I'm not sure what it is, but [rappers] speak to their generation. People see them in a role, and they relate."