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Back in 1999, I attended what is still – after almost two decades – my most memorable concert ever: Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation Tour at the Fox Theatre in Detroit. I was a high school senior and my homie Jenny and I could only afford nosebleeds, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying a top-tier show: OutKast killed it as the opening act, and Hill was pitch-perfect with her backup singers as they took us through the turn of the millennium’s hottest album: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
The album dropped 20 years ago this Aug. 25, and it’s a damn shame that so many asterisks accompany the anniversary of her magnum opus – chief among them Hill’s longstanding reputation of being Godfather-film-length tardy to her own damn shows and her general recalcitrance when challenged about it. But we’ll get back to that in a moment.
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A Singular Achievement
Miseducation is a seminal body of work because it masterfully straddled the line of hip-hop and R&B, perhaps better than any album before or since. On top of having a unique and easily identifiable contralto, Hill is also the best female rapper of all time for my money, as she proved on the Fugees’ 1996 sophomore classic The Score. Miseducation still rides to this day and deserves its five Grammys and all the hosannas it’s received in retrospect.
But while the music is still dope, a lot of the lyrics didn’t age very well. “Lost Ones” is fire if you ignore the fact that it’s the first of 4,086 songs on the album in which she comes at the neck of her Fugees bandmate turned lover Wyclef after being the side chick didn’t go so well for her. (Indeed, one of that generation’s best bodies of music came as the result of a breakup, as many great albums have). “Doo Wop (That Thing)” is a mess of respectability politics. A banging mess, mind you, but one just the same.
That kind of content was de rigueur in the 1990s, but if Miseducation came out today, Hill would’ve been dragged for sure. In fact, Miseducation is generally more enjoyable if you don’t think too hard about the lyrics, placing it in good company with…just about every hip-hop classic. (Re-listen to DMX and Eminem’s early multiplatinum albums and clutch those pearls.)
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Damage Done
There’s been a mess of think pieces and analyses on why Hill completely shirked the upward momentum Miseducation begat and which could’ve potentially made her the crossover megastar that Jennifer Lopez became. But it’s unquestionably a crying-ass shame that we never got more music like her 90s output.
Her 2002 MTV Unplugged album didn’t age poorly, but at the time it was received like what would happen if Migos released a lyrical, “conscious” rap album today. We haven’t received any new music from Hill in the 16 years since, and I’m sure egos and hurt feelings are the only thing holding back the proper Fugees reunion that people would pay stupid amounts of money to make happen.
There’s also the (publicly) unresolved issue of whether Hill has the right to her own songs, which might factor into why her current live performances of the songs on Miseducation always have completely different musical arrangements, sucking the joy out of the music for fans of the studio album.
Truth is, if Hill got her shit together and could perform the album as I heard her do it in 1999, it would place her in the incredibly rarefied air of music artists who could spend the rest of their days making a handsome living touring on the strength of one album. But she seems to have no problem murdering whatever goodwill she has with fans to the point where her name has become a punchline of sorts.
I learned the hard way how Hill gets down in 2013 when she was nearly two-and-a-half hours late for a Wednesday night show and took maybe 15 minutes to get through an unrecognizable rendition of “Everything is Everything,” during which she just repeated “everything is ev-ery-thiiiing” until my ears almost fell the f— off my head.
That was five years ago, and those of us who know better have been warning would-be concert attendees since then. And she keeps the same shenanigans going. We can all love Miseducation and recognize Hill for the singular talent that she is, but everything that happens with her reputation going forward is on her. And her alone.
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Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.
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