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Lauryn Hill: Soulful Revelation

POSTED: 11:37 EST, August 9, 2007

"She knows what it feels like to be left stranded at the heartbreak church. She knows what it feels like to lose precious things." bell hooks

Before Rasta boy Jon Forte wearily spoke of inmates finding the Lord behind the bars of FCI Loretto, before Wyclef Jean flipped battle rhymes on Brooklyn blockhuggers in Haitian, before and Biggie got shot -- Lauryn Hill, the vintage skirt-rocking poster child of hip-hop's nappy revolution in the later 90s, was having problems with men.

For the average listener, her the breakdown is traced back to the runaway soundtrack of every black ghetto in 1998, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. In the beginning, none of my friends took the album seriously. "Why she got to get all Carter G. Woodson wit' the shit?" they clowned before the gem even dropped.

We were all the way in Detroit discussing the quasi-phenomenon before white academic critics, hard on lyrical masturbation and meatless meanings, had time to passt verdict. The joint had leaked, so "Ex-Factor" was seeping out my homies' pores before the $13.99 sticker and shrink-wrap. It grew on us - real fast.

Looking back, it's been nine years and one month since the travail, birth, travails and glory of Miseducation. Nine years since little silly girls like me, hanging with flocks of dudes, a tomboy, could feel confident swinging her cotton ball kinky hair around, cocoa-colored skinny legs, always waxing rhapsodic over hip-hop, as honorable as a black man's manhood. A couple of years before Lauryn lost it, the "MTV Unplugged" phase, after her baby's daddy Rohan Marley played her. Nine is the number of revelation.

If women carry the seed of revelation (going back to Eve discerning the serpent as the trickster when Adam just saw a "woman") then we can take the wrath of Miseducation's soul, a gifted dysfunction, back to to a cognoscente of other bruised soul women - Janis Joplin.

This left-coast white girl hung in the same LSD-soaked quarters as Hendrix and didn't look like "the folk," but her raspy smokers-croaked falsetto was as grisly, unpasteurized and black as Aretha's. When her tie-dyed band of gypsies from Haight-Ashbury covered George Gershwin's "Summertime" you forgot she was an ugly- ass white girl: she became a graceful goddess like Athena, clipped out a soulful ghetto Greek tragedy or somethin'. Janis Joplin became the Faulkner of R&B, the Eminem of black music, pre-Teena Marie, the frosted crooner with hood stripes. White chocolate.

And yet before the epic Monterey Pop Festival, before the LSD-soaked quarters of Hendrix, before the euphoric last hit of brownstone that led to the unanticipated spirit- lifting OD, Janis had problems with men. The type of issues that had the girl slurring heart-wrenching pleas like, "Didn't I make you feel like you were the only man- yeah! Didn't I give you nearly everything that a woman possibly can?"

The low self-esteem, checkered past, uninterested dudes, had ol' girl searching for refuge, Mount Sinai, Jehovah, through clouds of weed smoke and her own coarse, smoker's-croaked falsetto.

"Work me Lord," she begged exhaustively at one point when things really got fucked up. "Please don't you leave me. I feel so useless down here with no one to love. Though I've looked everywhere, I can't find me anybody to love."

Fast-forward about three or four decades later. An ill dread-locked chick out of Jersey, who backpackers nicknamed L-Boogie -- the same puff-chested lyricist who got booed off Apollo, only to rise like Lazarus and later loyally spit with her boys on a Score joint called "Zealots": "See my rhymes are the type of fly rhymes that can only get down with my crew" -- was now thumbing her way through bumpy roads of pain and bitterness with dry explications of why love was a joke.

"I loved real real hard once," she sang thoughtfully sang on Miseducation's "When it Hurts So Bad." "But the love wasn't returned. Found out the man I'd die for, he wasn't even concerned."

There wasn't much rapping on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. There didn't need to be. No longer was L-Boogie "L-Boogie," trying to stroke and please you with metaphorical aerobics or as she once put it, "add a 'muthafucka' so you ignorant niggas hear me." There weren't much flowery Joni Mitchell vocals going on with Joplin's Cheap Thrills neither.

The connection lies in both women's maturity, or immaturity rather, an agonizingly righteous angst beyond the limitations of glossy production and theory-laced pamphlets preaching about feminism.

It's about the blues, the type too thick for shaky-thigh'd musical virgins, the folk who listened to their paranoid swelled-ankle grandmammy who cryptically warned it was evil like Satan. It wasn't for women running through the tulips, who didn't know what it felt like to mistake a man's absorbing voodoo for fidelity. Women who never had an ex.

But then, like many listeners in '98, I was only a kid. A little black girl hanging around a flock of dudes, a tomboy. The issues of fidelity were as far away from my vocab as orgasms. The blues were for my mama. I only wanted to hear "L-Boogie" spit. "Lauryn Hill," like Janis, was for the women who knew better. The women who knew what it was like to believe in a romance, juicy reciprocity, that never existed. The women who knew what it were to have problems with men.

Source: Vibe Magazine