SRP Sunday Studies - Lauryn Hill: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
The 1998 studio album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was the only music project to be released by fellow Fugees member Lauryn Hill.
Before the album's release, Lauryn attended Columbia High School with classmate, actor Zach Braff, and partaken in extracurricular activities in sports and performing arts. During that time, she began her acting career by starring in films and television such as As the World Turns, King of the Hill, and Sister Act 2.
Lauryn was approached by Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel to form the hip-hop trio, The Fugees, and began recording their 1994 debut album Blunted on Reality. While it did manage to display hip-hop and R&B stylings in the production mix, it did not meet the standards critically and commercially, peaking at number 64 on Billboard's Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums Chart.
Following the breakout success of their sophomore album The Score, Lauryn ran into some disagreements and clashes with her fellow bandmates before departing the group. After getting married to Jamaican-American entrepreneur Rohan Marley and the pregnancy of her first child, Zion Marley, she began working on her first project heavily inspired by the 1933 Carter Woodson book, The Miseducation of the Negro.
On August 19th 1998, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was released under Ruffhouse and Columbia Records, an R&B and hip-hop album discovering the concepts of love, breakups, feminism, nostalgia and religion as we, the listeners, educate ourselves in those contexts in great detail.
Next, most of the creative output was done by Lauryn Hill as she wrote and produced fifteen out of sixteen tracks made for the project, with the exception of the Frankie Valli 60s love song Can't Take My Eyes off You, reworked as an R&B-tinged jam. In this case, some songs like Lost Ones and Ex-Factor show great examples of crossing over between the hip-hop and R&B music genres respectively without doing too much of it.
Lyrically, Lost Ones is regarded as a diss track towards Fugees' bandmates Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel; a recurring scheme that eventually appears in other tracks on the album, such as the reggae-inflicted Forgive Them Father. In contrast, anthems like To Zion, Everything is Everything and Every Ghetto, Every City dive into the topics of youth culture, spirituality and recollection while examining the additional music elements of funk, Latin and classical music, the second of which demonstrated the guitar melodies from Mexican-American guitarist Carlos Santana.
Putting together the tenacious hip-hop production with sultry R&B elements and Lauryn's spunky and heartfelt sung/rapped vocal projection, Miseducation of Lauryn Hill spawned numerous accolades after the album's release, including Best Album of the Year at the 41st Grammy Awards in 1999.
The album also sought future inspiration from female artists including Beyoncé, Adele, SZA and Ella Mai. Coincidentally, Beyoncé's Lemonade (which captured the ingenuity of Miseducation) came out in April 2016 and followed the concept of black feminism by incorporating R&B, soul and reggae music into the production with each song exploring the Kübler-Ross model.
In spite of her personal and professional struggles since the album's success, Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is Lauryn Hill's only studio album to be produced under her recording contract with Sony BMG. In 2002, Lauryn released her Unplugged album and received mixed reviews from music critics, with some dividing the artistic directions of its folk-oriented composition and self-centred live performances.
To sum up, Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is one of those timeless hip-hop classic albums to make a foray into the female rap community amongst the male-dominated group that was once popularized by women rappers of the time. It also exhibited Hill's outstanding singing and rapping prowess on one track after the next whilst putting her creative freedom in the music composition, blending R&B and soul music, with hip-hop, Latin and disco elements throughout.
