Hill, Lauryn

Hill, Lauryn, innovative hip-hop rapper and singer; b. South Orange, N.J., May 26, 1975. Hill’s mother taught English and her father worked as a computer consultant. Both parents enjoyed R&B records. By the time she was 13, Hill had already performed on Showtime at the Apollo, singing Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Loving You?” At school she started a gospel choir, played basketball, ran track, was a cheerleader and homecoming queen. She hooked up with two of her schoolmates, Wyclef Jean and Prakazrel Michel, forming a rap group they called the Fugees, short for refugees, denoting the Haitian émigré status of the two young men. As if all this wasn’t enough, during her junior year Hill started to work on an acting career. She landed a steady role on “As the World Turns” and acted in the films Sister Act 2, Plenty, and Restaurant. She also appeared in the TV specials “Daddy’s Girl” and “Here and Now.” Rather than taking these credentials to Hollywood, however, Hill enrolled at Columbia Univ.

However, she also kept working on her various extracurricular projects, including the Fugees. During her freshman year, they signed with Ruffhouse Records. The group’s first album, Blunted on Reality, concentrated heavily on rap, and though it mixed elements of Caribbean music with the urban beats, the album didn’t do very well. Their second album, 1996’s The Score, however, became one of the biggest selling hip-hop records of all time—indeed one of the best-selling records in any genre—selling 17 million copies, largely owing to Hill’s singing on the covers of “Killing Me Softly” and “No Woman No Cry.” The group took home two Grammies that year, for Best Rap Album and Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The success of this album finally motivated Hill to leave Columbia a few semesters short of her degree in history.

After the Fugee’s 1997 tour, Hill found out she was pregnant by Rohan Marley, one of the sons of reggae legend Bob Marley. She spent most of that year caring for her new son, Zion, though she found time to write “A Rose Is a Rose” for Aretha Franklin and direct the video for the song. Michel and Jean went into the studio to work on solo albums, and after a while, Hill decided to follow suit, working in N.Y. and at the Bob Marley Museum studio in Jamaica. She invited guest artists including Carlos Santana, Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, Francis Dunnery, Earl “Chinna” Smith, and many other pop and reggae stars, to play. What finally came out of these sessions, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, might well be considered one of the masterpieces of pop music. With songs that lyrically addressed issues from sexism to motherhood, materialism to spirituality, the album earned comparisons to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ on and Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Deeper still, on a musical level, Hill blended hip-hop with old- school R&B, Caribbean rhythms, and flat-out soul. The album spawned two hits, the ubiquitous gold single “Doo Wop (That Thing)” and “Everything Is Everything,” which also went gold. At the Grammy Awards, she went in with 10 nominations and came home with the statuettes for Album of the Year, Best New Artist, Best R&B Song, Best R&B Album, and Best R&B Vocal Performance. Spin and Details proclaimed her Artist of the Year, and Time and The New York Times hailed The Miseducation as the #1 album of the year. The album had sold seven million copies and was still in the charts at the time of this writing.

Discography

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998).

—Hank Bordowitz