Maiden Voyage: Lauryn Hill's Debut Echoes Songs In The Key of Life and Other Classic Black Masterworks
On August 25, 1998, Lauryn Hill embarked on her maiden voyage as a solo artist with the release of her debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Clocking in at nearly 70 minutes its sprawling cohesion recalls Stevie Wonder’s 1976 Songs in The Key of Life.
Against a host of contenders releasing groundbreaking albums during 1970s, Wonder emerged victorious, winning consecutive Grammys for Album of the Year. Emerging as Motown's biggest star, Wonder inked a new multi-album deal for $30 million dollars---the biggest contract for any recording artist at the time.
Disenchanted with America, Wonder flirted with retirement and
moving to Africa. Instead, he moved forward to complete work on his
highly anticipated follow-up. Two years in the making, Songs was finally released as a two-record set/four-song EP. It earned Wonder his third Grammy Album of the Year win in four years.
As one-third of rap supergroup the Fugees, Hill flaunted soulful singing and dope rhyme skills on the group's best-selling album The Score. In a year of future rap classics: It Was Written, Reasonable Doubt, ATLiens and Ironman---The Score emerged as rap's breakout album. Blessed with an encyclopedic music recall, Hill inserted lyric and melodies from vintage R&B into the album's compositions.
Hill channeled Teena Marie and the Delfonics on Fugee-La-La and Ready Or Not and morphed into Roberta Flack on her remake of Flack’s 1974 Killing Me Softly (With His Song.) Guesting on the Nas reboot of Kurtis Blow’s 1985 If I Ruled the World, Hill tacked on the chorus to the Delfonics’ 1971 Walk Right Up To The Sun for the song’s bridge (“And we will/walk right up to the sun/we won’t land”). Common’s Retrospective for Life (1997) finds Hill crooning the chorus to Wonder’s I Never Dream You’d Leave in Summer (1970).
Writing and producing All That I Can Say---one of the greatest Stevie Wonder songs he never recorded, Hill's composition is reminiscent of Wonder’s I Can’t Help It written for Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall (1979). The Wonder trademarks are all there---from the cerebral devotions of love to Mary J. Blige singing in Stevie's unmistakable baritone.
Hill's A Rose Is Still A Rose (1998) gave Aretha Franklin (God rest her soul) one of her last major hits. On Rose, Hill revives the chorus to Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians 1988 What I Am---known to rap fans as the sampled hook for Brand Nubian’s anti-crack anthem Slow Down (1990).
A technology-induced duet with Bob Marley---Turn the Lights Down Low and the sexy slow burner The Sweetest Thing (1997) for the Love Jones soundtrack continued Hill's prolific run. Behind the music, internal conflicts caused a Fugees implosion akin to Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac with Hill cast as Stevie Nicks to Wyclef's Lindsay Buckingham. Pouring her experiences into what would become Miseducation, Hill’s Wonder years came full circle. Her debut moved 19 million copies worldwide to win five Grammys---including Album of the Year.
“My rhymes is heavy/like the mouth of Sister Betty”
---Everything Is Everything (1998)
Wonder serenades musical greats on Sir Duke. Hill channels them on Ex-Factor recalling rapper Slick Rick’s send-ups of Nat King Cole, the Beatles, A Taste of Honey and Dionne Warwick on classics The Show/La-Di-Da-Di (1985) and Mona Lisa (1988).
Ex-Factor recreates the beat from Wu-Tang Clan’s ghetto soliloquy Can It Be So Simple (1994), which samples Gladys Knight and the Pips 1974 rendition of the Barbara Streisand 1973 classic The Way We Were. Hill’s dead-on rendition of Knight’s “can it be so simple” line is a slick nod to her R&B/hip-hop pedigree.
On Saturn, Wonder takes society to task for its transgressions and retreats to an outer-space Wakandan utopia where "just to live/is our natural high:"
"We don’t fight our wars the way you do/we put back all the things we use/there’s no sense to keep on doing such crimes
There’re no principles of what you say/no direction in the things you do/ for your world/ is soon to come/ to a close
Through the ages all great men have taught/truth and happiness can’t be bought or sold/ Oh tell me why you people are so cold
“We can’t trust you when you take a stand/ with a gun and bible in your hand/and the cold expression on your face saying give us what we want/ or we’ll destroy"
If Wonder was the brooding soothsayer on Saturn, Hill is the wise sage on cautionary tale Doo Wop (That Thing) cautioning gullible sisters (“You better watch out!”) against slick come-ons from the kind of unscrupulous brothers Wonder profiled on Misstra Know It All (1973). Flaunting soulful street-corner harmonies at the bridge, Doo Wop revives the slick and earthy storytelling heard on records like the Honey Cone’s 1971 hits Stick Up and Want Ads.
Hill admonishes her people for fake religious posturing, a topic covered in Wonder’s Jesus Children America (1973). She advocates natural beauty for her sisters---the kind Wonder joyfully riffs about on Songs' gem Ebony Eyes----“she’s a girl that can’t be beat/ born and raised on ghetto streets.”
Lost Ones is probably Hill's greatest lyrical moment. Picking up where Wonder’s 1974’s political indictment You Haven’t Done Nothin’ (“It’s not too cool to be ridiculed /but you brought this on yourself”) leaves off, Lost Ones uses Saturn’s critical analysis to face down a male dominated record industry decades before #metoo and #timesup.
Resurrecting Sister Nancy’s classic Bam Bam from '82 (note: see Chiquita’s chilling murder scene in Belly or check Jay Z’s 4:44), L-Boogie weaves in and out of Jamaican patois with a confident flair that is equal to Wonder’s tri-lingual stylings on Ngicuiela, Ngicuiela-Es una Historia/ I am Singing where he sings in English, Spanish and Zulu.
Set to boom-bap drums, Lost Ones echoes KRS-One’s dancehall flavored, strident messages from his own Wonderesque run of Boogie Down Production albums: By All Means Necessary (1988) Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop (1989) Edutainment (1990) and Sex and Violence (1992).
Hill dispatches lyrical darts dipped in venomous spiritual references. Islamic asides, (You can't hold God's people back that long/the chain of Shaitan wasn't made that strong), Five Percent lingo, (“trying to pretend that your word is your bond/until you do right/all you will do is wrong”), biblical scripture (Now, now/ how can your talk turn cold/gain the whole world/ for the price of your soul”) and metaphysical doctrine (“Now don’t you understand man/universal law/what you throw out/ comes back to you, star”).
In a pop culture moment, Hill uses Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon (1982) to nudge her adversaries towards her Wonder-like world of humanity (“Never underestimate who you scar/ cause karma-karma-karma comes back to you hard”).
Lost Ones replicates Rakim’s thematic lyrics of fury while managing to one-up his metaphysical mind travel to the cosmos and the motherland so masterfully depicted on Follow the Leader (1988) and In the Ghetto (1990).
Leaving Ra to construct bars like pyramids brick by brick, Hill cuts to the chase with potent couplets like “I know all the tricks from bricks to Kingston” forging her Jersey roots with Bob Marley’s native Jamaica in a great diasporic moment.
When she proclaims that “L’s been here/since creation,” you want to believe it. Her threat "But if a thing test me/run for my gun/can’t take a threat to my newborn son” conjure up images of L-Boogie as a modern-day Jochebed/Miriam protecting baby Moses at all costs.
The figurative Mosaic imagery continues as she laments superficial idolatry (“It’s funny how money can change a situation”) and threatens pending calamity (“but there come many paths and you must choose one/and if you don't change/ then the rain soon come”) before dismantling the industry's seven deadly sins with cryptic Marley-speak:(“Your movement’s similar to a serpent/tried to play straight/ how your whole style bent?”).
Everything is Everything---lifts its title from Donny Hathaway's seminal debut album. Everything tackles social injustice toward inner-city youth with a message of hope and empowerment that hangs over Miseducation like a cloud of optimism:
“L-Boogie spars with stars and constellations/then came down for a little conversation /adjacent to the king/, fear no human bein’ /roll with cherubims to Nassau Coliseum /now hear this mixture/where hip hop meets scripture/develop a negative into a positive.”
Isn’t She Lovely and To Zion celebrate the joys of first time parenthood. Wonder’s giddiness is evident as he proclaims: “I can’t believe what God has done/ through us he has given life of one.” Hill is more pensive. Dipping into her lyrical bag of spiritual reincarnation, To Zion’s displays Hill's dramatic flair for immaculate concepts as she retraces her tentative steps toward motherhood employing Wonder’s signature abstract storytelling:
Unsure of what the balance held
I touched my belly
overwhelmed by what
I had been chosen to perform
but then an angel came one day
told me to kneel down and pray
for unto to me
a man-child will be born….
Faced with making the choice choosing between a booming career and having her child, Hill chooses the latter: “Look at your career, they said/Lauryn, baby use your head/but instead I chose to use my heart.” Hill’s quiet exuberance and salvation speaks volumes: “Now I thank you for choosing me/ to come through unto life to be/a beautiful reflection of his grace/ see I know that it gets so great /is only one that God could create/ and I am reminded every time I see your face.”
Groundbreaking albums establish a benchmark of excellence that can be a gift and a curse. Follow-up albums Journey Through the Secret of Plants (1979) and Lauryn Hill Unplugged 2.0 (2001) lacked the familiarity of predecessors and failed to live up to public expectations.
Wonder and Hill's key collaborators were also absent from these projects, having moved on due to compensation and credit issues, asserting that the two superstars were not the sole guiding forces of their works.
We tend to prefer our superstars singular and creatively infallible. In reality though, their tapestry of collaboration, credit, compensation and conflict are interwoven from the same fabric of music history. The list is long. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Maurice White and Charles Stepney. Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson.
These artistic role conflicts even extend to Wonder and Hill.
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