My Re-education on the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Listening to this album as an adult has me seeing it in a whole new light
I’ve been thinking a lot about Lauryn Hill lately. Last month, Apple Music crowned her first and only solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the best album of all time.
This is high praise and even though skeptics might tell you that these ✨lists✨ work more to get us thinking than they are definitive, I’m glad the renewed conversation about it made me go back to the album.
Miseducation is a record that is reflective of my own journey through the complexities of being a young Black woman in my little corner of the universe who is unlearning toxic ideals about womanhood, love, relationships, sexuality and faith.
The album came out when I was 5, so I listened to most of it as a young child/pre-teen, and the most I’d engaged with the actual substance of it as a young adult, was growing up and realizing that the lyrics to Doo Wop (That Thing) were a bit problematic. I really only started properly wrestling with the nuances of the record — and her personal life — after listening to an episode of the New York Times culture podcast Still Processing. In it, hosts Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris commemorated the 20th anniversary of the 5-time Grammy-winning album by looking at its impact, the forces in Lauryn’s life that shaped the record and the ways in which she continued to try to tell her own story afterwards.
Personally, I love listening to Miseducation now because Lauryn is working through so much that I think people today can still relate to — getting pregnant young, figuring out a massive, intimidating career, toxic love, and the dissonance of allowing yourself to be a mouthpiece for a patriarchal culture that does nothing to protect you. So when the album made it to the top of Apple Music’s list, I thought it might be a good time to revisit it with fresh ears and see what it says about the world she was living in, the experiences she went through and how all of those things ultimately shaped her very complicated sense of self.
In track one, Intro, a nameless voice reads off a roll-call in what sounds like a classroom setting and when it gets to “Lauryn Hill,” there’s no answer. That leaves me wondering where is she? Did she miss class that day? Is she skipping school? Or is she too caught up in her own daydream to hear the voices trying to pull her back to the present. I like to think she’s not there at all because as we’ll hear, the things she’s learned in life can’t be taught in a classroom.
Enter Lost Ones, track two, where Lauryn reminds us that she is a mothafuckin RAPPER. The confidence, the swagger and the absolute audacity with which she takes position as a solo artist to be reckoned with is almost unheard of in young artists today. Knock and the door will be opened unto you? Nah, Lauryn is kicking the door in and daring anyone on the other side to compete. The Lost Ones outro is also the first in a series throughout the album that capture young Black people’s complex understandings of love. These conversations force us to think about the constructs we’ve built around love as a society, and the images that we associate with what love is “supposed” to look like.
And while there’s no doubt that Miseducation is a record about love — romantic, parental, Godly — so much of it is about a very specific kind of toxic, desperate, unrequited love; like Ex-Factor, a beautiful track about loving someone you know isn’t good for you.
That endless yearning — despite a certainty that your love is unreciprocated — shows up again in When It Hurts So Bad. On that song, she’s yearning for a love that’s as desperate as it is unreachable. When she sings, “Gave up my power /I existed for you” I immediately hate how much I can relate to that feeling. But like she said, “if you ever been in love / Then you'd understand/ That what you want might make you cry.” Duhh.
For me, though, To Zion is still the most beautiful thing Lauryn Hill has ever made. I always cry when I listen to her go through the fears, anxieties and criticisms she faced when she found out she was pregnant, only to end up at “I’ve never been in love like this before.” TEARS.
Then there’s Doo Wop (That Thing). Nothing quite underscores the complexity of Lauryn Hill’s struggle with internalized misogynoir like this song. Ostensibly an act of rebellion against the male-dominated pressures of a Hip-hop industry that relentlessly objectified women, Lauryn ends up alienating the very audience she’s supposed to be speaking for, with overwrought lyrics and heavy-handed finger-pointing.
This song is supposed to have the energy of a tough-love friend who is rightfully scolding you for hooking up with someone you knew you shouldn’t. Instead, it aged like a judgemental aunty who thinks slut-shaming should be a rite of passage for young Black girls. She gets on her pulpit and suggests that women can determine the way they are treated by men based on how they dress and who they choose to have sex with (“Plus, when you give it up so easy you ain't even foolin' him (Him)/ If you did it then, then you'd probably **** again”) and of course, all this is okay for her to say because it’s her own experience as well (“Don't think I haven't been through the same predicament (I been there)”).
But at least she’s an equal opportunity hater; because the “second verse is dedicated to the men,” and in it she regales them for once about the life choices that have caused them to be disenfranchised and minoritized, never mind all the systemic barriers that the Black men she’s scolding routinely have to navigate simply to exist.
Doo wop, the first song by a Rap artist to ever debut at #1 in the US, is crazy when you look back at it with 2024 years; but it’s also reflective of how vicious and unforgiving the society that birthed it was. I don’t think Lauryn Hill is un-self-aware about how she comes across, but I do think she learned her lessons the hard way and isn’t shy about about dishing out those same lumps if it means other Black girls don’t make the same mistake she did.
Lauryn, who had been in a reportedly tumultuous relationship with married Fugees bandmate Wyclef Jean (they started dating when she was 16 🥴) fully internalized the idea that she was a product of her bad choices — but I also wonder how much resentment she holds for the forces that helped her get there; people in the industry who wronged her, the men in her life who let her down… (is Superstar is about Wyclef??) Well, if the music she made at the time is anything to go on, she seems to turn a lot of that anger inward on herself. Doo wop aged like milk, but is still a bop that if nothing else, is representative of the creative genius who made it.
Thankfully though, by the time we get to I Used To Love Him, Lauryn is finally taking a stand on love, and it feels like we’re getting somewhere. She thanks God for showing her that life is “much more than being some foolish man's wife,” seemingly unaware of the irony that she’s spent the entire album tethering herself to the whims, will and authority of another male figure — God.
She continues to reverence that God on Forgive Them Father, a record rife with religious motifs that punctuate her sorrows about all the different ways that humans are bad to each other, and you hear flashes of that same near-obsessive religiosity in Every Ghetto and Every City.
We take a turn from obsessing over God to re-focus on another object of Lauryn’s devotion, on Nothing Even Matters. When I tell y’all this is a REAL love song, I mean this REAL lover’s music. I still think it’s one of the greatest love songs ever written, and the D’Angelo feature is simply musical perfection.
By Everything Is Everything and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the album’s title track, it’s clear Lauryn has made up her mind to define her own destiny. Everything Is Everything is a culmination of all the complicated feelings that she’s spent the record unpacking, while The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a defiant note to self about agency, personhood and what it means to truly know who you are. “And deep in my heart, the answer, it was in me/ And I made up my mind to define my own destiny,” she sings. There’s something beautifully radical about insisting on your own fate even when the world is doing everything it can to tell you that it’s out of your hands.
Okay, I lied before about Nothing Even Matters. There’s no better love song than Can't Take My Eyes Off You, where Lauryn is celebrating the fact that she’s survived her struggles and is still even able to find room to love. Then, the entire project is capped off by Tell Him, another yearning song that bears all the hallmarks of Lauryn’s Christian faith. Her acknowledgment that she has faith, but without love she’s nothing, is a great reminder of the ways that love can be a truly spiritual experience.
For me though, one of the most powerful things about The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the way it’s framed. In a typical class, teachers talk, while students listen and occasionally answer questions to make sure they’re paying attention. Here, you hear far more from the students than you do from any authority figure. Scratch that, the kids in this class are the authority. Teachers usually hold the power to decide what knowledge to impart and what is important to know. But in this classroom, it’s not about what you’re supposed to know, it’s about what you do know and how that knowledge shapes the journey ahead and helps you process the world around you. In Lauryn Hill’s school of life, learning is communal, collective, adaptive, and reflective of the minds that education is supposed to shape.
Talk to me nice
Please tell me why 50 Cent decide to troll me?
I woke up last Tuesday morning to a bunch of dms and emails from angry 50 Cent supporters who had been directed to my page by none other than… him. Apparently, he’d taken issue with comments that Jay Connor, senior editor at the root and I had made about the fact that he has no business producing a documentary about Diddy because he’s a troll who isn’t doing this for the right reasons and doesn’t care about victims. (I talk more about this in last week’s newsletter)
Here’s the post he post and deleted and while it was pretty upsetting to have men screaming at me all day, our conversation obviously struck a nerve and I look forward to doing more work that makes bad men uncomfortable.
Watch, listen, read
It’s been awhile since I had a chance to watch a good limited series and Under the Bridge, a based-on-a-true-story show about the murder of Reena Virk, a teenager from Victoria, B.C. has truly kept me awake at night all week.
Ayra Starr’s sophomore album The Year I Turned 21 dropped last week and, WOW. I LOVE this album from top to bottom and it’s already gone double platinum in club tayo. Same with Tems’ Born in the Wild. Bad bitches are up this summer and I couldn’t be more excited.
Also thoroughly enjoyed this week’s newsletter by
about why baby showers are a drag and there’s no way to really prepare for motherhood.That’s it for this week, I’d love to hear what music or albums from the past that you’re still listening to, and any new shows I should be watching as summer arrives!
Thanks Tayo for the shout!