The Absolute Power of Lauryn Hill

Forgive us, Father, for we men know not what we do when Lauryn Hill jumps on the scene. Yes, Lord, she is that fine. I can swear that it's the same in person as it is on video: Lauryn Hill gives great face. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes are beyond seductive. Her lips, when slightly pursed, seem capable of mouthing anything you are capable of imagining. And her muscular legs—like those of an Alvin Ailey dancer—belie the limits of her petite frame. She is the queen of her hill.

"I could wear a full scuba suit, snorkel and a hat and the guys would still be like, 'Yo, she's fly,'" Lauryn told a British publication a while back, and, yeah, it's real like that. But what makes Lauryn Hill even more incredible is that she is also a 23-year-old musical genius.

Her multiplatinum solo effort, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, is easily one of the finest albums of the Nineties. A mixture of hip-hop, R&B, classic soul and gospel, Miseducation is certain to garner plenty of Grammys this season. With a title that evokes Carter Woodson's landmark book The Miseducation of the Negro, the record, as Hill likes to say, doesn't have "a materialistic approach to music." Which means Hill didn't settle for predictable hip-hop and R&B clichés: the sampling of an entire song, the overdone sappy love ballads, the obligatory use of tried-and-true producers. In fact, the subject matters of her songs—the disappearance of love, the lack of community and the states of racism and sexism—make her album stand out. When I spoke with Hill a few months ago she told me, "I'm not embarrassed to expose myself in the sense that I'm human. I make mistakes and bad judgments and I've had my heart broken. I'm also not embarrassed to tell someone how happy I was when I had my first child or how conflicted I was. Or how much I love God. I don't feel like I have to put up a front to the people who want to hear my music. I don't want to write about things that separate me from the audience."

My time with her was more proof that her allure is rooted in reality. Lauryn began her day at the house she bought her parents in northern New Jersey. (Her dad is a computer consultant, her mom a teacher.) She was accompanied by Rohan Marley—father of her two children, son of Bob Marley and former star linebacker for the University of Miami. Their charisma was apparent at once. Their humility and ease was remarkably refreshing. In an era loaded with sex, hustle and self-aggrandizement, Lauryn Hill is a dream girl next door. She's the ponytailed neighbor you always knew was going to go somewhere.

For Miseducation Lauryn spliced together life experiences. She grew up in a suburb of Newark, New Jersey. In an early display of talent, she appeared as a child singer at the Apollo Theater. As a teenager, she acted opposite Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2. She was a year into college at Columbia (concluded on page 142)Lauryn Hill(continued from page 115) University when she became the anchor of the Fugees. Amid it all she made time to found and chair the Refugee Project, an outreach organization for inner-city youth in New Jersey. Not since such singers as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder were at their peaks have we heard a record so full of love, pain, healing, raw truth and beautiful music as is Miseducation. In defining a generation and a gender, it also manages to overstep generations, gender and group politics.

Part of Hill's success has to do with the new ascension of black music in the late Nineties. Scan the Billboard charts on any given week and peep the number of hip-hop and R&B acts jacking spots once held by rock acts. The Fugees' sophomore album, The Score, has sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide since its release in February 1996. It single-handedly stretched the boundaries of hip-hop beyond the ghetto walls. Hill credits her parents for giving her confidence. She acknowledges that she has built on themes established by her musical forebears. From Aretha Franklin (who, she says, "smells just like church—like paper fans with wooden sticks") has come a hard-earned respect. Like Janis Joplin, Hill reaches for spiritual immersion in all of her songs. And like Madonna, Hill knows that beauty and sexuality can be used to your advantage, particularly if you are the one in charge of it. Hill balances her art with a sense of self that defies the pressures of society.

Consider a span of activity at the end of last year. Two weeks after the birth of her second child, she appeared lithe and sexy on Saturday Night Live. She and her new band ripped through Doo Wop (That Thing). Two days later she was in Los Angeles performing on the Billboard Music Awards. Then it was back to New York for a photo shoot that extended until two in the morning. However, the best news was her announcement that she'll be touring with Outkast in March. Now we'll all get to see her up close.

Miseducation wins, ultimately, because it is Lauryn's brainchild. She was the executive producer and she wrote all the songs. That's a rarity for women in the music business. "But," Hill told me last fall, "for some reason, women aren't taken seriously as thinkers and creators and arrangers and producers. The industry thinks there always has to be some man somewhere puppeteering the whole situation. It doesn't make you feel good as an artist when you are having conversations about your music and people don't take it seriously." Lauryn Hill has proved that a woman, a young woman, can go into a boys' club and play the game better than most of the boys. And look incredibly sexy doing it.