In Defense Of Ms. Hill

It’s finally time to stop letting folks from outside of our community tell us how to feel about Lauryn Hill
Yasiin Bey and I make beautiful music together. We are yin and yang, our styles complement each other very nicely. While it’s always a treat for us to perform together as Black Star, the style and pace of our solo performances are different. Yasiin and I have very different philosophies when it comes to stage performing. While I like to do songs back-to-back at a non-stop pace, make sure I do my hits and have my DJ hype up the crowd and do my ad libs, Yasiin prefers to take his time and does not like too much talking from his DJ.
Yasiin once explained to me that when people pay to see him, they are paying to see what he feels like expressing. So it doesn’t matter whether he does his “hits” or not. That was a great lesson for me.
“My songs are personal music, they’re not communal. I wouldn’t want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I’m not playing campfire meetings. I don’t remember anyone singing along with Elvis, Carl Perkins or Little Richard.” ~Bob Dylan
Many fans will disagree with Yasiin’s stance here. They are missing the point. The artist is a human being, not a product. Sure, the artist makes products that are for sale, but the artist is not forever in your debt because you may have purchased a product from them at some point.
When you buy an album from me, I receive money and you get music. It’s a fair and even exchange that begins and ends once I receive my money and you receive your product. If I don’t value myself as an artist — especially working in a market that has decided that recorded music is not worth spending money on — then who will?
Artists make art for themselves. Art is an honest expression. Artists who pander to their fans by trying to make music “for” their fans make empty, transparent art. The true fan does not want you to make music for them, they want you to make music for you, because that’s the whole reason they fell in love with you in the first place.
I wrote my first rap when I was 12 years old. I had no fans. I didn’t write it for the fans, I wrote it because I had something I desperately needed to express. When Black Star came out, Yasiin and I did not have a huge fan base. We did that album for us. It is that honest personal, expression that fans crave.
The great thing about making art for yourself is that if you do it well, millions of people will relate to it and embrace it. They will support you and make it possible for you to have a career and feed your family, all with your art. These are your fans, and their passion, dedication and contribution to your life are to be cherished and respected.
However fans are not your boss, and listening to them when it comes to creative decisions is a slippery slope. I am not obligated to make the same album over and over again just because fans demand it. I am allowed to try new things, succeed at them or fail at them. I am allowed to not make music anymore ever, if that’s what I choose to do. I am allowed to give a shitty show or not even show up if I feel like it. Hopefully that will never happen, but if it does, it will never take away from the quality of the work I’ve already put out into the world.
Years ago I was in the audience at the BET Awards waiting to see Lauryn Hill reunite with the Fugees. Rumor had it that Lauryn was trying to perform a poem instead of her hits and the BET brass wouldn’t allow it. If this was true, it meant that BET loved what Lauryn Hill had given us in the past—enough to use her name and image to draw in viewers, without paying her—but had no respect for what she wanted to express on this day. This moment was the inspiration for my song “Ms. Hill.”
When I was going to NYU, rooming with John Forte, we were hanging out with Ms. Hill, who was attending Columbia University. She used to come visit me at Nkiru Books in Brooklyn, the store I used to work at that Yasiin and I eventually purchased with our show money. We would hit up the African Street Festival at Boys and Girls High School and then go see professors like Dr. Frances Cress Welsing speak.
Before the Fugees blew up, this 19 year old, beautiful Black woman rocking dreadlocks was studying at an Ivy League college and already had two movies and a soap opera under her belt (King of the Hill, Sister Act 2, As The World Turns). This was an impressive young lady. When the Fugees did hit it big, they changed the musical landscape forever. The Score raised the bar for hip-hop and gave the people of Haiti something to be proud of. It sold 30 million copies and ended up on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums of All Time, due in no small part to Lauryn Hill’s incredible singing and rapping.
They sang about love, unity and they took pride in creating music that addressed the ills of their community in meaningful ways. The Fugees live show blended all of the elements of Black music and made for an experience that was unique in the world of hip-hop. They inspired millions.
Shortly after becoming one of the most famous women of color in the world, Lauryn Hill founded the Refugee Project, a charity organization that sought to change the attitudes of at-risk youth. She took inner city kids from New York City to Camp Hill, which she also founded, in the Catskill Mountains. She traveled to Kenya and Uganda to help build wells that would provide clean water, and she organized free concert in Harlem in 1997 designed to get people in that community to vote. All of this Lauryn Hill contributed to the world before giving us the classic that is The Miseducation.
If you’ve never listened to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, you haven’t lived. The album is a stellar piece of work. It is the pure, unfiltered, unflinching voice of a 24-year-old female MC/singer pushing back against the walls of the neat little box the world expected her to fit in. Tears came to my eyes when I first heard this album. “Ex Factor” is searing, “To Zion” is soaring, and “Lost Ones” remains a club banger.In 2005, Lauryn Hill told USA Today, “If I make music now, it will only be to provide information for my own children. If other people benefit from it, so be it.” If anyone deserves to be able to say something like this, it is the legendary Ms. Hill.