Lauryn Hill - Fugees - Hip-hop between the sacred and the profane

A life marked by opposites: alone and with the Fugees, famous yet unhappy, Lauryn Hill has carefully and intelligently sought to give hip-hop a cultured dimension, reclaiming a specific female identity for it and a bond with the most traditional forms of black music. All in the name of Bob Marley and Aretha Franklin.

Beautiful and radiant, Lauryn Hill actually conceals a complex, tormented personality. And there's a reason for that. She's a real outsider in the world of hip-hop. At the time of her official debut in 1994 with the Fugees, hip-hop was an "all black" and male-dominated world, with only a few women who were merely pretty, from Queen Latifah to Salt-N-Pepa, trying to be sexy by acting tomboyish. Everyone, in any case, claimed working-class origins and, as sources of inspiration, cited Charles Bronson more than musicians. They celebrated a world along the lines of "the strongest gets ahead". And as for hip-hop as a musical expression, what they championed was the sampling technique and, rather than actually singing a song — which was seen as something for white artists — the so-called spoken word.

So when the Fugees — cousins Prakazrel "Pras" Michel and Wyclef Jean, together with eighteen-year-old Lauryn Hill, who had known each other since middle school — released the album Blunted On Reality, it went almost completely unnoticed. Musically, the sound recreated on the album is traditional. Plenty of rap mixed with typical hip hop built on tasteful samples from the likes of Kool & The Gang or Earth, Wind & Fire, drawing for now more on the spirit than the actual music of his Majesty Bob Marley. What also makes the record interesting are its nods to Afro sounds and reggae touches here and there. Musically, however, it remains a fairly ordinary hip hop album, not far removed from others of the genre at the time. Perhaps that's also why its reception was lukewarm.

But there's more to it. While other hip-hop artists sang about the hard life in the streets of America's cities, Fugees broadened the discourse, criticizing certain aspects of American politics with references to the plight of Haitian refugees as well. Lauryn Hill is in fact of Haitian origin. But while others practiced a small-scale, local kind of politics, Fugees went much further. While artists like Public Enemy went on the attack, Fugees had a less preachy, less theatrical attitude.

They simply wanted to make a point and bear witness, at times even with a touch of irony. Once it became clear that Pras was just a musician, that the roles of mentor and vocalist were split between Wyclef and Lauryn Hill, who wrote and signed almost all the songs, and that the three of them had no working-class background, it's easy to see why the misogynistic world of hip-hop reacted to this work with little interest.

Lauryn's figure and story, however, did not go unnoticed. Pretty as a pin-up, kind and well-mannered unlike hip-hop's "bad girls," she had been born into a typical American working-class family. Her father was a computer programmer, while her mother taught English at a high school. Lauryn claimed Bob Marley and Aretha Franklin as her spiritual mentors. Among other things, she already showed remarkable command and astonishing skill in shifting her voice between rap and reggae. In 1996, with The Score, everything changed for everyone. While the themes on Blunted On Reality could sometimes be handled with mere cleverness, here the messages became more direct and incisive. Rather than making a political statement, Fugees looked inward, proudly reclaiming their African-American roots. Musically, too, they refined their sound. Less noisy than the debut but more elegant, the album once again evoked the spirit of Marley (also through the cover of "No Woman No Cry"). But once again, it was Lauryn Hill's voice that stood out. Far more prominent than on Blunted On Reality, it proved able to move effortlessly between different registers and styles, even edging toward the classic soul she loved so much, as in the cover of Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly." And it was precisely her rendition that drove the album up the charts (17 million copies sold) and to Grammy success (three awards).

Both for the way its themes were handled with great sensitivity rather than excessive emphasis, and for the crafted, classy quality of the arrangements, the album's great achievement was proving that hip-hop could break away from the tiresome clichés of DIY music and the "vigilante of the night" artist persona, that it could be carried from the streets into different settings, even among white audiences. That last point is an accusation Fugees have often found themselves facing. Once again, though, the minds behind the album were only Wyclef and Lauryn.

A few years ago, Lauryn told Rolling Stone magazine that even though the two of them had been lovers for a time and wrote songs together, they only ever talked about work. A sign that the two had a different perception of reality. A different sensibility. Above all, they differed in how they processed the unexpected success of The Score. In the same interview, in fact, Lauryn said: "Because of the album's incredible success, there was a moment when I decided I shouldn't pray anymore. And the reason for that choice was that things had come into my life that I believed were absolutely not good. But at the same time, I had decided that I needed those things," referring to her relationship with Wyclef. In short, while he, as a solo artist, seemed perfectly at ease wearing the role of hip-hop star, for her, far more private, success became corrosive.

Right after The Score, then, a kind of split began between the world of the music business and the fragile woman she really was. And just as Lauryn Hill had managed, in part, to come to terms with all of this thanks to her marriage to Rohan Marley (Bob's son, with whom she had two children), her inner life was upended by the hysterical reactions that followed the release of her first solo album, The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, in 1998. Listening to it even just once, you get the impression that hip-hop is like a river into which countless different styles flow as tributaries. As with The Score, the record didn't invent anything new, but it was the perfection and class of how those styles were put together that made it unique and special. Freed from her bandmates, Lauryn revealed she possessed the integrity and sensitivity of a singer-songwriter in the mold of Joni Mitchell. Beyond the usual Fugees themes, she asserted not only racial pride but also a proud female identity, with echoes of Chaka Khan's unrestrained sensuality. And, of course, Bob Marley's revolutionary spirit kept running through it all.

Speaking about the elements present on the album, Lauryn Hill said: "In the world there isn't just a spiritual war going on," referring to racism in general, "there's also a battle for a return to traditional forms of black music expression, though music still has a long way to go on that front." Hers was, at the very least, an attempt. Hip-hop became the connective tissue into which reggae, soul, disco — in the cover of "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" — and gospel were woven. And while her gift for vocal adaptation showed up once again, what impressed most was the involvement, fragile and passionate at the same time, the way her performances could convey a sense of lyricism, almost of sacredness, as in the gorgeous title track.

For Lauryn Hill, singing is almost an act of faith. As a result, American critics — tired of covering hip-hop only in connection with violence after the murders of Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur — spoke not just of a masterpiece but of a "miracle." The public responded in kind. The album sold half a million copies in its first week: an absolute record for a female hip-hop artist.

Now thrust by the media onto every front page, forced to travel the world collecting platinum discs (13 million copies sold) and awards, Lauryn Hill also took home the five major Grammys in 1999, matching the pink-tinted treble achieved thirty years earlier by Carole King with "Tapestry": Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Record of the Year. But Lauryn experienced all of it as a painful storm.

In fact, four years passed before she decided to show herself again. She did so with a live performance for MTV, later released as a double unplugged album, in which everything The Miseducation had represented was almost stripped away in favor of a bare-bones approach, not just musically (voice and guitar) but thematically too. Still carrying Bob Marley in her heart, the new songs (alongside two covers) no longer spoke of female and racial pride, but only offered glimpses into her personal struggles of recent years. And in the exchanges captured with the audience came the clarification that Lauryn Hill is now a new woman. But still a talented artist, still a spine-chilling performer, and still a fragile girl.

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