Lauryn Hill

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
    The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
    The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

    100 Best Albums Lauryn Hill’s debut—and only—solo studio album was a seismic event in 1998: a stunningly raw, profound look into the spiritual landscape not just of one of the era’s biggest stars, but of the era itself. Decades later, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill still counts as a life-changer, with the preternaturally talented Hill rapping with the confident ferocity of a woman in total creative control and singing with the gospel-hued richness of the soul canon. It was an expression of interior depth during a time in which Black women were often portrayed as one-dimensional archetypes, and Hill delivered her magnum opus of life’s triumphs and setbacks with such singular heart, sincerity and specificity that it transcended from an album into a universal statement of being. Her fortitude was so powerful that new generations continue to discover an album whose specific mastery of musicality, lyricism and frankness has not been replicated. Miseducation was forged in emotional fire. After seven years as the voice of the politically cogent, critically acclaimed New Jersey hip-hop trio Fugees—and in the aftermath of a protracted, tumultuous relationship with her bandmate Wyclef Jean—Hill set out to document a period of major life transitions, including the slow erosion of the group she’d been with since high school. With the trauma came new beginnings: Hill was also inspired by the physical and mental transitions of pregnancy and the birth of Zion, her first child with Rohan Marley, using her attendant spirituality as a guiding light. This potent emotional crossroads led to what remains one of the rawest albums ever created, a lasting artistic beacon for musicians across genre, and a moment in which the whole world recognised Hill’s talents. Miseducation’s opening track, in which a teacher announces a classroom roll call only for Lauryn Hill to be absent, speaks to its thesis: that its lessons were of the sort that can only be learned through lived experience. As she weaved through painful eviscerations of an ex, which even at the time were understood to be directed at Jean, she redefined the way gritty, sharp rapping and lavish R&B harmonies could fuse together in an era of nearly catholic separation between the two genres. (Even three years after Method Man and Mary J. Blige’s “All I Need” remix, hardcore rap was largely still teeming with misogyny, and R&B was seen as a softer, more feminine pursuit.) Miseducation centred a young woman's point of view, in all her rebellions and vulnerabilities, amid terrain dominated on the hip-hop charts by a certain vision of hyper-masculinity. But it also served as an entry point for a mainstream still inclined to denigrate hip-hop’s musicality. The album was recorded, in part, at Hope Road in Jamaica, in Bob Marley’s home—a legacy reflected in Hill’s idea for the album’s cover art, which echoes The Wailers’ Rastaman Vibration cover. Yet the DNA of these songs, and a key to their endurance, draws on a classic Motown/Stax sound that showcases Hill’s immaculate vocal approach; the layered “Doo Wop (That Thing)” alone won her two of the five Grammys she took home in 1999, a validation of the freshness of her sound, as well as the way her music spoke to the emergent feminism of the Hip-Hop Generation. The vulnerability in Miseducation’s singles is often discussed, but Hill’s concerns, and powers, were multi-valent. Once a history major at Columbia University, Hill explored her upbringing in Newark, New Jersey, with a sharp, subtle sociopolitical eye (“Every Ghetto, Every City”, featuring clavinet from Loris Holland, minister of music at the storied Brooklyn Pilgrim Church) and philosophised on the nature of growing up in a disenfranchised world (“Everything Is Everything”, whose classic ’70s soul sound comes courtesy of a backing band including a then-unknown pianist named John Legend). Miseducation is also proof that pure intention and unflinching emotional truth can be a path to deliverance unto itself. As Hill raps on the politically charged koan “Everything Is Everything”: “My practice extending across the atlas/I begat this.” She was, and remains, a once-in-a-generation talent whose inspiration, and innovation, can be heard through the decades. Artists exhaust long discographies hoping for a cohesive piece of work resonant enough to reshape culture and inscribe its creator into the pantheon; Lauryn Hill did it in one.

Albums

Music Videos

Artist Playlists

Singles & EPs

Live Albums

Appears On

More To Hear

About Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill is rap’s greatest “what if” story. Born in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1975, Hill befriended fellow musicians Prakazrel “Pras” Michel and Wyclef Jean, and in 1990 they formed a group called Tranzlator Crew—soon to be known as the Fugees. Though she was the act’s de facto singer, Hill found inspiration in the cultural activism of Ice Cube and Eazy E, and her gifts as both a rapper and a world-class singer were on abundant display in the band’s 1996 version of Roberta Flack's “Killing Me Softly”. The Grammy Award-winning single anchored the Fugees’ chart-topping second album, The Score, and while it was the group’s last record together, it was merely the beginning of Hill’s story. In 1998, she released her debut solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which amply proved that female MCs shouldn’t be treated as second-class citizens in the rap industry’s hierarchy. Her flow was relentless yet inviting, a mix of swagger and sway. Hill changed the game not just for women in rap but for rap in general: Miseducation was the first rap album to ever win Album of the Year at the Grammys. But after that monumental achievement, Hill effectively turned into the J.D. Salinger of hip-hop, retreating into a life of seclusion from which she has rarely returned. Her divisive MTV Unplugged set from 2002 saw Hill eschew hip-hop almost entirely, abandoning her deeply powerful boom-bap beats in favour of acoustic folk renditions of her songs. Yet her legacy lives on in those who have followed: There would be no Cardi B, no Nicki Minaj without Lauryn Hill, and she’s been sampled by hip-hop royalty like Drake, Meek Mill and J. Cole. Regardless of how often or what she performs, Hill's pulse will always be heard within hip-hop.

HOMETOWN
East Orange, NJ, United States
BORN
26 May 1975
GENRE
R&B/Soul

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada