Grammy-award winning artist Lauryn Hill, has created some of the best classic singles that still shake rooms til this day. It’s been 23 years since she’s released her last album ‘Miseducation’, and it’s just now recently that she reveals why.
In a Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums Podcasts she explains, “The wild thing is no one from my label has ever called me and asked how can we help you make another album, EVER…EVER. Did I say ever? Ever!” Hill continues “With The Miseducation, there was no precedent. I was, for the most part, free to explore, experiment, and express. After The Miseducation, there were scores of tentacled obstructionists, politics, repressing agendas, unrealistic expectations, and saboteurs EVERYWHERE. People had included me in their own narratives of their successes as it pertained to my album, and if this contradicted my experience, I was considered an enemy.”
The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill was released in August 1998 and generated numbers! The album opened at No. 1 and sold at an astounding 422,624 units in its first week, which had never before been done by a solo female artist. This led to the following year, Hill taking home 10 GRAMMY nominations and five wins including the coveted Album of the Year and Best R&B Album.
Hill reflects on and assures that she’s still touring and making music, but how her later work shows just how ahead she was, “I wrote an album about systemic racism and how it represses and stunts growth and harms (all of my albums have probably addressed systemic racism to some degree), before this was something this generation openly talked about,” she said. “I was called crazy. Now…over a decade later, we hear this as part of the mainstream chorus. Ok, so chalk some of it up to leadership and how that works — I was clearly ahead, but you also have to acknowledge the blatant denial that went down with that.”
The Miseducation will never go without notice and Hill is still very appreciative of that till this day, “I also think the album stood apart from the types and cliches that were supposed to be acceptable at that time,” she says., “I challenged the norm and introduced a new standard. I believe The Miseducation did that and I believe I still do this — defy convention when the convention is questionable.”
