One of the most talented female hip-hop performers of her time with The Fugees, a multiple Grammy-Award winner, and the author of the self-titled critic-lauded album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”, Lauryn Hill faces public scrutiny nowadays.
The singer, composer, and actress, whose Grammy-Award and quintuple-platinum record celebrates a quarter of a century after its release, is being questioned after her decision to reunite with her former band, The Fugees and Pras Michel, one final time before Michel is sentenced for up to twenty years in a $100 million dollar extortion scam involving Chinese nationals, Academy Award-winner Leonardo DiCaprio and former US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Still, that’s only the tip of the iceberg surrounding the controversies for this talented woman, whose celebration of the 25th anniversary of her album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” was accompanied by a seventeen-date tour with her band, the Fugees. Let’s dig in and find out what makes Lauryn Hill hit the headlines nowadays.
The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill: A Controversial Album
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was released on August 25, 1998, as Hill’s first solo album, and it is the only one she’s released to date. It is an iconic piece of R&B and hip hop that went quintuple platinum, won many Grammy Awards, and pushed the music industry to redefine the role of women in those genres as well as becoming a cultural influence for many performers nowadays.
Recorded in Tuff Gong Studios in Jamaica, the same place where reggae superstar Bob Marley lived and recorded, as well as Miami and New York, Lauryn Hill created a masterpiece of an album, impregnating her personality, her life experiences, and her style into the songs.
And while Columbia Records didn’t like some of the material, and felt utterly unimpressed by it, they had to keep their mouth shut because the record became a gold mine. And that’s the first controversy surrounding Lauryn Hill in this piece.
As a black artist, with Miseducation, Lauryn Hill rose amongst many popular artists in the 1990s, like Erykah Badu, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, and Missy Elliot. An A-lister like Madonna or Janet Jackson also released albums like Ray of Light and The Velvet Rope.
The problem with racial intolerance was no stranger to Hill, who was accused of saying that she would rather have her kids starve than have white people buy her albums and listen to her music. She denied that; no one knows where that came from, and she couldn’t care less about the color of the skin of those who buy her albums or play her tunes. That’s just how she is.
The Fugees Reunion
As Lauryn Hill celebrates the 25th anniversary of her debut solo album, she reunited with the Fugees on tour, so fans will be hearing her not only perform “Doo Wop” but also “Killing Me Softly” and “Ready Or Not”.
Here’s the controversy, the latest one: Pras Michel is tangled up in criminal conspiracy charges for illegally donating money to the 2012 Barack Obama presidential campaign and for courting the Donald Trump Administration to stop investigating the 1MDB scandal in which Malaysian and Chinese nationals embezzled billions of dollars out of a sovereign wealth fund.
Pras, who will face his sentence soon, will tour with The Fugees and Lauryn Hill, sparking outrage as to why would these successful artists share the stage with a convicted felon. Regardless of what you may think of Pras, his actions, his involvement, and what he did, his trajectory with The Fugees is undeniable.
And while Pras’s detractors might consider that he’s doing that tour with Lauryn Hill and The Fugees as some sort of whitewashing of his reputation so he can get some leniency by the time he faces the judge during sentencing, he’s free to do it. Pras, a long-time collaborator of Hill, now fifty years old, could face two decades in jail if he gets maximum time sentencing.
When touring with Hill and the Fugees, Pras will prove that he’s in good behavior, that he isn’t a flight risk, and that his intentions to reform are honorable.
