Nov 1, 2018
The Album: Lauryn Hill: The
Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
On August 25, 1998, Lauryn Hill, the breakout rapping/singing star
from The Fugees released her first (and only) solo
album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. On
August 25, 2018, exactly 20 years later, the Heat Rocks crew
invited author Joan Morgan to join us to talk about that album and
her new book about that album, She
Begat This. Call it a happy coincidence, call it
kismet but either way, call it an amazing conversation.
It's difficult to overstate the singular importance of The
Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. This was a generation before
artists like Drake made singing + rapping into a popular form;
Lauryn was wading into unknown waters when she put this together.
As we discuss, her own label had to be pushed to even put the album
out but once they did, it became an instant smash: multi-platinum
sales, the first "Best Album" Grammy award for a hip-hop album, and
it elevated, for better or for worse, Lauryn - still in her early
20s - to becoming one of hip-hop and R&B's most important
figures. Of course, in the years since, controversy has dogged her,
especially regarding her live
shows and two decades later, her legacy is a complicated
one, as we get into. Joan Morgan would have been an ideal
guest even if she hadn't written a book about the album; her
bonafides as one of the great cultural critics to emerge in the
1990s were already well-established, least of all in her 1999
collection of essays, When
Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. Joan's based in New
York, finishing up a PhD at NYU, but she happened to be in town on
that fateful 20th anniversary day to come chat with us.
More on Joan Morgan
More on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Show Tracklisting (all songs from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill unless indicated otherwise):
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