The twentieth anniversary of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is quite an occasion for a number of important cultural reasons. For me, it’s mostly a reminder of just how old I am, as 1998 still feels like a decade ago at most. I now regularly ultrasound pregnant patients who were born after Tupac died, and each time I sprout a new gray hair. But back to 1998, I was fifteen years old and offered up Ms. Hill’s debut album as a gift idea for my grandma, who wanted to buy me a present for some random reason. She was (and is) generally clueless about such things as popular music, so she walked into the store and asked one of the employees to help her find the album. They searched the entire store for a good fifteen minutes before the poor guy finally discovered it on a separate display in a corner of the store. Because of this, my grandma thought this was some unknown artist whose rise I had predicted. When Lauryn Hill took home all those damn Grammy’s the next year, my grandma was convinced that I was some kind of musical clairvoyant who could pluck future talent out of thin air. Which would be great if it were true, as A&R of Def Jam sounds infinitely sexier than OB/GYN radiologist. But I digress.
I devoured that album from the moment I got it. My friends and I were just learning to drive at the time, and we listened to it in the car on the way to study sessions. I played it in my headphones while I set the table for dinner. I bumped it in the bathroom while I took showers, and I sat with the liner notes, reading the lyrics until I knew them all by heart. I discussed its awesomeness and debated over the best songs with my best bus friend as we delved into Ms. Hill’s controversial interviews and political stances. I had acquired a decent music collection by this point and had plenty of favorites, but this was one of the first albums I truly engaged with to such an extent, because it virtually demanded such attention. From the beats to the lyrics to the level of discourse, this was a piece of art to be reckoned with.
It may have been the first album that I interacted with analytically, but it was far from the last. In what now seems like a former life, I fancied myself a hip hop scholar. That sounds loftier than it really was, but I did get pretty far in my education on the back of my love for hip hop. After an introductory linguistics class my second quarter of undergrad introduced me to the existence of people who, for a living, researched things like street poets and the language of political resistance, I was sold on this field and figured I might as well focus my studies on something as vital as that. I remember walking my professor back to her office after that class, asking her, “So there are really people who make money studying that stuff?” When she straight-faced answered yes, and quite good money, I was sold, and switched my major forthwith.
I was lucky enough to have a number of supportive professors, and one in particular who understood the lane I was searching for and introduced me to some scholarship that had me shook. During one independent study, she handed me an as-yet-unpublished manuscript by a PhD candidate named H. Samy Alim. It was an erudite analysis of Pharoahe Monch’s Internal Affairs, and it opened up new worlds in my mind. I had always believed that there was a level of skill and sophistication to hip hop that most outsiders to the culture didn’t get. I was constantly searching for a way to explain this to the critics who derided it, but Alim gave me the language to finally do this. He got into multisyllabic rhyme patterns and rhythmic cadences and broke it all down until you had to hold your hands up and surrender to the mastery of words on display. I had found my niche.
I was lucky enough to link up with an organization called JUiCE – Justice by Uniting in Creative Energy – which was an after school program that offered training in the five elements of hip hop – DJing, MCing, BBoying (breakdancing), graffiti, and knowledge (“overstanding” in hip hop parlance). I ended up shadowing the MCs as they recorded an album together, and I stumbled through the research process well enough to write an undergrad honors thesis, and later a master’s thesis, on “language and identity in underground hip hop.” These MCs, who were all in their late teens and early twenties, were still learning the ropes of recording and thus not overly experienced with the process, but they possessed an incredible wealth of knowledge of the history of the music and culture that they drew on continually. It was through them that I learned that hip hop was like the Simpsons, in that the more you knew, the better it got. If you had only a cursory knowledge of the genre, most of it would seem like gibberish to you. It was only when you delved deeper that you realized just how complex the wordplay and references within it all were. Even the youngest of these kids had so much knowledge at their disposal, and the outside world had no idea.
What I was looking for in my research was a way to pick apart the intricacies of this knowledge and its artistic performance, as well as to convey the extent of this knowledge for all to see. Granted, hip hop does not need validation from anyone, least of all a bunch of stuffy white armchair scholars, but I felt it deserved the kind of attention given to other forms of cultural output. This was essentially a selfish pursuit on my part, as I got to spend countless hours on a subject I loved and earn a degree to boot while studying the work of artists less fortunate than me. Why did I deserve to gain cultural, and eventually actual, capital from hip hop when so many of its practitioners did not? The short answer was that I didn’t. The longer answer involved the intersection of race and class that conspired to give me, and not others, the opportunity to perform such an intellectual exercise in the first place.
This sense of the inherent unfairness of this setup was only one of many reasons I walked away from these studies which clearly still excite me. The atmosphere of the university, and the idea of spending my life in one, just didn’t appeal to me after my limited time there. I did my graduate studies at UCLA in a department filled with some amazing scholars and mentors, and they were overall a supportive and down-to-earth bunch that was remarkably unpretentious. Still, the underlying sense of competitiveness among (some) fellow students was palpable and not an environment I was willing to spend excessive amounts of time in. More than any of this, I unexpectedly had my first child, and my own experience of needing and not having my mom around as much as I wanted, as a kid battling mental health issues, drove home how determined I was to be more available for my own offspring. I don’t begrudge my mom her career and would never want her to have gone in any other direction, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss her terribly as a kid when she worked 36 hour shifts and I didn’t see her for days at a time. That shit sticks with you, as does the psychic toll of a colicky baby in a city far from your family. When it came down to it, I still needed my mom, and the rest of my immediate family, and I bailed on the PhD program, in a completely cowardly fashion, after completing my Master’s, when my daughter was eight months old.
Ten years and three kids later, I have no regrets about walking away from my studies, even if I do occasionally miss the research and discussions I had available to me during my time in that world. It was fun, but in the end it wasn’t for me, at least not long term, and if given the choice between focusing on the research and focusing on my family, I would choose my family every time. Is it fair that this is a choice I had to make at all? Probably not. But it wasn’t particularly fair that I got to achieve academically through the art of others either. Lauryn Hill wrestled with a similar dilemma at length on the song “To Zion” off her iconic album, when she discussed her decision to have her son while in the midst of a successful career as an artist. Unlike me, she was able to pull it all off and make a classic album to boot. And that is why she has earned the right to be “Ms. Hill” for as long as she damn well pleases. If I had stuck it out, I would have been a “doctor.” I think she is entitled to her chosen honorific for now and always. Seasons change, mad things rearrange, but the achievement stays the same. Put some respeck on her name.
Additional notes:
- Joan Morgan, another scholar who was formative in my own thinking, has a new book called She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill that I will be reading as soon as Amazon Prime breaks into my house to deliver it. If you have any interest in the impact of the album and the cultural moment it helped create, you should definitely check it out. Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost helped establish the idea of hip hop feminism and is always worth a read as well.
- The Dissect podcast is doing a mini-series on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to commemorate the album’s twentieth anniversary. I plan on writing more on Dissect in the future, but for now suffice it to say that it is an exceptionally well researched podcast that will make you appreciate amazing music more than you already did. In listening to its first two seasons, I came away even more in awe of Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West than I had been before, which I would have thought impossible. I can’t give it any higher praise than that.
