it was summer 2002. i was still slowly adjusting to dc area living – overcoming wanting to move back to north carolina after the 9/11 attacks, aaliyah’s death the year before on my birthday and finally deciding to loc my hair. i joined my cousins and his crew at the smoking grooves tour at the then, nissan pavilion. the line up included outkast, the roots and miss lauryn hill. lauryn had just released mtv unplugged 2.0. all the songs she sang were from that album. most of the crowd hated it. i remember my cousin screaming, “play doo wop. we don’t wanna hear this depressing shit.” i enjoyed it. loved it actually. soon after i bought the album and made two extra copies – one for the car and one for my office. with unplugged, lauryn did something too advanced for her treasures and time…she stopped. showed us her worry, her wounds and her way forward. she showed us, us. and we didn’t want to hear it.
yesterday, i was listening to one of my favorite podcast still processing https://www.nytimes.com/podcasts/still-processing and the topic was ‘we heard lauryn hill, but did we listen?‘ their conversation (jenna wortham and wesley morris) focused on the 20th anniversary of the release of the classic the miseducation of lauryn hill and everything leading up to, during and after the success of the album. they reminded me that l. boogie was just 23 when the album dropped on august 25, 1998 (very good date…very good date). the pressure to equal or surmount that grammy winning album of the year had to be nagging. and lauryn let us know that in unplugged. but there was so much more she talked about. i gravitated to the album for it’s raw poetry. i remember being hidden in my office, reviewing files with the album on repeat…almost everyday. my coworkers, would stop by, hear it and ask, “are you okay?” yep, i was fine. looking back, i think i liked it so much because here i was a black man, 25, with a masters degree, a good start to my career and i was just beginning to ask, in hopes to discover, who i was. i did, what i hope any good song, or book or friend does, i related. i connected with her screams to get out of boxes, telling us to press restart and rebel! what lauyrn did on her sophomore gem, was dismantle her own fairy tale and those of others to give us a glimpse into her new finding truth. but ya’ll, with her boyish baseball cap and amateur guitar skills, weren’t listening.
but things appear different when you look in the rear view mirror. we see raw and real more, maybe too much, in 2018. every time i watch insecure and see issa rapping in her mirror, i think of and thank lauryn. it’s there issa can be gritty, completely open and say things she may or may not act on. every instagram post eluding to our trials and triumphs to figure it out. just like lauryn and her bravery to belt out heart-mind, questioning-discovering songs at that pavilion in virginia that scorching summer day. a 2003 rolling stone article said this of hill’s unplugged and the 470,000 units it sold at the time, “a lesser artist, it would’ve never been released. a lesser artist would’ve been shot and thrown out the window. i’m sure columbia (record label) lost money on it.” fourteen years later, the same magazine said this, “it’s an artist battling a shredded throat, the crushing weight of industry expectations and her own fragility. putting this all out there for the public to see was an amazing act of courage and the most unique, unpolished unplugged ever to see the light of day.” there’s much to say and being said about miss hill. but we can thank her for unplugging her fairy tales. i think we can and should listen now. miss hill, thank you for daring.
a boy who loves,
j. darius greene