Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged Album Prophesied our Cultural Moment
“I know that a lot of content in the songs is very heavy you know but fantasy is what people want but reality is what they need, and I’ve just retired from the fantasy part.” That’s Lauryn Hill right before she sings the delicately soulful track “Adam Lives in Theory” on her MTV Unplugged album that she recorded in front of an intimate audience in New York City in 2001. The album was poorly received, to say the least, receiving brutal servings from critics who called it self-indulgent, cultishly religious, unnecessarily repetitious and lengthy, and at a worst, proof that Hill was completely unhinged. Hill’s MTV Unplugged session was a raw, unfinished verbal anatomy of Hill’s personal struggle since the release of her first solo album in 1998, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill which catapulted her to fame and became an instant, highly influential classic of the hip-hop genre.
MTV Unplugged №2.0 was antithetical to Miseducation in essentially every way: where Miseducation was met with overwhelming critical acclaim and has persevered throughout the past twenty years as an iconic and sonically gorgeous masterpiece of neo-soul, Hill’s MTV special was has been largely forgotten. Her first album positioned a then 23-year-old Hill as perhaps the most promising young voice in hip-hop as the 90s came to a close. For critics, MTV Unplugged seemed to be proof that Hill was an unstable diva who had lost her way. At the 1999 Grammy Awards, Miseducation was the first hip-hop project ever to receive the Best Album award and Hill walked away with a total of 5 awards including Best New Artist. Miseducation’s conception as a landmark work was part of the reason her second album became the object of serious critique coupled with Hill’s retreat from public life and music-making.
Hill performed MTV Unplugged №2.0 with damaged vocals chords and interspersed interludes alluding to her struggles with mental health, disillusionment with fame, and the pressure and deterioration of her public persona. The album was considered to be a commercial failure especially next to the unparalleled success of Miseducation; critics called it “stripped down” and “raw”, some gently and some not so gently lamenting the spiral and fall of R&B’s breakout prodigy. A music critic for The Guardian even wrote scathingly that, “In the background, you can hear executives from Hill’s record company wailing impotently and tearing clumps of their hair out.” The album’s commercial bust was quickly connected to whispers of Hill’s legal conflicts and mental health issues.
But upon revisitation of MTV Unplugged №2.0, I find a prophetic musical work that addresses with depth many of the political and social issues at the fore of 2018. The album isn’t glossy, souped-up, and produced to what the world perceived as perfection like Miseducation was and that is exactly why we have so much to learn from it. Throughout her live performance Hill stops and starts, explains that “some of these songs don’t even really have titles yet”, and even forgets her freshly written lyrics. Hill opened herself as a candid and vulnerable artist enduring struggle to an audience whose expectations and veneration of her were astronomical. The 22 track live performance was widely dismissed by a public that was expecting greatness and more Miseducation, where Hill delivered a barring of her soul and her struggle.
Not only is the music on MTV Unplugged healing and restorative purely based on sound; Hill also lays down salient life advice, addresses injustice, philosophizes concepts of freedom, liberty, and speaks about self-care, reconciling her own identity and the importance of truth, authenticity, and transparency through the lyrics of her songs and her emotional monologue interludes. Hill acknowledges the general opinion of the press saying, “I know the view is that I’m emotionally unstable, which is reality” with a laugh. She isn’t interested in the idea of performance at all (“I used to dress up for y’all but I don’t do that no more”) but rather catharsis and liberation.
The themes that Hill addresses prophesize our social media possessed society, its subsequent self-care movement and the call to destigmatize mental health issues. Stigma surrounding Hill’s performance was undeniably related to why the album was so negatively received. When the album was released critics pitied Hill as a fragile and unintelligible heap of emotion on stage but what Hill did with her Unplugged project was actually radical. She was fleshly evidence of the consequences of a mental health struggle in the face of immense societal pressure to deliver and produce.
Hill engages in the destigmatization of mental health battles when she says, “Every single one of these songs is about me first, me first”, “It took me a long time understand that what I am is what I am and I can’t be afraid to expose that to the public”. Hill speaks of reconciliation with her true, unfiltered, authentic identity. Hill’s chokes back of tears on the end of “Gotta find Peace of Mind”. The moment is indicative of what many people dealing with mental health issues go through privately. Activists and those who are socially conscious are under more burden than ever to fight publicly and constantly in the context of the Trump administration. A link can be drawn between Lauryn Hill’s lyrics and interludes, a prescient reaction to the age of vitriolic and oftentimes self-obsessed digital discourse in which people lose sight of what is real, tangible, and meaningful.
Hill also highlights themes of isolation, loneliness, and insecurity all of which are effects of the digital age. In her second number “Adam Lives in Theory” Hill explains that “When I’m speaking about Adam I’m really speaking about all of humanity” and then accuses god’s first man as “Masquerading like he’s got it figured out”. Hill’s allusions to religion are numerous, but here she diagnoses the issue of collective masquerading which fuels the dissonance between our online selves and our real selves. This dissonance is perhaps the defining critique of the social media era. On “Mr. Intentional” she says that “We give rise to ego, by being insecure” and then on 5th interlude she calls out the falsity of individual struggle, pointing to the fact that we are all going through the same shit: “I’ll tell you everybody’s in the same mess, we all are, I know we that. I’ll be the first to tell you, I’m a mess…. every day I’m trying to learn how I can be less of a mess..”
Hill’s self-exposure on the album can be used as a way to talk about mental health, the dangerous power of celebrity, standards of black success, and the consequences of young artistry. It’s eerie how applicable Hill’s album is to how the hip hop and internet culture of the 2000s and the 2010s have unfurled. The leading hip-hop figures of the past two decades including Kanye West, Drake, and Cardi B all have re-purposed, sampled, and continue to reference Hill’s work. Hill’s perpetual battle with fame, public exposure, and superstardom speak to the contemporary burdens of young ascendant artists and black artists generally. In her very first interlude after her first two songs, she explains the crushing pressure of being held in the public eye:
“…there’s a period of time in which I was just out, just gone from the public and I came to terms with the fact that I had created this public persona, this public illusion, and it held me hostage, like I couldn’t be a real person because you too afraid of what your public will say and at that point I had to do some dying and just really accept the fact that look, this is who I am and I have to be who I am, and all of us have a right to be who we are”. Hill is a proponent of self-acceptance in the midst of identity crisis, articulating that it's okay to fall and then self-resurrect. To crumble and then restore.
On “Mystery of Iniquity” Hill offers a critique of the judicial system, as she works through the trauma that she suffered during a career-defining lawsuit in which four musicians claimed arrangement and production credits for all the tracks on Miseducation and resulted in Hill losing the rights to many of her most iconic songs: “Cross-examined by a master manipulator // The faster intimidator receiving the judge’s favor”, “Hypocritical giants // Morally non-compliant // Orally armed to do bodily harm // Polluted, recruited and suited judicial charm”. Most of the critiques of systems and institutions on this track could easily be transposed into the vernacular of young people who consider themselves to be outspoken proponents of the resistance movement against Trump’s white house. Hill sings of “Counterfeit wisdom creating the illusion of freedom” which is a phenomenon that arguably is driving the movements of the alt-right. Her lyrics, “Do we expect the system made for the elect // To possibly judge correct? // Properly serve and protect?” are particularly relevant in light of Bret Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a supreme court justice in the Fall of 2018.
Hill can be analyzed as the martyr of hip-hop, broken by the effects of fame, but she also can be seen (and hear me out here) as a precursor to the Kanye West of 2018. West is another unbelievably talented black hip-hop artist whose rise to success has spanned over more years than Hill’s but ultimately also precipitated his confrontation with a serious mental illness. West eventually submitted himself to a hospital after having a mental breakdown (which he now describes as a ‘breakthrough’) and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Interestingly, West sampled the now iconic bridge on Hill’s “Mystery of Iniquity” to create the track “All Falls Down”, the fourth number on the seminal The College Dropout. Hill sings a raspy “When it all All falls down // Telling you all // It all falls down”. The Mystery of Iniquity details the legal drama that transpired when Hill lost the rights to many of her songs, but it’s impossible not to draw connections between the two artists, both of which have endured intense internal battles as a result of the pressures and paranoias hyper scrutinization in the public eye. Both are artists that have given voice to the black experience of superstardom within their respective discographies and have offered exacting diagnosis of society.
Another eerie echo of Hill’s album in the late 2010s is Jordan Peele’s psychological, racially-concerned thriller Get Out whose title matches Hill’s 17th track on Unplugged “I Get Out”. Peele’s 2017 film was heralded as a groundbreaking commentary on contemporary race relations. The plot follows Chris, the film’s twenty-something black protagonist as he attempts to escape the family of his white girlfriend who run a covert business enterprise transplanting the brains of white people into black bodies, relegating the consciousness of the black host to “the sunken place”. Although Hill’s lyrics “I get out of all your boxes” speak to her frustration with the pressures of living as a public figure, when the words of the song are read with the plot of the movie in mind, the connections are haunting. Hill sings, “I get out // you can’t hold me in these chains” and talks about her need to escape “social bondage” referencing a system that is suppressing her: “Psychological locks // Repressin’ true expression // Cementin’ this repression //Promotin’ mass deception”. The sunken place in Get Out has emerged as the guiding social commentary of the film: Peele himself has corroborated the notion that the Sunken place refers to the marginalization of black people as a whole, that no matter how hard they scream they will always be disadvantaged and silenced by the power of whiteness. In Get Out Peele critiques the manifestation of a modern version of slavery, a version that is perpetuated within the psychological realm. Hill’s song seems to address similar, if not identical issues, “Blindin’ through mind control // Stealin’ my eternal soul // To keep me as your slave”. If the rest of Hill’s album wasn’t already prophetic enough, the Get Out and “I Get Out” echos are scarily indicative of how relevant MTV Unplugged is to our current cultural and political moment.
The spirit of Hill lives on as the canon of hip-hop hurdles forward, she is one of many Goddesses of Hip Hop and in this album, she dared to go where few artists do following one of the most successful breakout albums of all time; straight to the pain, the hurt, the self-loathing, and the vulnerability of utter fragility in a pointedly simple setting. The social, political, and personal consciousness of Lauryn Hill, a sort of waking up and break of the system, is what we are witnessing as ‘the resistance’ in the Trump era gains momentum and young people, artists and non-artists alike navigate mental health and public identity issues in the age of instant identity cultivation.
The album’s thoroughly rhymed critique of systems and institutions, its cynicism, its heartbreaking exposure of what makes the world a broken place all define the creative project, but that’s not to say that its not without hope; another concept that has seized the hearts of young resistors of the late 2010s. The album ends with the song “The Conquering Lion” where Hill speaks of victory and liberation, “The conquering lion // Shall break every chain //Give him victory //Again and again and again” This hope, this triumph, this forward-looking resilience is also prophetic of our moment, and something young Americans should look to channel as they begin to find their places in the world. There is a particular kind of soft and persistent hope that exists in this moment of despair and confusion, and Lauryn hill voiced that in 2002 before we even knew we were going to need it. She did it on stage alone in a blue Yankees baseball cap and gold hoop earrings.
“Life is too valuable man, for us to sit here in these boxes all repressed, afraid to admit what we’re really going through, I’m tired of that” Hill says as she closes the album. Hill’s legacy tells us that we ought to liberate ourselves from our own boxes. The best we can do to honor her musical genius is try.
