How a young Lauryn Hill fought to make a name for herself as a solo artist

Lauryn Hill is back on tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of her one and only album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. 

After facing criticism for being repeatedly late to her own shows, Hill set the record straight onstage during her recent show in Los Angeles' Crypto.com Arena. "Y'all lucky I make it on this … stage every night," she told the crowd.

"God is the one who allows me to do it, who surrounded me with family and community when there was no support.... When the album sold so many records, no one showed up and said, 'Hey, would you like to make another one?'

"So I went around the world, and I played the same album over and over and over and over again. Because we are survivors, and we're not just survivors, we're thrivers."

But what exactly did she mean when she called herself a thriver? Culture critic A. Harmony joined Commotion host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to break down some of the hurdles Lauryn Hill has faced in order to cement her legacy as a once-in-a-generation artist.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Take us back to '90s hip-hop and that landscape. What was Lauryn up against, in terms of making her first solo album? 

A. Harmony: Hip-hop in the '90s was very much a boy's club. It was steeped in misogyny. There were a lot of women MCs in the game at the time, but everybody had to have a male chaperone in order to be taken seriously. So if you think about Foxy Brown, there was Jay-Z right behind her. If you think about Lil' Kim, there was Biggie right behind her. Yo-Yo had Ice Cube behind her. It's like every man in the industry had this pet woman or protégé that he was kind of parading around as his success and like, "Here's the way that her success can be attributed to me somehow." It seemed as though you couldn't be taken seriously in the industry if you didn't have a male beside you. 

Even Lauryn with the Fugees had her two male chaperones who were able to take credit for her success. So she now wants to make a solo album and she now wants to show people that, "I am an artist and I've got something to say. I've got a voice and my own story outside of the male lens." And in '90s hip-hop, that was unheard of.

Elamin: Let's contextualize some stuff about the Fugees. They won best rap album at the Grammys, and then things start to go south. What was going on?

A. Harmony: Oh, man. So much was going on behind the scenes. Again, they kind of had to pull themselves out of the trenches, and now they're getting all of this success from The Score, and it's starting to go to people's heads. There are egos at play. There were rumours that Lauryn and Wyclef, two of the bandmates, were embroiled in an affair of their own. Wyclef was married at the time. Lauryn got pregnant, and mind you she's only 20 years old at the time. Wyclef thinks the baby is his; it turns out to not be his, and there are some feelings there as well. 

Wyclef and Pras start doing their own solo work, and Lauryn wants her shot at doing the same. But who knows? Maybe because of emotions around the pregnancy and the relationship between Wyclef and Lauryn, she's, like, blacklisted from the industry. Wyclef makes certain that nobody wants to work with her. She contributed a lot to his album, Wyclef Jean Presents The Carnival, but then when it came time to do the same for Lauryn, nobody wanted to work with her. There were a lot of intense emotions behind the scenes that led to the rupture of the Fugees.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with A. Harmony produced by Jane van Koeverden.