Instead, she refers often to the Bible, which she doesn’t seem to realize is simply another text, another tradition, another cultural product-and in itself it is now a static text, tradition, and product. Plato’s dialogs about virtues and the uncertainty of knowing, Nietzsche on morality, and Bell Hooks, Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, and Toni Morrison on race and sex might be particularly helpful to her. However, it is education and philosophy (the intellectual traditions that individuals and societies over centuries have been creating and questioning and changing) and it is the models of other artists that may offer her help-inspiration, solace, technique. She uses generalizations such as "everybody else is just as empty" and "everybody knows that they’re guilty" and she says that one shouldn’t hide behind education. Part of the problem is in how she is thinking about that growth. I regret that she hasn’t located better models for her growth. If she does grow as an artist that development will have value not only for her but us as well, and that will be the value of art and possibly also philosophy. (What kind of value? It stimulates thought, and encourages one on one’s own path.) The recording may prove to be an important transition in her development.
However, her singing here seems honest-full of conviction and emotion, and yearning toward something, and I have little trouble listening to her voice and I think her intentions are honest and that gives this recording value. She talks about having made sacrifices in the past to protect her voice, sacrifices she’s rejecting now, sacrifices that kept her from living fully or interacting with the people in her life, as she had to rest and not speak. Many of them lack melody or any charm (or wit or structure or…) and her voice is husky to the point of hoarse and singing off-key is common. I’m not sure most of what she calls songs actually are songs. Unplugged is a collection of thoughts set to music. Neither Miseducation nor Unplugged convinces me that she is a major talent, or even a significant one, though I find what she is trying to do now very interesting: she’s trying to grow and take her audience with her. What I think is interesting about Miseducation is the atmosphere she creates-one that seems friendly, honest, speculative, and sensuous-as she raps and sings about love, values and life lessons, and neighborhood and camaraderie. I did not listen to the whole of her previous recording, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, until after I listened to Unplugged. I found the claims made previously for her beauty, talent, and value exaggerated-and I thought her songs were mundane and that she sang off-key.
I must admit that I have not admired her work, little I knew of it. The truth about who we are, about our ambitions and anxieties, pride and pain, is not so common that the testimony of someone with so much to lose-public image, money, and career trajectory-is something I was inclined to listen to cavalierly. I approached the disk with a sense of privilege and trust. She, with guitar is hand, is attempting to grow up in public, and I suspected this after reading surprisingly unsympathetic comments about her performance and this disk. She explains that she has been facing her own limitations and her new songs come out of that exploration she’s not trying to correct others as much as she’s trying to correct herself. "Every single song is about me first," says a plainly clothed Lauryn Hill to her audience, as recorded on her new Unplugged, a live acoustic performance broadcast by MTV and now available on compact disk. On Image, Identity, and Improvisations Or, The Continuing Education of Miss Hill
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