Columbia Records prexy Don Ienner calls Miseducation "one of the last important albums of this decade." Hyperbole? Perhaps, but the reaction of both critics and the public to Miseducation indicates that such highfalutin praise may be right on the money for once. Released Aug. 25, Miseducation sold a sizzling 422,624 copies in its first week, establishing a SoundScan-era record for a female artist and landing it atop the Billboard pop chart. In less than a month, the album has shot past the one-million mark. (It took Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals to restore the chart's characteristic artifice-over-art balance and topple Hill's three-week reign at No. 1.)
Hill admits to being "surprised" by the record's strong out-of-the-box performance, but Miseducation holds its own surprises for the Fugees fans who flocked to buy it. "Everybody probably expected her to have Puffy Combs, Teddy Riley, Babyface, all the top-line, marquee R&B producers on there," says Chris Schwartz, president of Hill's label, Ruffhouse, which is distributed by Columbia. "Instead, she chose to do it herself and to make a very introspective, retro kind of record using live musicians. People like Maxwell, D'Angelo, and Erykah Badu have come close to doing what she's done, but I think Lauryn's really made the defining record of what's going to be the next wave of R&B."
Some would amend that sentiment to include pop and hip-hop as well. In a hopelessly fragmented, post-everything musical milieu, Hill's (mostly) organic nuevo soul is roping in a diversity of listeners. As Schwartz notes: "This is a record with multigenerational appeal that's not being championed by any one race. Everybody's into it."
With the mainstream showing her big-time love, the artist formerly known as L-Boogie don't have to live like a (re)Fugee no more. Not that there's anything wrong with being one third of a group that's won two Grammys and sold 18 million copies worldwide of its second album, 1996's The Score (making it the largest-selling rap album ever by a group). It's just that Miseducation has pushed the envelope into a loftier zip code. As label mate Bob Dylan sang back when he was a fresh-faced pop prophet: "She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back."
Still, a brief review of the past is in order. The product of a stable, loving home, Hill credits her parents with helping set her on the young-gifted-and-black fast track. She describes her mom, Valerie, a high school English teacher, and dad, Mal, a computer consultant, as "very, very cool." (So cool, in fact, that she still opts to live at home with them in a large house she bought not far from her South Orange headquarters.) Both parents were avid music fans, and even before she was bitten by the hip-hop bug, Hill was soaking up their voluminous collection of '50s, '60s, and '70s albums and 45s. "There was something sacred about those old records," she says. "They meant so much to me, and they kind of had a lot to do with the soundtrack of my life."
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