To many people, Lauryn Hill is one of music’s biggest mysteries. She was on top of the world and just walked away. There were stories of her private life that may have changed your viewpoint about who she was. But really, the question was why. Why did she walk away from music when she was at the top of her game?
In 2003, journalist Toure filled in some of the story for us with his memorable Rolling Stone article. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. It’s a must-read.
On Wednesday’s Fuse show The Hip Hop Shop, Toure had his chance to interview L-Boogie. She was performing over the weekend at Rock The Bells alongside The Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, and Snoop Dog. She finally had some answers for us.
Some of the reason she left had to do with her children. She wanted them to have normalcy and privacy and real childhoods. But she herself wanted out of public scrutiny and wanted freedom and needed to be able to reclaim her individuality. She also said that she’s ready to express herself again.
But this quote might have summed it all up best:
You have to live life so you have something substantial to share, or it’s kind of pointless.
She seemed at peace and no, she didn’t seem crazy. I jokingly tweeted Toure to ask him if he was able to look her in her eyes and call her by her first name. That was a recent story about her behavior. He didn’t answer me, but he answered someone else that there was none of that going on.
He did ask her what everyone wanted to know. Would we be able to hear a new album? She was a little indecisive at first. She promised new recordings, but wasn’t sure about a new album. But she also implied that maybe there was also a new album on the way as well.
Here’s a short clip of her performing at Rock The Bells:
Photo of Lauryn Hill shared via Wikipedia through the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
This is the sort of thing that probably wouldn’t happen here. I just don’t think Americans take their pop charts quite as personally or as democratically as they do in the U.K. Earlier this summer, a brand of kid’s shoes put out an ad featuring “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, the 1990 major label debut single by They Might Be Giants. The duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh have, since they started recording original songs onto a standard answering machine in the early 80s, become the godfathers of nerd-rock, and now that their original fans (like me) are pushing middle age with mortgages and children, the band have found renewed success recording four albums of “children’s music”, and performing alternate shows for grown-ups and kids on tour. The idea of sticking TMBG’s loving ode to the nightlight into an ad for kids’ shoes might’ve been genius if it weren’t so self-evidently perfect.
I don’t know how it’s working out for Clark Shoes, but it seems to be doing well for They Might Be Giants. The song re-entered the British Top 100 pop songs late last month. Of course, songs featured in popular ads often get enjoy a run on the pop charts here as well – just as Sara Bareilles, Yael Naim, or Phoenix – but those successes seem more like happy accidents. In the case of “Birdhouse In Your Soul”, a strange populist cause – okay, a facebook group – has formed around keeping the song on the charts and trying to advance it to the top spot. That said, after four weeks, the song has only gone so far as #70 (on the chart dated 8/21; the song falls back to #72 on the 8/28 chart).
But that’s not to say it couldn’t eventually succeed. This isn’t the first instance of the Brits attempting to cook their pop charts. See also: Buckley v. Burke. In 2008, after Alexandra Burke won the TV talent show The X-Factor, a campaign by apostles of the tragic 90s singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley attempted to thwart Burke’s cover of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” from making its predicted number one debut over that year’s Christmas sales week by urging fans to download Buckley’s own version of the song. It’s a Brand New Record for 1990!
The campaign failed, but just barely. Buckley’s song charted at #2 behind Burke’s. Still, the TMBG song, while it may linger on the chart for as long as the ad airs, probably won’t reach those sorts of heights. For one thing, “Birdhouse In Your Soul” isn’t being pitted against another version of itself, or even another song. Moreover the Alexandra Burke debut was a one-off event sales week; it was also a holiday week, and it’s a holiday week that The X-Factor has annually co-opted for just this eventful purpose. So Buckley v. Burke was framed as the classic battle over artistic legitimacy between a tragic rock icon and a freshly minted “mass-produced” pop idol for the very soul of the pop chart.
As a fan of both Burke and Buckley (although, when it comes to “Hallelujah”, count me in with Team John Cale), I, frankly, prefer not having to choose sides. They Might Be Giants‘ Elektra debut record Flood was essentially the first record of 1990, and “Birdhouse In Your Soul” was instant classic that still makes me giddy and giggly every time I hear it – even more so now that I’ve got two kids singing along with me.
I’m no fan of Stephenie Meyer’s books, or the movies they’re based off of. I’m not really into vampires and werewolves. But I get as woo-hoo excited as a TRL teenage fangirl every time a new Twilight movie comes out. It’s not because of Robert Pattinson’s gravity defying hairdo or Taylor Lautner’s sculpted abdomen and dark, forbidding gaze. (Truth be told, I had to look them both up on Google just now to make sure I had their names right.) It’s about the soundtracks. The soundtracks to these movies are amazing!
Like John Hughes’s movies in the 80s, the Twilight movies draw their music from a collection of artists that could conceivably appeal to a pretty broad audience, but at the same time, are still mostly championed by the alterna-kids and that endangered species known as the record store employee. In the 80s, that meant bands like Oingo Boingo, Madness, Spandau Ballet, Nick Heyward, the Dream Academy, the Thompson Twins, Paul Young, Wang Chung, and Simple Minds – few of whom scored more than a couple of hits, but whose legacies have largely survived the reflexive 80s hating. A lot of these artists’ songs are more celebrated now than they were back when they were (almost) “popular”.
Though each of the Twilight movies’ scores so far have been written by different composers, the aesthetic of the soundtracks has been remarkably consistent, and consistently thrilling. The British band Muse (who basically sound like Radiohead, only un-evolved since 1995) have appeared on all three Twilight Saga soundtracks so far, but each album features an increasingly diverse roster of the artsy cool. Though the first soundtrack trafficked more in mainstream modern rock artists like Paramore, Linkin Park, and (oh yeah) Perry Farrell, the second two have gotten more daring, bringing fairly well-known indie acts like Death Cab for Cutie, Metric and Thom Yorke, together with folks like Swedish pop chanteuse Lykke Li, rapper Lupe Fiasco and the British band Fanfarlo.
But the Twilight Saga soundtracks do John Hughes one better. Where Hughes’ movies often licensed existing songs for the group’s catalogs (Simple Minds “Don’t You Forget About Me” and Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science” being the big exceptions – Psychedelic Furs re-recorded a song they’d released years earlier for the title song of Pretty In Pink), the songs that appear on the Twilight Saga soundtracks are most often originals written and recorded specifically for the soundtracks. You won’t find Editors’ gorgeous piano ballad “No Sound But the Wind” from New Moon on the band’s new studio record (In This Light and On This Evening) which came out right around the same time. And the thing is, “No Sound But the Wind” wouldn’t have worked on the Editors’ album anyway – not just because it’s miles better than even the best parts of In This Light (this is, sadly, true) – but because it truly belongs with the rest of the songs from New Moon. More than anything else, these records are special because they sound like they were actually conceived as unified albums – not just a cross-promotional collection of songs by Today’s Hottest Stars, all K-Tel style; and the songs are quality – not just out-takes or throwaways – and they’re bound together not just by the subtextual narrative of the movie, but with a common sense of atmosphere and evocation.
The latest Twilight Saga soundtrack, for Eclipse, has already delivered videos for songs by Muse and Metric. One of the latest is by Cee-Lo Green, the former Goodie Mob rapper turned retro-funk freak solo artist before teaming up with producer Danger Mouse to form Gnarls Barkley (whose 2007 debut hit “Crazy” essentially became the first pop standard of the 21st Century). On “What Part of Forever”, he sheds much of his signature flamboyance – in fact, he sheds his hip-hop persona altogether – singing a lyric about making life-altering choices over chiming guitars, a rhythm that rolls like stage-coach wheels, and a melody straight out of the sunny California folk-pop sound of the late 60s – a beautiful song for late summer.
To many people, Lauryn Hill is one of music’s biggest mysteries. She was on top of the world and just walked away. There were stories of her private life that may have changed your viewpoint about who she was. But really, the question was why. Why did she walk away from music when she was at the top of her game?
