And then she came… Selah. I never seem to get Lauryn Hill out of my life, despite the many years that have passed since I thought about her.
I arrived in Portugal an hour before she gave a free concert for the city of Lisbon in 2010, so I went and stood waiting for hours, making that perhaps Part 2 and this one Part 3. This time I have a job and money and can afford comfort, can shell $280 (for two tickets) on someone who will no longer make me happy – but what will?
I knew her story, shit the whole music world does, about an unused talent who stopped after one album (and one previous one with her band) when she could have moved people for years. What was I to see this time, age 41, with my Dad dead and the whole world moved on?
Was 1998 honesty the same as 2023 honesty? No surely it isn’t, not any more. What had she tried to communicate to us then, and what did it mean now? The despair of love gone wrong? But this isn’t Love in the time of cholera, where the guy pines for the same married woman for thirty years until her husband dies – even the most wretched losses of people have surely been tempered after 25 years.
So, what? Her tapping into old, forgotten hopes, feelings that moved her and us once but that she needs to keep revisiting no matter how irrelevant they might be now?
What had happened in that time? This hope that we were going to be the revolution, with our pure and sincere feeling that she had been able to magically tap into? We weren’t. I’ve read about power structures in the last five years, lasting revolution is virtually impossible. So were we still supposed to sing the songs, more importantly to feel them?
What about me? Oldish. I am vaguely keeping my body in track but up top I’m as grey as the London fog. 21 years, for me, since I had found her album and looked at the photos of Lauryn Hill’s pretty face in the CD booklet. And in that time? Well, it went, that’s all I can say, I learnt a few nice things, fulfilled the occasional goal.
What about her? I realised at the concert that not a single one of her songs had stuck around in the greater musical consciousness. Maybe she knows that too. Her set could only last 70 minutes – 80 with the usual contrived fake leaving/encore sequence. There were simply no other songs she could sing, besides her 1998 album, plus Killing me softly, Fu-Gee-La and Ready or not from the Fugees’ album, plus her inferior Turn your lights down low as a result of marrying a Marley.
And yet, and yet. She sang the song The miseducation of Lauryn Hill and I started crying in the darkness. Deep in my heart, the answer was in me. Was it? The answer to my Dad’s cancer was not in me, it simply made crying a lot easier these days. I can cry, silently, keep my head steady and look like I’m simply continuing with my task. As long as no one looks at my face – and why would they?
Oh Lauryn. That song. My god. It was about being in the ghetto, getting out of the ghetto, and the money it made literally got you out of the ghetto, where, who knows, you maybe led a normal, happy life with your grown, musical children. But you’ve gone on tours and had to sing the same 15 songs all the time. How tiring.
So what truth were we there to get from her, after 25 years? There were people there of various ages and races, who had been touched by her once and still believed. Like me. Well, I could see her for what she was now. A washout. No longer a mystic. But she wondered how she had been able to touch so many people, she literally asked that to us. The answer was probably honesty, as she acknowledged to us on Tuesday night, and I myself am certain that was true. Deep in my heart, the answer was in me.
Would I ever care about an artist that much again? No, the older human heart rejects extremes, it never lets itself get carried away like that again. I had had moments with the love of my life, even though it didn’t last, and the Bulldogs actually won a premiership, and I found someone else who is loyal to me, and my Dad is no longer with us. And then what was next? None of these things seemed remotely likely in 1998. In 1998 there was simply the hope of a song, and Lauryn Hill’s pretty face, and her youth, and my youth.
Will there be a Lauryn Hill and me, part 3? (Or part 4 if you count Portugal, or whatever, pardon the semantics.) What have I got left? I assume at least 30 more years to find something, anything, to do in my grown-up life. It can be nice, I have money and a decent job, for now. Maybe I still have my mind, and body, for the moment.
But I feel a bit sad for Lauryn Hill. Does she regret her premature, emotionally pained withdrawal after 1999? Is she sad that she didn’t wring it all out of herself when she had the power? Shouldn’t we all be grateful that at least such musical and lyrical beauty happened once? I could see her vulnerable, still pretty 48 year-old face on the screen on Tuesday, inseparable from the knowledge that musically she went nowhere after 1998 and here she is on a mere nostalgia tour.
So, Lauryn Hill and me, partie 3, circa 2035? I guarantee nothing for myself. I will keep going but as was proven to us this year, it’s really up to the world, and its casual injustices. Is there anything more I could wring out of Lauryn Hill from this experience, since she was not able to wring it out of herself? I don’t know. She was there, she survived, maybe that is enough.
Love is lost 