Painfully True

WHAT: Lauryn Hill Uplugged 2.0 WHERE: Just about any music store HOW MUCH: Price varies.

Lauryn now: less saucy siren, more substantive songwriter. Whether that's good or bad is open to debate.

I made one of my rare forays down to the Bay Area last week and squeezed in a trip to Rasputin’s in Berkeley. Rasputin’s, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of patronizing the place, is a mighty, shining beacon of hope to all the cheap bastards out there (myself included) who just can’t stomach the idea of coughing up $16 for a cd that probably cost the recording industry $1.25 to produce. In short, Rasputin’s is a used record store. And it’s big. Huge. Big enough to bridge seven or eight generation gaps in a single bound. Like I said, big.

So I was trolling the aisles, shaking my head at the 1001 used Jessica Simpson cds (as if you couldn’t see that one coming along), when I came across Lauryn Hill’s last album: Lauryn Hill Unplugged 2.0. It’s an intriguing album. One woman, a case or laryngitis, a guitar and some tortured, but inspired lyrics. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, a brief recap on Ms. Hill for everyone who was asleep at the wheel from 1996 to 2002: 21-year old Lauryn Hill is the third member of the Rap/R&B trio, The Fugees. Their album, The Score is a major hit. It sells an astonishing 17 million copies and suddenly you hear Lauryn’s voice belting out Roberta Flack’s dusty old, “Killing me Softly” from car windows the world over.

Though Lauryn is a major part of The Fugees’ creative chemistry, Wyclef Jean gets most of the credit for the band’s success. This prompts Lauryn to cut her own album—an album she hopes will prove to the world that she is not just a pretty back-up singer. That album (1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill) goes huge—selling over 12 million copies and making Lauryn rich, super-star popular and so forth.

Suddenly, Lauryn is crazy hot.. So hot, in fact, that Hollywood is offering her roles in Charlie’s Angles, The Mexican, The Bourne Identity and the last two installments of the Matrix trilogy. Lauryn inexplicably turns them all down and just sorta disappears for awhile—cue the sound of crickets and the rap-a-tap-tap of Internet Chat Room-bound, Lauryn Hill fans who are wondering where the hell Ms. Hill went. And that’s pretty much how it’s been ever since.

Lauryn made one recording between 1998 and now—that was 2002’s Unplugged 2.0. First, let me say that I like the album a lot and that I, for the record, am not a slavishly, devoted card-carrying member of the Lauryn Hill fan club.

Though Hill had reportedly only recently taken up the guitar when she decided to cut an album consisting of solely her voice and a single acoustic guitar, she makes much more interesting music out of three chords, than you might expect possible. It’s a hard sound to describe as there aren’t a lot of rapper/singer/rock-folk-spiritual musicians with which you can draw comparisons, but that’s precisely the odd musical middle ground that this album stands upon. Surprisingly, Unplugged 2.0 doesn’t come across as a half-assed mish mash of styles. Instead, it sounds, well….unique. And pleasing to the ear. Very good things, in fact.

While Lauryn’s vocal range and style are still impressive on this disc, her voice is unabashedly ragged throughout (she tore up her throat in rehearsals the night before the recording, but insisted on proceeding with the show anyway). Given the dark tone of some of her songs, her slightly strangled tone actually meshes well with the material. Nevertheless, it’s still painful to hear Hill’s voice repeatedly teeter on the edge of breaking apart on songs like Oh Jerusalem.

Lauryn with a shitload of Grammies--back in the "Lauryn as performer" days.

Unplugged is pretty dark, introspective territory. It’s not shake-your-booty, pronounce- your-Pimpitude kind of fodder. This is basically an album about a person who’s coming to grips with the fact that the success they dreamed of, wasn’t in fact everything they dreamed it would be. As Hill notes in one of the many breaks between songs, “I know that the content in a lot of these songs is pretty heavy, but you see, fantasy is what a lot of people want, but reality is what they need and I’ve just retired from the fantasy business.”

Perhaps the most challenging and beautiful thing about listening to Unplugged 2.0 is that Hill is so nakedly candid throughout the recording. Listening to Lauryn explain her fall from public grace is at once both touching (wow, thanks for being that honest with me) and disconcerting (wow, did you really have to be that honest with me?).

Example? “Every single one of these songs is about me first. Me first. There was a period of time that I was just out—just gone from the public and I, uh, came to terms with the fact that I’d created this public persona—this public illusion---and it held me hostage. It was like I couldn’t be a real person because I was too afraid of what my public would say and at that point I had to do some dying and say, ‘This is who I truly am.’… I used to be a performer, but I really don’t consider myself a performer so much anymore. I’m really just sharing, more or less, the music I’ve been given. So if I start and stop or I sing ‘Baby, baby, baby’ for 18 bars, don’t sweat it, okay? You guys are cool? (laughs) Okay, I’m also talking to the people inside my head right now.”

So, is the album worth buying? Though legions of traditional R&B listeners would probably disagree with me (this album sold just over half a million copies...), I'd argue that Unplugged 2.0 is worth picking up. Just be warned: this isn’t a slickly produced R&B album, it’s not a bag-of-granola Folk album, it’s not straight ahead rock or roots reggae. It’s none of the above, but it has elements of all of the above. Unplugged 2.0 is unique, brave and worth a listen. If nothing else, it cut against the grain of just about everything that has been ballyhooed and hyped these past 10 years. That alone makes it worth checking out.

By the way, Hill has spent the past three years in her Miami studio crafting a new album that insiders claim is the greatest thing to happen to America since sliced bread and Al Green. Whether or not this new album will ever see the light of day, however, is open to debate. Hill is currently doing an oddly apt impersonation of Axl Rose (who spent the last decade crafting an album that could reputedly change the world, but which the artist never feels is ready to be seen by the public). Artist? Performer. Simple “sharer of music”. Sadly, it probably doesn’t matter what she calls herself, if Hill doesn’t bring another album to the public in the near future, the public will move on without her. That would be a shame.