The Daily Spin, July 9
Ms. Lauryn Hill | The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
Artist: Ms. Lauryn Hill
Link:
I really want to like this album more than I do - and it’s undeniable, the influence it had at the time, a direct counter to a lot of the thuggish bravado that was dominating rap in the mid to late nineties.
In many ways, it’s an incredible effort, pulling from a wide range of influences to build upon each other, Jamaican reggae bumping shoulders with all flavors of rap, RnB, hip-hop, and many historical African-American influences. I can recognize all of these awesome inputs, but they don’t come together all that cleanly for me - as much as this is a defiant record, it still feels like there’s a piece missing, to me, something that just doesn’t quite come together.
Over 77 minutes, I think I wanted a slightly more impactful result - and while I can see the way threads from this album have played through into the modern era, there’s not enough of it to validate an impersonality that creeps into the fringes of some of the tracks on the album.
For being part of a genre that I would generally describe as Not For Me, it’s great - but it all falls a little misplaced.
Rating: 7.7/10
Best Tracks: Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You; To Zion
Worst Tracks: Every Ghetto, Every City; Final Hour