#Wyclef Jean Lyrics

[sirlonius]

[music-in-my-veins14]

No fighting No fighting

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

AYO What music we think Miguel listens to?

Y'all think Miguel be up in his office listening to reggaeton or no?

Standing up on that high ass platform - what do he being doing up there

Does he know Bad Bunny?? Does he like him? If he a fan? Does he like Calle 13???

Does he listen to ROSALÍA? He seems like a ROSALÍA guy. He's dramatic - he needs dramatic music. Jess walks into his office to ask a question and he's just... listening to MOTOMAMI. Up there bumping 'BIZCOCHITO'. Or 'Aute Cuture'. I feel like he'd LOVE 'SAOKO'

PLEASE TELL ME HE LIKES SHAKIRA THAT'D BE GOLD

You're helping him do some work and hear him hum a melody under his breath, or repeat some lyrics from the Spanish version of 'Whenever Wherever' - a sappy-ass love song.

Or you walk into his office and he tells Lyla 'turn off the music' really really quickly but you're still there looking at him like

"... Miguel were you just listening to 'Hips Don't Lie' feat. Wyclef Jean? Be honest.'

'Forget what you heard, and this stays between us.'

PLEASE WHAT DOES HE LISTEN TO I NEED TO KNOW

[kittyball23]

What cover songs do you hope Brozone and/or the Royal Sisters do in the future? Both as individuals, duos or as a group?

Ooo! I got a few I think could work (though for some the lyrics will have to be slightly adjusted of course)

Time to Change originally from the Brady Bunch, it’s about growing up n stuff, plus its supposed to be a six-parter (easily can be made to a 7-parter for BroZone and the Pop Sisters), plus Trolls has featured Brady Bunch music before (Sunshine Day)

Hips Don’t Lie originally by Shakira and Wyclef Jean by Cliva, as it’s about dancing (and per my headcanon Clay’s the best BroZone dancer) plus it’s a duet

Home originally sang by the chipmunks in Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, a six-parter that can also be made into a 7-parter and has a portion of the song sung by just the boys, one by just the girls, and then both together

We Are Family sang by Keke Palmer and the cast of Ice Age: Continental Drift, which had a variety of lyrics that were sang by different characters

Pretty Girls originally by Britney Spears and Iggy Azalea by the Pop Sisters (bonus if its sung at Branch and Clay lol)

Eleanor Rigby originally by the Beatles by Floyd (because this is the song I thought he was going to sing in the movie since it has "Lonely People" lyrics in it too. Fr though, I think an acoustic cover by Troye Sivan would sound beautiful)

Dynamite originally by BTS by BroZone (I was holding onto a thread of hope months ago that this song would be in the movie, it’s one of my favorites from BTS)

ABC originally by the Jackson Five by BroZone (I was also holding out for this song in the movie)

Surfin’ USA originally by the Beach Boys by BroZone (for when they’re having fun on Vacay Island)

Feels Like Love originally by the Cheetah Girls in their third movie One World, and since it’s about couples it could probably be Broppy, Cliva, and probably even Sprandy

Macarena originally by Los Del Rio by BroZone and the Pop Sisters (I know it’s overused in media, but I picture it going like the Animaniacs version😂)

These are the ones I could think of off the top of my head, not sure for what situations they would apply though, but I'm sure it can be figured out 😌 If I think of more, I'll definitely add onto this ^_^

[zot3-flopped]

i highkey think people want acts like shakira and charli and chappell right now bc we want to feel GOOD. eras ONLY works bc it has feel good songs from past eras, but the heavier the setlist is on ttpd and bummer tracks, i just think people don't want that right now. lyrical masturb*tion aside, they sound and feel bleak and the world has been bleak enough lately. shakira shakira! i hear in my head in wyclef jean's voice lol

Or if we do want to revel in melancholia, let's listen to bands who do it properly. Taylor always sounds tepid to me.

[runthepockets]

Thank you for including Nicki in your rap post. Many people have tried to write her off for years and downplay her achievements due to her personal life

Yeah, I saw someone trying to do that on my post (RE: her marrying that pedophile and getting her brother out of jail for rape). While I don't think those actions are in good taste, I don't think that's enough to get me to write off her legacy.

She was the first foot in the door of women in mainstream Rap music that felt authentic and individual (besides, like, Lauryn Hill, who couldn't handle the spotlight at such a young age and who turned to a life as a private citizen after all the shit she was dealing with while working on Miseducation.) Unlike women rappers of past, she didn't have to do the whole "female mafioso" thing that a lot of women had pushed onto them by their clueless male counterparts, she didn't have to play into the role of dating / being seen attractive by a powerful man in the music industry to get signed on and she didn't have to write hypersexual lyrics that didn't reflect her in order to get those men to sign on her work.

She was allowed to wear bright clothes and make goofy alter egos and make silly voices and be fun and independent and talk about love and sex from a black feminine perspective. She brought a potent and unique sense of charm and vibrancy to the world of Hip Hop due to her Carribean upbringing, the likes of which are honestly unspoken heroes in the culture (Wyclef Jean brought us Carribean Hip Hop fusion before we even knew we were ready for it, Foxy Brown's assertive and fiesty rhymes and style were huge inspirations on both Nicki and Megan Thee Stallion, Busta Rhymes is....just fucking look at and listen to the guy, man, he's been ahead of the curb from the jump.) She was the first female rapper I can really remember girls my age getting latched onto and getting excited over.

So, yeah. Again, while I don't think the men she surrounds herself with are ideal, it's just not enough for me to write her out of the culture or our history. Hip Hop has always been a boys club, she was the first to change that. In any other subculture, she would be untouchable, or at least would have people talking about her with more sympathy and nuance. Why the sympathy stops for her idk.

[things-about-cars-in-posts]

So, uh... this post was answering an ask, but then the saving glitched or something and now the post is in the drafts but it no longer has the ask in it, but the ask isn't in the inbox either. So I don't know if it vanished completely or if it will appear in this post upon posting. And perhaps more importantly, I don't know if the asker will get a notification when I hit post. I guess this is a good moment to ask you all to please avoid asking questions anonymously if possible, so I can reach out if need be (especially considering the months I tend to take to answer, har har).

Well, great, my quest to write a brief post is off to a great start. Oh, I know!

*ominous clattering sounds*

So, ever seen Speed? The movie, not the phenomenon. I haven't, but from what I heard, it's a movie where a bus driver finds out there's a bomb that will go off if they go slower than 50mph. I've gotta see it just to find out what prompted that, did a passenger get frustrated with how slow it- see?!?! I'm doing this again! But no more, thanks to this nifty device I've fitted, that will blow up if this post's word count reaches 2000 words. Yes, that's a pretty high bar, but you know, we tryna stay alive, like Wyclef Jean said. Wait, no, I don't think he ever actually says the song's title in the lyrics. But surely he mentioned its title at some point, right? I'm doing it again aren't I. What was the question anyway?

Do I- Okay, let's not repeat the "do I have thoughts on that" line. Last time it didn't end well.

But yeah, of course! I wrote about the Corolla previously, and who could forget the first mass production hybrid car?

Well, most of the people who drove one, probably - and likely even some that are currently involved in driving one. And, as I went over, I think that's to Toyota's credit.

Now, in my post about hybrid powertrains (definitely a recommended read to anyone who's giving a shit right now) I forewent one of the few important distinction between an F1 car's KERS system and my mom's Toyota - since the former can never run purely on electric power it's a mild hybrid, whereas Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD for friends) is a full hybrid system since it can. So essentially the reason her Toyota is not like an F1 Ferrari is that it's more capable. (And also it burns down less.) So the car could be using only the electric engine, or only the combustion engine, or both, or energy could be getting generated through regen braking or even by the engine(???) and I'm not even sure that's it. There's even a little animation you can toggle that shows you what the drivetrain is doing and what energy is going where. And I always thought that was a bit of a test-drive-only gimmick, not realizing that in my reaction lay proof of the system's brilliance: you don't ever really notice nor care what it's doing! Thanks to the smoothness of a very clever CVT made of planetary gears that I vaguely assume I understand, you barely ever feel any of those goings on. Aside from shifting into B when you need engine braking -even that a very smooth affair- all you ever experience is the variation in noise from the silence of EV mode to, should you ever be so unlucky as to encounter a road that points up...

(credit to @ggrtl1)

The HSD system now being in most of Toyota's range makes it easy to forget how it was a Prius exclusive for the longest time, and how starkly the Prius stood out when that was the case. But if we look back with that in mind, the Prius being an environmentally conscious choice that doesn't actually require you to have a clue about shit, and a car that almost actively dodges your attention, it's clear how it immediately became extremely popular… almost as much as it was maligned.

Car enthusiasts, as I already went over (oh sorry, I'd already linked this one), hated the Prius with unfathomable passion. I grew up in car meme circles and counting the jokes at the Prius' expense was akin to counting your breaths. To this day you can probably spot peeling "Prius repellent" stickers atop the exhaust pipes of the most insulting trucks of the Walmart lot. And really, I think there's more to why than what I talked about. For one, the Prius's architecture and marketing attracted and created drivers without much eagerness to get out of their own way, and by extension the cars behind them's. But really, people hated on Audi drivers tailgating and BMW drivers being seemingly unaware of the turn signal stalk's presence, and that never translated into cheering at pictures of M3s and RS4s engulfed in flames. There also was the idea of the Prius driver as someone eager to rub their environmental consciousness in your face - and I believe that gets closer to the point, but again, however much you can hate a driver, that doesn't really translate into hating the car with such memetic reliability that a key mechanic in my favorite gaming series ever involves finding pink Priuses and blowing them up.

It's something about the car itself. Or rather, what it represented.

I believe the Prius was the vegan of cars.

It was never just about what it did or how, but about how its existence implied that our way of life (in our case our acoustically, socially and environmentally obnoxious gas guzzlers) was bad, was wrong. It was an attack on how we rolled. And so we attacked back: "No, fuck YOU. You're nerdy, and uncool, and boring, and ugly. Go die." And really, it's interesting how those were the angles the Prius was attacked by - even though it was clearly never concerned with being cool or exciting to drive and, if I do say so myself, the Prius never looked that bad in the years when that hate developed.

I mean, even this interior is neat if you ask me!

Really, I think the reason those angles were chosen goes beyond the car. Nerdy, uncool, boring, ugly. What image does that conjure up?

Exactly.

And just like that emoji, those are comebacks you huck at someone who's getting in the way of your good time. But how did someone else's car get in the way of our good time? Simple: by highlighting the problems with our good time. Again, the vegan of cars. And just like them, this opposite faction was also seen as a threat. If this view wins, we feared, our vehicles for The Good Time will get banned or canceled or neutered beyond recognition. We were arguably living through the start of such events and they did get worse with time.

But still, our approach was misguided, handling serious environmental issues with the same maturity of children being reminded of their homework by their parents. The solution was not to try and boo the issue away, as though a relative handful of enthusiasts could drown out environmentalism, but to recognize that our smaller number and the masses' different priorities could have been assets: get out of this tunnel vision whereby everyone needs to have what you like and let others have a Prius; hell, encourage others to get a Prius, because the more people buy fuel efficient cars on their own accord, the less governments will feel the need to force them to do so with bans! Because bans? They SUCK. Not being able to use your car or go some place no matter how much you're willing to pay and how many hoops you're willing to jump through SUCKS. And it's unfair to everyone: the greener choice should be the better choice, because if not you're short changing people, and that betterness should be communicated well to the people, so they know they're not getting short changed. At which point you wouldn't need a ban anyway because the only people who wouldn't pick the greener thing of their own accord are us, the handful of weirdos who'll gladly stick with something worse for The Experience™, whose impact will be too small to be worth restricting everyone's freedom over.

We were too few to matter, but instead of using that as the asset it was we fought against that idea. And that's understandable: we all like for our opinion to be popular, we all like to push people to be more like us because we like the idea that it's a good thing to be the way we are. So it's tough to embrace the idea that the fewer people like us there are the better. And perhaps we were too proud to admit that our passion really is problematic at scale and thus have that conversation altogether. Or we just didn't feel like dealing with that problem. Again, kids not wanting to do homework.

But now that half of all Toyotas sold (in the U.S. at least, but that's always been the cultural trends dictator anyway) are hybrids, funnily enough, it all seems okay. I mean, whose vitriol is being spent on the Corolla Hybrid? And it's not because the Corolla name did get slapped onto enough different cars that eventually it landed onto something with some enthusiast cred...

...because that never made enthusiasts hold the "normal" Corolla in any higher regard than 'boringly sensible, nondescript transportation only ever interesting as a way to justify any unwise sportscar purchase of a similar buy-in price' ("Can you believe I got this V10 twin turbo Audi RS6 for the price of a new Corolla?", usually said a month before the first night spent under a bridge). And even if it did, it would be all the more reason to curse the HSD powertrain for "ruining" it, or whatever. People don't hate on the RAV4 Hybrid, the Sienna Hybrid, the whatever Hybrid nowadays. (Or maybe they are and I'm just hanging around more mature people now, but I do feel like a cultural shift has gone on.)

Is it because hate struggles to spread itself too thin, especially across vehicles whose hybridness isn't their whole personality as the Prius's was? Maybe, but I doubt it looking at all the positive sentiment around the fifth gen Prius, surprising a glowup as it may have been.

(Y'ain't really fuck with me way back then girl

how 'bout now)

It could also be that a threat is often worse than the event itself, because focusing on a threat makes it feel like an all-encompassing hypothetical that must be avoided at all costs or how will we manage, but when we live through it it's just one of the many things going on in our lives, and we find out we manage just fine. Many cars we barely cared about to begin with are hybrid now, so what. Those seeking to avoid hybrid powertrains just... do that. Some cars are canceled, so we buy used or look elsewhere. That Prius was not a harbinger of doom, just a precursor of a trend that it didn't cause, and didn't really kill us all. But maybe it's the move that we're currently fearing will kill us all, electrification, that has not just shifted attention away from hybrids, but framed them more positively by comparison. But perhaps there's an even bigger, show-stealing enemy, doing what we feared hybrids would do and what we're fearing electrification will do: SUVification. Sure, people raged at things like the Honda NSX becoming a hybrid or the Mazda MX-5 announcing electrification, but travesties like the new "Capri" really make that rage look silly, as if we lost the focus of what was really vital, like i did with the word count oh no

Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Song of the Day - “Jokerman”

Happy 40th Birthday to Dylan’s great tune “Jokerman”, released October. 27th, 1983, on his “Infidels” album.

As decades have gone by, my favorite Dylan song has had to evolve, many times… and this was another time for that…

This song is just quintessential Dylan.

It has both political and biblical imagery it.

Dylan said he wrote it while down in the Caribbean… “Jokerman" kinda came to me in the islands. It’s very mystical. The shapes there, and shadows, seem to be so ancient. The song was sorta inspired by these spirits they call jumbis"

The music video created to accompany this song is filled with images of “jokers” - Hitler, Reagan, Ali, and artwork from Bosch, Durer, and Goya.

Just to burnish this song’s greatness, Dylan had some serious talent backing him - most impressively the two stellar guitarists Mark Knopfler and Mick Taylor. Also added was Dire Straits keyboard guy Alan Clark on organ.

The bass and the drums on it are played by reggae stars Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar of the reggae group Sly and Robbie, giving the tune a decidedly reggae vibe.

The track is a long one, over six minutes in length.

And after a long stretch of critics being less than adoring of his output, they all raved on this one… and it now makes every list of best Dylan.

Fellow artists raved also. Wyclef Jean said, it was "the most incredible piece of literature I ever read”

Dylan performed “Jokerman” on “Late Night With David Letterman” in early 1984 and this performance is now a legendary one. …being called by some as “blistering and righteous”. He sang backed up by a Latino punk band called the Plugz.

That performance has a story within it of a mishap - Dylan was handed a harmonica which was tuned in the wrong key… But the musicians involved all adapted beautifully, which is a bit of a Dylan thing. On the recording of this track for the album, Sly Dunbar remarked, “Bob Dylan always do songs in different keys, like, he’ll change three, four different keys in a song, and he will change the lyrics on the fly, so when we cut ‘Jokerman’ we recorded it and then we had a break overnight. Dylan came in the morning and said, ‘Oh, gentlemen, could you just run ‘Jokerman’ for me again?’ Nobody knew the tape was spinning; we were just running down the music and he said, ‘OK, that’s it’ — it was the take we didn’t know we were taking that he used.”

Maybe this style of Dylan’s is a metaphor for his career, which he has morphed and evolved over and over again.

“Jokerman” has been covered many times and by really varied artists…

I think a case could be made that “Jokerman” is the Dylanest of Dylan tunes… right now it remains my favorite...

[Mary Elaine LeBey]

[kickmag]

Throwback: Wyclef Jean-Guantanamera featuring Celia Cruz, Lauryn Hill & Jeni Fujita

Wyclef Jean's version of "Guantanmera" featuring Queen of Salsa Celia Cruz, Lauryn Hill and Jeni Fujita appears on his first solo album, Wyclef Jean Presents The Carnival. Cruz had recorded the song about Cuban patriotism several times before working with Jean on his version. He changed the lyrics to a tale about a beautiful woman, and Hill rapped about her power over men. Culturally, "Guantanamera" had Cuban, Haitian, and African-American references, making Jean's tribute unlike any other. The video was played heavily on MTV, and the single received a Grammy nomination. The Carnival was critically acclaimed and it performed by music industry metrics. But most importantly, the album connected with people worldwide and Jean created a legendary collaboration with Cruz. Jean's solo debut does not sound like any other rap album and "Guanatanamera" is still a favorite from his catalog because of its warmth and originality. Jean released Wyclef Goes Back To School Volume 1 in 2019, and it is his is 9th solo album. The Fugees reunited at The Roots' 2023 picnic for the first time since their 2021 Global Citizen Festival performance. 

[gerogerigaogaigar]

Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

For the early days of Funkadelic's career the funk definitely took a backseat to the psychedelic. And while there are funky elements throughout Maggot Brain the real star is guitarist Eddie Hazel. I think Eddie Hazel is one of the best guitarists ever, his work in Funkadelic and his solo career is a blend of psychedelic, blues, hard rock, funk, and jazz and no one blends them all the way Hazel does. On the middle of the album Hazel plays fuzzy heavy riffs especially on You And Your Folks, Me And My Folks and Super Stupid. And on the ten minute opening and closing tracks he shows off his improv skill by playing delicate strings of jazzy riffs that create a beautiful stream of consciousness style solo. Obviously every single ayer on this album is a master at what they do but if its early Funkadelic, especially Maggot Brain and Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On, then Eddie Hazel is your god.

U2 - The Joshua Tree

This is an enjoyable album. The 135th best album ever? Oh my god no. U2 are factory default music. They are plain, unsalted potato chips. Bono is incredible at reaching into the void and pulling out the platonic ideal of banality. Like these guys can write decent music, but there is no soul. Inside those jangly chords and melodramatic vocals is just a bunch of guys who want to be famous and will do anything to get there except be sincere.

Fugees - The Score

In terms of rhyming, flow, storytelling capabilities, expansive vocabulary, beat crafting, and whatever else you want out of a hip hop record The Score is possibly the greatest record of all time. Wyclef Jean in charge of production and bringing a casual style of rap with heavy use of Haitian creole, Miss Lauryn Hill with a tough stacatto style while also bringing beautiful singing, and furtive Pras so easily forgotten. The mix of reggae and jazz into the hip hip beats made for some very unique flow and makes the group stand out on the basis of their instrumentals alone. But the rap skills of the rest of the group are completely insane and all three are ao perfectly in sync with each other. The lyrics are effortlessly cool and intelligent as fuck at the same time. There are absolutely no throw away tracks on here. Every single song could and should have been a smash hit single. And to be fair Ready Or Not and Fu-Gee-La did become huge hits and the transcendent cover of Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly is one of the most evergreen songs in hip hop history. The Score has stood the test of time and become one of the most belived albums for a reason.

Joni Mitchell - Hejira

At this point in her career Joni Mitchell was an unparalleled genius at artistic expression. A little folksy and very jazzy, especially with the help of fretless bassist Jaco Pastorius, Mitchell is in the zone here. Every song developing its own complex series of characters and symbols. This is Joni Mitchell's most complete and cohesive work, although i personally have a slight preference for the less focused Hissing Of Summer Lawns.

Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits

What am i even supposed to say at this point? Sure I like Hank Williams but if you cant actually point to an album that is significant to call one of the 500 greatest then just choose aomething else. Hey there have only been three or four metal albums total and one electronic album so far. Why not choose some of that? Iron Maiden, Diamond Head, Judas Priest, Converge, Rainbow, Entombed, Gojira, Sepultura, Devin Townsend, Voivod, Opeth, Between The Buried And Me? Theres a list of metal bands with top 500 tier albums. Andy Stott, Carl Craigg, 808 State, The KLF, Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Robert Hood, The Orb, Justice, Moodyman, The Field, Leftfield, Mr. Oizo. There I gave you some electronic artists too. This list sucks. Oh yeah and Hank Williams is like the father of country music and is really good and important or whatever.

[cyarskj52]

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musicsermon Remixes used to be a MOMENT. Not just a random verse added, but complete lyrical changes and/or a whole other track. The true spirit of the remix feels near extinct.

For Day 12 of the #BlackMusicMonthChallenge, name a remix that changed the whole song.

[music-in-my-veins14]

Oh, you know I'm on tonight, my hips don't lie And I am starting to feel it's right The attraction, the tension Baby, like this is perfection

[latestupdates2022]

Pray For Me Lyrics by Stonebwoy Feat. Wyclef Jean

Pray For Me Lyrics by Stonebwoy Feat. Wyclef Jean Stonebwoy and Wyclef Jean Lyrics Embrace the power of words and music with the heartfelt lyrics of Stonebwoy’s Pray For Me, featuring Wyclef Jean. From poignant ballads to uplifting anthems, each line carries a unique emotional weight that resonates deep within. Pray For Me Cover Art Stonebwoy & Wyclef Jean – Pray For Me…

[daletraeng]

Lyrics for the song “Wyclef Jean” by Young Thug

[whileiamdying]

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Ms. Lauryn Hill

Raw, profound, and era-defining, its mastery has never been duplicated.

Lauryn Hill’s debut—and only—solo studio album was a seismic event in 1998: a stunningly raw, profound look into the spiritual landscape not just of one of the era’s biggest stars, but of the era itself. Decades later, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill still counts as a life-changer, with the preternaturally talented Hill rapping with the confident ferocity of a woman in total creative control and singing with the gospel-hued richness of the soul canon. It was an expression of interior depth during a time in which Black women were often portrayed as one-dimensional archetypes, and Hill delivered her magnum opus of life’s triumphs and setbacks with such singular heart, sincerity, and specificity that it transcended from an album into a universal statement of being. Her fortitude was so powerful that new generations continue to discover an album whose specific mastery of musicality, lyricism, and frankness has not been replicated.

Miseducation was forged in emotional fire. After seven years as the voice of the politically cogent, critically acclaimed New Jersey hip-hop trio The Fugees—and in the aftermath of a protracted, tumultuous relationship with her bandmate Wyclef Jean—Hill set out to document a period of major life transitions, including the slow erosion of the group she’d been with since high school. With the trauma came new beginnings: Hill was also inspired by the physical and mental transitions of pregnancy and the birth of Zion, her first child with Rohan Marley, using her attendant spirituality as a guiding light. This potent emotional crossroads led to what remains one of the rawest albums ever created, a lasting artistic beacon for musicians across genre, and a moment in which the whole world recognized Hill’s talents.

Miseducation’s opening track, in which a teacher announces a classroom roll call only for Lauryn Hill to be absent, speaks to its thesis: that its lessons were of the sort that can only be learned through lived experience. As she weaved through painful eviscerations of an ex, which even at the time were understood to be directed at Jean, she redefined the way gritty, sharp rapping and lavish R&B harmonies could fuse together in an era of nearly catholic separation between the two genres. (Even three years after Method Man and Mary J. Blige’s “All I Need” remix, hardcore rap was largely still teeming with misogyny, and R&B was seen as a softer, more feminine pursuit.) Miseducation centered a young woman's point of view, in all her rebellions and vulnerabilities, amid terrain dominated on the hip-hop charts by a certain vision of hypermasculinity. But it also served as an entry point for a mainstream still inclined to denigrate hip-hop’s musicality.

The album was recorded, in part, at Hope Road in Jamaica, in Bob Marley’s home—a legacy reflected in Hill’s idea for the album’s cover art, which echoes The Wailers’ Rastaman Vibration cover. Yet the DNA of these songs, and a key to their endurance, draws on a classic Motown Records/Stax Records sound that showcases Hill’s immaculate vocal approach; the layered “Doo Wop (That Thing)” alone won her two of the five Recording Academy / GRAMMYs [awards] she took home in 1999, a validation of the freshness of her sound, as well as the way her music spoke to the emergent feminism of the Hip-Hop Generation.

The vulnerability in Miseducation’s singles is often discussed, but Hill’s concerns, and powers, were multivalent. Once a history major at Columbia University, Hill explored her upbringing in Newark New Jersey, with a sharp, subtle sociopolitical eye (“Every Ghetto, Every City,” featuring clavinet from Loris Holland, minister of music at the storied Brooklyn Pilgrim Church) and philosophized on the nature of growing up in a disenfranchised world (“Everything Is Everything,” whose classic ’70s soul sound comes courtesy of a backing band including a then-unknown pianist named John Legend).

Miseducation is also proof that pure intention and unflinching emotional truth can be a path to deliverance unto itself. As Hill raps on the politically charged koan “Everything Is Everything”: “My practice extending across the atlas/I begat this.” She was, and remains, a once-in-a-generation talent whose inspiration, and innovation, can be heard through the decades. Artists exhaust long discographies hoping for a cohesive piece of work resonant enough to reshape culture and inscribe its creator into the pantheon; Lauryn Hill did it in one.

“It’s interesting and very unique for an album to soundtrack your life but be so timeless. Every time you hear it, it feels like the first time…and it touches you in a different way and meets you at a different point in your life. If anyone was to have made one album and that be it, that’s it. That’s the pinnacle.”

— Dua Lipa

[runthepockets]

Being a geeky black dude in the 2000s was hard, but more than that it was just plain weird. Getting called an oreo for liking Metal music and getting called homophobic slurs for not liking the "right" Metal music was a world of its own, but the main war I was fighting was the culture war between Hip Hop heads and Metalheads.

Obviously the former group was in the right in the majority of these arguments. I mean, even if Hip Hop was all "kill violence murder do hard drugs and fuck everyone", who cares. It's music. Good music, at that, with the kind of production and subject matter and witty lyricism that people write wordy reviews about on niche music forums. If you're doing a bunch of shady shit cus some random rappers who you don't even personally know alluded to it in a couple songs, odds are you were probably predispositioned to doing those things anyway, which imo is an indication that we need better financial and interpersonal support networks, not more shaming and alienating.

At the same time I could never quite get behind the Metal shaming, either. I mean, to me (and Mos Def) Hip Hop was the heavy metal of the black community. Both are made up of a bunch of angry young dudes trying their best to express themselves and their individuality and navigate masculinity in a way deemed acceptable, be it by talking aggressively over dense beats about guns and fast cars and hot girls or talking aggressively over dense riffs and basslines about barbaric warriors and shambling ghouls with acidic spit, and I have a lot of fun listening to both and feel empowered by both for pretty similar reasons. Being male dominated genres, they both have their misogynistic moments, but the former experiences more scrutiny over it because....black dudes do it? Even though it's been shown time and time again that we're more likely than any other male demographic in the country to vote for women during election seasons and advocate for things like drug decriminalization, police abolition, and testifying for how much the feminist movement has benefitted women in the US rather than hurt them.

I bring this up because, for some reason, these debates still happen. There are still racist Metal dudes and there are still Hip Hop heads who consider you a sellout for liking "white music", and it's baffling. I thought in this era of Metal / Hardcore bands ala Full of Hell and Primitive Man and Drain integrating synthesizers and trap beats into their discographies and Rappers ala Denzel Curry covering Rage songs we'd have been past this already. I mean fuck man, Wyclef Jean was at Woodstock in '99, Tech N9ne collabed with Chino Moreno and Stephen Carpenter 12 years ago, Ice-T and Riley Gale collabed on a Body Count song in 2020, and Ho99o9 toured with Slipknot last year. Like there's really nothing else to say. The wandering tribes are united. We're all chilling and smoking at the skate park.