That Old Thing Back

An interview that I have yet to see wasn't what caught my attention. I, like many other people in my generation and the one before me, treat The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as a Bible of some sorts put to beat sung by an angelic voice- that which belongs to Lauryn Hill. Although that album was released in 1998 (12 years ago) and Hill has yet to have an album to reach its success, her name still starts a flurry of conversation, partially because of the privacy that she has set aside for herself.

The music journalist Toure' recently did an interview with her for Fuse Tv,and although I have not seen the interview, I first heard about it via Twitter. Hiill's words weren't what caught my attention, as I stated earlier. It was what was said by someone else that really got me.

In my Creative Nonfiction class on Tuesday, we discussed why people may hide things or not share them when writing. As writers, do we even have the right to do that (pun intended)? You have a responsibility, I believe, to tell your story, to share things about yourself (we were discussing our upcoming memoirs that we have to write as our first major assignment, so this is why I feel that leaving out things is not right).

The comments that really made me stop and think were said by Vernon Mitchell, Jr. (@negrointellect), a doctoral candidate in history at Cornell University. He wrote:

"I think we want "that old thing back" so bad that no matter what she did, it likely wouldn't measure up. I could be wrong...maybe I am. We won't ever "hear" Lauryn Hill again, until we let go of what she did in the past..."

I'm not the only one who worships The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, her debut album. Hill is held to a very high standard in hip-hop, neo-soul, R&B, etc. In fact, her album was listed by Rolling Stone as one of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Songs like "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", where she sang,

"My world it moves so fast today, the past it seems so far away & life squeezes so tight that I can't breathe...And every time I try to be, what someone else thought of me, so caught up I wasn't able to achieve..."

really helped me grow into a confident person. But that's beside the point. Mitchell's tweets are one of the reasons, I assume, that Hill retreated behind the spotlight, why she shied away from people like me, who live by her lyrics- we expect too much from her. When we relinquish the Lauryn from 12 years ago, we can get to know the Lauryn from today.

So in this situation, is her hiding parts of her story acceptable? When I say hiding her story, I'm referring to releasing new music. If and when she does decide to release new music, does she even have to be as personal as she once was? When you are in a different place in your life, do you have to write the same as you did previously? Do you owe that to your audience?

I guess that in Hill's case, she should just take her own advice. Make up her own mind to define her own destiny.