Lauryn Hill

Bio

Lauryn Hill won five Grammys in one night, for an album she had spent eighteen months making, when she was twenty-three years old. Then she stepped away from the music industry, more or less for good. That is the simple version of the story. The actual story takes longer.

She was born Lauryn Noelle Hill on May 26, 1975, in East Orange, New Jersey, and raised in South Orange. She started singing on Showtime at the Apollo as a teenager. She started rapping with Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel as the Fugees while she was still at Columbia. The Fugees released Blunted on Reality on Ruffhouse / Columbia in 1994. It barely sold. They released The Score in February 1996. It sold eighteen million copies worldwide. It is, in any honest accounting, one of the most successful rap albums of all time.

The Score is mostly Lauryn. She raps. She sings. She arranges. Her verse on "How Many Mics" is the rap verse most likely to make a male MC who heard it in 1996 question whether he should keep rapping. Her vocal on the Fugees' cover of "Killing Me Softly" is the version of the song people now think of as the definitive one.

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill came out on Ruffhouse / Columbia on August 25, 1998. She wrote, produced, and arranged most of it. She rapped on it. She sang on it. The Grammys gave her five awards in one night the following February: Album of the Year (the first rap album to win the category, also the first by a Black woman in twenty years), Best New Artist, Best R&B Album, Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, and Best R&B Song. The album has sold over twenty million copies. There has been no follow-up studio album.

That is the part where it gets complicated. She fell out with management, fell out with producers, fell out with the industry. She gave a famous, deeply candid, by-all-accounts-unfinished MTV Unplugged set in 2002. She had her first four children with Bob Marley's son Rohan. She was convicted in 2013 of failure to file taxes and served three months in federal prison. She has toured sporadically since. She has shown up late. She has sometimes shown up not at all.

She is, in 2026, fifty years old. She is, by basically any reasonable standard, one of the most talented people the genre has produced. She has chosen to mostly not be in the genre. That is allowed. It is also a loss, the size of which we are still trying to figure out. The Miseducation is in print. It will be in print forever. Go listen.