Trivia / Lauryn Hill

• Artist Disillusionment: As the most notable member of The Fugees, Hill became a star thanks to their album The Score. When her solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill came out, it was both a critical and a commercial success. Even when listened to today, it hasn't aged that poorly, mostly because it was made as more of a Soul album than a Hip-Hop album. But Hill didn't like the way the music industry worked, putting a ridiculous amount of effort into maintaining a personal vision without the burden of Executive Meddling, and in the end decided that she wanted to focus more on her family. Not helping matters is that, a few years ago, she was convicted of tax evasion and has had quite a few financial setbacks as a result. Barring an Unplugged album that was released in 2002 and the occasional tour, she doesn't seem all that interested in bringing out new material, making a revival of her music pretty unlikely nowadays.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The Urban Legend regarding her saying that "she would rather starve than have white people buy her records", which was started by a prank call to Howard Stern's radio show. It gained wider fame due to Eminem repeating it in a joking fashion in his song "Cum On Everybody".
• Creator Backlash: She doesn't particularly like her songs anymore, especially the ones from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. During performances, she often performs unrecognizable remixes that are either sped up too much, too loud, or both.
• Creator Breakdown: Her entire career following the release of her solo album. Hill basically retreated from the mainstream, refused to release further studio albums, and basically living the life of a reclusive with only the occasional live performance, where she performed brand new material. Many of the songs on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill were rumored to be direct attacks on Wyclef Jean and Pras, such as "Lost Ones," "Superstar," "Ex-Factor" and "Forgive Them Father". "To Zion" discusses her first pregnancy and how people told her to have an abortion so that she wouldn't ruin her career, but she believed that her family should come first in her life.
• Creator Killer: When The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill won critical acclaim, massive sales, and the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, she quickly emerged as the Breakup Breakout of The Fugees and looked to have a long career ahead... only for her studio follow-up to fall into Development Hell amid reports of mental health problems. The Last Straw for many fans awaiting new material was her 2002 Live Album MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, a vastly different work in which, instead of performing her hits, she performed a series of brand-new, unfinished, and very lengthy songs without her backing band (who she was in a legal fight with at the time), after having blown her voice out in rehearsals the night before (leaving her sounding raspy and frequently flubbing her lyrics), and spent the time in between rambling about "reality" and how Celebrity Is Overrated. Many listeners and critics found it preachy, self-indulgent, and lacking the energy of Miseducation, and even some of the executives at Columbia Records admitted that had anybody other than Hill recorded that album, it never would have been released. She vanished from mainstream attention soon after and came to be better known for her personal troubles than her music.
• Hide Your Pregnancy: Her video for "Doo Wop (That Thing)" hid the fact that she was pregnant at the time.
• One-Book Author: To this day, Hill only has one studio album to her name, owed largely to the massive Creator Breakdown that followed it preventing her from recording a planned follow-up.
• Reclusive Artist: Currently, she is the mother of six children by one of Bob Marley's sons, but still remains out of the public eye. In fact, nobody even knows where she lives. She does perform occasionally in concerts, but is notorious for being late (an egregious example being a December 2010 concert that started at 8:30 and she didn't show up until midnight) and performing poorly. She popped up again in the tabloids in mid-2013 after being sentenced to 3 months in prison for tax evasion - her excuse was that the IRS had not been respecting her family's privacy. Though she has been averting this a bit recently as she now has a Twitter account, albeit one mainly for promotional purposes, and is fairly active on Instagram.
• What Could Have Been: In the early 2000s, she wrote a screenplay about the life of Bob Marley, in which she planned to act as his wife Rita. She also began producing a Romantic Comedy about soul food with a working title of Sauce, and accepted a starring role in the film adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved; she later dropped out of both projects due to pregnancy. She also reportedly turned down roles in Charlie's Angels (2000), The Bourne Identity, The Mexican and The Matrix sequels.

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