LAURYN HILL
Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn | May 14th
An imminent prison sentence isn’t usually considered cause for celebration. Lauryn Hill is 30 minutes late and there’s an unmistakable sense of apprehension in the Williamsburg air. The astronomical price tag on tickets as well as a string of wildly chaotic live sets in the past year makes for a tense atmosphere.
This was a show which took place on account of Hill being charged for tax evasion, and it’s now common knowledge that she owes somewhere in the region of $1 million to the state of New Jersey. This is serious shit, but it seems the circus surrounding her was closed down for the night, and Hill was given a platform to do what it was that drew people to her in the first place.
As an artist, Lauryn Hill is revered as one of the seminal individuals in modern R’n’B, a perception based largely on her work with The Fugees and her faultless 1998 solo debut The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill. Eventually her band walk on, the backing singers join them and then Lauryn Hill takes the stage. After a reworked version of Killing Me Softly she laughs and says “I love you too.” The apprehension, kind of, died.
She played uptempo renditions of many of the cuts from her single solo record. Tracks like Everything is Everything, Final Hour and the colossal Lost One captured the same spirit of urgency and aggression they brought on record. When Lauryn raps, she creates the sense she’s telling you for the very last time. When she sings on numbers like Forgive Them Father, she still has one of the most distinctive, hypnotic and simply stunning signing voices of recent decades. The only acknowledgment for her upcoming time inside came in the form of an ad-lib on new track Black Rage (a fierce, slightly paranoid revamp of The Sound Of Music’s My Favourite Things) where Hill referenced being “put in chains”. The crowd roared, one guy shouted “BROOKLYN IS NOTHING WITHOUT YOU LAURYN.” It was a peculiar kind of send off. She would constantly scan the stage and gesticulate about sound levels in an almost manic fashion. At one moment, her trucker-hat wearing guitarist stepped too far forward and was shoo’d back within seconds. When she paid homage to her breakout outfit The Fugees by playing Fu-Gee-La, Ready Or Not and the timeless How Many Mics the energy was almost indescribable. She took on the verses originally spat by Wyclef or Pras and owned them with her signature velocity and that I-Won’t-Tell-You-Again delivery.
She played for almost two hours, ending the show by bringing some of her children onstage and letting them rap or sing along. Some might call it an effort to to humanise herself, but to an extent, this moment was inconsequential. The victory of the night was for Lauryn’s music. If that was a miseducation, this show was a quickfire revision session before your teacher goes away for a little while. With any luck she’ll come back with some more to say.
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Words: Duncan Harrison
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