She Begat This By Joan Morgan

2018 marks two decades since the release of the Grammy-Award winning classic, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. I was working at The Source magazine at the time and remember the zealous editorial debates on whether Lauryn actually deserved the elusive five-mic rating. The main issue was that she hadn’t rapped on every song. And while it was a classic album, was it a classic rap album? Plus, there was just so much singing, could Miseducation really be deemed a hip-hop classic? This was ’98 ya’ll. [Sidenote: Drake should kiss the ring of Lauryn Hill].

I played, no we blasted that album over and over again. We debated. 4.5 mics, then?  I teared up alone in my office one night listening to Lauryn croon “look at your career they said/Lauryn baby use your head/but instead I chose to use my heart” on Zion. I’d recently been promoted to managing editor. My son was five in ’98, my daughter going on nine and I was 30.

Ms. Hill never got those five mics. We settled on no mics.

☛SHE BEGAT THIS: 20 YEARS OF THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL by “hip hop feminist” Joan Morgan drops August 7th. 

Worth noting, Brittney Cooper, author of ☛ELOQUENT RAGE: A BLACK FEMINIST DISCOVERS HER SUPERPOWER [pub: St. Martin’s Press] wrote one of the best blurbs, I’ve read in a long time:

While reading this masterful, rich, and amazingly concise cultural history of the Nina-Simone-Defecating-On-Your-Microphone-Nineties, I learned two lessons. One, you cannot tell the story of Hip Hop or Black womanhood in the 1990s without a deep understanding of the prototype for Black Girl Genius that is Lauryn Hill. And two, you cannot tell the story of Hip Hop or Black womanhood in the 1990s without the fiya-spitting, Jamaican, Bronx-girl pen of Joan Morgan. Lauryn gave us the soundtrack, the artistry, and the permission. Joan and her crew of badass, pioneering Hip Hop journalists, many of whom are featured here, continue to give us the language and the frameworks to understand the singularity of turn-of-the-21st-century Black cultural production. Absent either of these Black girl geniuses, the story is incomplete. Indeed, she begat this.

Per Simon and Schuster:

Released in 1998, Lauryn Hill’s first solo album is often cited by music critics as one of the most important recordings in modern history. Artists from Beyoncé to Nicki Minaj to Janelle Monáe have claimed it as an inspiration, and it was recently included in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, as well as named the second greatest album by a woman in history by NPR (right behind Joni Mitchell’s Blue).

Award-winning feminist author and journalist Joan Morgan delivers an expansive, in-depth, and heartfelt analysis of the album and its enduring place in pop culture. She Begat This is both an indelible portrait of a magical moment when a young, fierce, and determined singer-rapper-songwriter made music history and a crucial work of scholarship, perfect for longtime hip-hop fans and a new generation of fans just discovering this album.

Peace, Love, & Beauty,