|
"Don't think you've met me before."
Lauryn Hill does lots of talking on this "Unplugged" set, but nothing
she says seems to stand out more than this. In her reincarnation as
hip-hop folksinger (just her on acoustic guitar, the cracked voice
singing and talking for nearly two hours), Hill takes the most stale
sentiment of Oprah philosophy, that being yourself is the most
important thing, and strips it of its meek middle-class mediocrity.
In an artistic reinvention that has to rival anything popular
culture's thrown up in decades — she's a multiple Grammy winner,
for fuck's sake! — Hill has removed all the artifice inherent in
such popular culture, and has set out to make music that's both
honest and true. Which sounds like a straightforward,
elementary conceit until you hear her talking — and she does
lots of talking — about having 40 people on your payroll; and
how your name, your own birthname, is now just tantamount to a brand,
and the L-Boogie Corp needs to keep rolling along to keep Sony
stockholders happy.
But, like, the thing is, it's not just that Lauryn Hill has stepped
out in a stripped-back way; that's not it at all. Hearing her doing
this goes beyond the expectations that come with someone doing the
unexpected, because, as she warns at commencement, she's no longer a
performer. She's just a girl singing songs, talking, letting things
hang out. She's doing this because she wants people to see right
through her, and the honest truth of this artifice-free recording
goes beyond the normal peddled sentiment of being "personal." This
set is vulnerable in a way that so few folk dare to be, stripping
away the erected façade of cool behind which human beings
— forget hip-hoppers, I'm just talking people — hide their
embarrassing emotions, their daggy fears, their clichéd
dreams. And her conviction in doing this goes way beyond simpering
self-help aphorisms or hypocritical hippiefied peace-love proffering.
Her "Unplugged" turn is raw and real in a way that puts past denizens
of this television-channel brand name to shame. She's retired from
the fantasy of performance, and hearing her sing these songs is near
tantamount to hearing Patti Smith in high command. The actual sound
of such strummed songs has much in common with the early-day
invocations of both Terry Callier and Ani DiFranco, with, of course,
the spectre of Bob Marley always hanging over Lauryn's little head.
Her lyrics, as folksinger, are the weightiest — and thereby the
most unfashionable — words, trying to be downright biblical as
Lauryn searches for her own perceptions of truth. God, salvation,
society, soulfulness, even self-reflexivity; the songs scattered
between the rambling conversations herein have no fear of being grand
in their hopes and dreams. She even takes the essentialist
cliché of the singer/songwriter into the kind of climes it
rarely dares tread, getting flat-out Cat Poweresque when her rambling
reverie "I Gotta Find Peace of Mind" (whose lyric "touch my mouth
with your hands" comes like sweet poetry) ends with her in tears.
Such an unsophisticated soap-operatic event separates her from the
normal realms of written songs, in which tunes try to bully the
audience into crying, or songs are written to cry because the
performer is too self-conscious to. And such an event seems like a
grand evocation of the emancipation Hill talks at fond length of
finding, like these tears aren't cried out of frustration, but
exultation.
|
