The Spiritual Power of Lauryn Hill

MUSIC IS MY safe space. When all hell is breaking out, I can put in my AirPods and turn on part of the soundtrack of my life and reset. The pandemic created a chronic hell that illuminated oppressive forces that have existed for centuries. Music became even more essential for my survival.

I am a Black clergywoman who is clear that “my emancipation doesn’t fit” many people’s equation. Let me say that another way: My authentic expression of self makes some people uncomfortable. My unapologetic expression of womanist Blackness often sheds light in the shadows of a corrupt world.

I won’t pretend that I have always felt free to be me. It took a pandemic to give space to be reminded by theologian and prophet Lauryn Hill that “deep in my heart, the answer, it was in me.” Hill’s lyrics and very existence compelled me to “[make] up my mind to define my own destiny.”

Some consider Hill to be one of the greatest lyricists of all time. An eight-time Grammy winner (with 19 nominations), she sings, raps, and acts. She is hip-hop royalty. In the ’90s, I wanted to be her. She wore the dopest locked hair style, had the most beautiful brown skin, and expressed her Blackness with boldness and class. She had, and still has, a lyrical flow that men and women couldn’t ignore. She was fly. (Translated as cool, sexy, smart, and stylish.)

Her industry-shaking debut solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, released in August 1998, will stand the test of time. Hill speaks truth in ways that penetrate the soul. I was a young mother when the album came out. She articulated things that only a Black woman could identify with. She spoke of the tension and beauty of having a child when society was telling her that motherhood and a career couldn’t coexist. She sang and rapped about self-respect, love gained, and love lost. This album is life. This album ministers. This album is sacred.

During the pandemic, I realized that I was not alone in wanting to be authentically connected to the sacred and secular. I reconnected to the things that brought me joy and realized that I could embrace hip-hop and faith. Many women, especially Black women of faith, are looking to reconcile culture and faith, and I believe that the rhetoric of Lauryn Hill can help with this reconciliation.

Hip-hop can reframe the sacred and create opportunities to connect to God, illuminating the joys and pains of life. If you listen to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill with an open heart and fresh ears, I believe that you will encounter God in new ways.

Hip-hop as resistance

THE APPRECIATION AND study of hip-hop and religion must start with Black music in general. Beginning with the spirituals as birthed by Africans forcibly brought to the Western Hemisphere, Black music was birthed out of the struggles and joys of life. The identity of Black people is couched in Black music. Whether in the Sorrow Songs, or gospel, or rhythm and blues, or hip-hop, Black music has always been a spiritual art form. James Cone, in his classic The Spirituals and the Blues, contends that music has and always will be a large part of who we are as Black people in America, yet most of us do not recognize the dualism of the sacred and the secular in Black music. While Cone was speaking of the blues and the spirituals — the music that had fed his soul while growing up in Bearden, Ark. — he prophetically alludes to rap music in the conclusion of his 1972 work, noting that he has only spoken of a small part of the musical narrative that has told the story of Black people’s joys and pains.

Black scholars who were fans of hip-hop began exploring the relevance of the genre in the world of African American culture as well as religion. Christianity, Islam, or other spiritual traditions have been an important part of the lives of Black people in America. Black religion and communities have influenced, formed, and nurtured Black music, including hip-hop. Hip-hop was created by a people under siege, providing the means for them to creatively speak out against those things that create systematic oppression and disenfranchisement.

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Just as understanding scripture must be informed by the context of the author, hip-hop must be understood within the context it was birthed. Hip-hop is a form of resistance that has given a generation the methodology to push back on messaging that has challenged the humanity of Black people, and it has created a community of like-minded people. Daniel White Hodge, in The Soul of Hip Hop, explains that hip-hop, through its lyrics, sound, and culture, “explores a basic theology of life” that transcends the church or the mosque. In other words, hip-hop is a method for young Black people attempting to understand life and the mysteries of God on their own terms.

A space for sexual politics

A MALE-DOMINATED CULTURE from its genesis, hip-hop has had to deal with misogyny in its lyrics as well as in its imagery. Tricia Rose, in her seminal 1994 work Black Noise, deals with female rappers in her chapter “Bad Sistas: Black Women Rappers and Sexual Politics in Rap Music.” The late rapper Ms. Melodie explained that women have always been represented as lyricists in hip-hop; they just were not the first to be recorded. Women’s voices presented a space where sexual politics could be discussed. Female rappers dealt with questions of sexual power, sexism, embodiment, racism, and economic issues authentically and creatively. These early female rappers verbally contradicted society’s notion of “true womanhood,” giving agency to themselves and the women who listened to and emulated them. Many of the early rappers attempted to empower Black women while being careful not to criticize Black male rappers. They appear to wrestle with the patriarchal systems within hip-hop, navigating and manipulating the game to their advantage.

Hip-hop historian Nelson George once claimed that female rappers have not significantly contributed to hip-hop culture. Yet Kathy Iandoli, in God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-Hop, notes that while hip-hop’s birthing is often attributed to DJ Kool Herc in 1972, his sister Cindy Campbell was the mastermind of the first hip-hop party at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx. Early in the life of hip-hop, women were rappers, DJs, and record label CEOs. Other writers acknowledge the skill and creative imagery of early female rappers that shifted the trajectory of the culture.

But the invisibility of women in hip-hop culture is undeniable. Women often have been relegated to roles defined by the male power structures as well as the white power structures that have funded and shaped the trajectory of commercial hip-hop. Women have had to make space for themselves as rappers and lyricists as well as in the culture itself. Often called derogatory names by men, Black women who love hip-hop have existed in a special space of nonbeing, standing between Blackness and gender.

“Challenging male rappers’ predominance, female rap artists have not only proven that they have lyrical skills,” explained Cheryl L. Keyes, author of Rap Music and Street Consciousness. “In their struggle to survive and thrive within this tradition, they have created spaces from which to deliver powerful messages from Black female and Black feminist perspectives.” In other words, female rap artists have had to challenge sexist and racist narratives while working twice as hard to prove their skills in a genre that appeared to not want women there in the first place.

Lauryn Hill’s sacred rhetoric

HILL'S LIFE AND lyrics continue to empower and affirm Black women of the hip-hop generation nearly 25 years after the release of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Hill’s persona lands her right in the middle of Black feminist or womanist thought.

Rising during a time in Black culture when soul music was resurgent, Hill is both MC and singer. When she was in her prime, many considered her one of the top five rappers of all time. She oozed #blackgirlmagic before the invention of social media and hashtags. Her cocoa-brown face made it to the covers of VIBE, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, and Vogue at a time when dark-skinned women were rarely seen on magazine covers. She was one of the first prominent Black artists to wear her hair in a natural state, and her image alone had an enormous impact on the psyche of Black women in the 1990s.

According to Joan Morgan, author of She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Hill embraced her suburban middle-class background while deliberately placing herself in the “discourse of diaspora,” exploring various aspects of Black music from around the globe. She was in tune with her Blackness, thereby empowering women of color through her style and her sound. Raised in suburban New Jersey, she never attempted to embody a narrative that was urbanized or falsely hardcore. She spoke of her upbringing with pride. Her confidence and talent spoke to suburban-bred Black women like me who saw Salt-N-Pepa and MC Lyte as awesome rappers but didn’t see ourselves in them.

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Hill embraced the African diaspora through dress, music, and lyric choice. She addressed social, economic, political, and spiritual issues that were important to the Black community during the late 1990s and still are today. Her lyrics are laced with biblical references and religious connotations from different traditions.

Because of Hill’s importance to Black and hip-hop culture, especially for Black women, I would argue that Hill’s rhetoric, which includes her persona, is sacred. Who she is and what she represents, through her words and embodiment, is subversive to a culture that deems Black women as less than human or “true women.” Her embodiment challenged a patriarchal and misogynistic culture that shaped and maintained negative images of Black women. She melded the positivity of Black love and love of self with relationships with the Divine. She played the role of prophet by pointing out behaviors that are destructive to self and others. Significantly, she challenged the culture of prosperity, materialism, and status that was prominent in hip-hop — and still is today. In the hit “Doo Wop (That Thing)” — visually in the video as well as lyrically — Hill creatively “urges both men and women to ponder their present status and consider new ways of behaving and thinking,” according to Celnisha L. Dangerfield’s essay “Lauryn Hill as Lyricist and Womanist.”

Marching to Zion

IN THE Hip Hop and Religion Reader, Hodge discusses Hill’s spiritual impact on hip-hop culture, drawing on interviews with people steeped in it during the height of popularity of Hill’s Miseducation. Many respondents considered Hill to be a type of prophet who convicted them to change their ways. “Hill created a space for those struggling in relationships, love, faith, and with God to come and connect, meditate, cry, love, and doubt in safety,” Hodge wrote. “This opened up the door for some to find a deeper meaning as to who God was.”

Hill’s song “To Zion,” an ode to her first child and to motherhood itself that is infused with the Afro-Latin guitar of Carlos Santana, gospel, and a reggae drumbeat with a hip-hop sensibility, deals with her unexpected pregnancy at the height of her career. Her friends and family urged her to have an abortion because they felt that having a child would ruin her career. Author Joan Morgan, who is credited with coining the term “hip-hop feminism,” compared Hill to the singer Nina Simone. Forty years after Simone’s record label told her to hide her pregnancy, Hill faced the same sexist culture.

In “To Zion,” Hill wrestles with the uncertainty around the impending birth of her son. She recognizes that this pregnancy is bigger than herself. The spiritual undertones are clear. The song’s lyrics are reminiscent of the first chapter of Luke, where Mary is told that she would give birth to a son. Hill acknowledges that what she is going through is fully sanctioned by God, that she is not alone in this. This transparency gives other women support within their own situations.

The refrain — “Now the joy of my world is in Zion” — speaks to the joy that rises amid her uncertainty. Hill describes the love she is experiencing and prays over the life of her newborn son. Here she speaks of being chosen by Zion to be his mother. She proclaims that his birth is a beautiful reflection of God’s grace, noting that God is the only one who could give her a gift so great. She goes into the refrain, this time with a choir instead of singing it alone, invoking Isaac Watts’ hymn “We’re Marching to Zion.” She sounds much surer of herself this time around.

“To Zion” has empowered and encouraged many Black women. “It was a deeply needed affirmation — one [Black women] rarely get,” Morgan said. Cal State LA professor and DJ Lynnée Denise explained, “The decision to do motherhood on one’s own terms is a kind of resistance. And however Black women decide to do it, is the ‘right way.’ Lauryn’s response was to create a beautiful lullaby.”

Identifying the holy

BLACK WOMEN WHO are a part of the hip-hop generation are looking for a spiritual experience that includes all of who they are. For too long, the church has expected people to divorce themselves from those secular spaces that the church has deemed profane. To be relevant to a generation that has realized that they can “do church” virtually, the church must provide spaces where people can be authentic in their worship and their spiritual formation.

Creating spaces for women to acknowledge what they deem sacred — in the traditional sense or from nontraditional, postmodern perspectives — will allow more Black women to be authentic. Such safe spaces, where Black women can identify the holy in their lives through the rhetoric of artists such as Lauryn Hill, can help bring a wholeness that had formerly seemed impossible.