Lauryn Hill: Lady Soul

AMERICA IS AT WAR. THE RADIO OF A BLACK CHEVY SUBURBAN inching down Broadway in midtown Manhattan drones: Day Two and the airstrikes on Iraq continue tonight and for the days ahead. President Clinton – the blade of the impeachment guillotine hovering above his neck – says it’s what we have to do.

Lauryn Hill swivels in her seat, careful of her long, cream-white, queenly dress, her crisp blue-and-white man’s dress shirt, her eye-popping turquoise-and-white ankle-length mohair coat. She places a delicate, loving hand on the very broad shoulder of Rohan Marley, her ever-present boyfriend and the father of her two children (“I’m damn near married,” she says). Her face is bent with concern. “This war thing makes me uneasy,” she says with quiet denunciation. “It happened so sudden. There was no buildup.”

“Is a sign of revelay-tion,” says the Jamaican-born Ro, his voice husky and thick with patois.

“Well,” I say, “they say they didn’t want to attack during Ramadan.”

“Oh,” she says, “but attacking the day before is OK?” She shakes her head. “The media have made people so accepting of war. They’re so cynical, they’ll believe something stupid. I was in Rwanda and we went to the places where the genocide happened – yards full of bones and skulls, and it seemed like props. My friend said, ‘Lauryn, I thought I’d be more upset than I am.’ He was completely desensitized. He was more upset about not being upset.” She goes quiet, letting the thought hang in midair. “Ro’s theory,” she adds, “is that all of Hollywood is meant to desensitize us.”

A moment later, Lauryn says, “Bono said my album is one of the most important of the year.” She is incredulous, but calm and respectful. No one else in the car is surprised. “He wants me to do Lalibala, Ethiopia, on the eve of the new century.” Ethiopia is the Rastafarian holy land.

“Iz a spiritual ting,” Ro says. “Ya go out there for the people. Nah fah self.”

“If I’m not performing, I’ll be in church.”

“Lalibala iz the church.”

The conversation flows on, touching on war and the media and modern America, Lauryn consistently siding with the unempowered with an earnestness and a conviction rarely heard outside of vintage Black Panthers footage.

“The small-business man who made America individual is gone,” she says. “There used to be flea markets by my house where you could buy all sorts of little things. Now it’s all Home Depots.”

This is the Lauryn Hill who doesn’t just want to make music – she wants to change the world. “We’re in this war,” she says. “Well, there’s always a constant spiritual war, but there’s a battle for the souls of black folk, and just folks in general, and the music has a lot to do with it.”

Lauryn has fought this war for eleven years, first with the Fugees and now with her self-produced debut solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, a talking book that tells the history of soul, R&B, reggae and hip-hop. Its instant success has put her in the vanguard of the modern hip-hop-soul movement. “Black music right now is like this whole Star Wars battle,” says Ahmir Thompson (a.k.a. ?uestlove), drummer for the Philadelphia hip-hop band the Roots. “There are very few people who are on the side of art and are goin’ up against the Death Star. D’Angelo is Luke Skywalker. Prince, Ste-vie, James, Marvin and George are our Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi. And, most definitely, Lauryn is Princess Leia.”

Lauryn believes she’s already having an impact.

“Music is about to change,” she says. “I think now people feel a little more comfortable playing with the parameters. Writing more intensely. I think we [D’Angelo and herself] have helped to make people less afraid. There are a lot of young people who will be given more leeway. People can’t really hear potential. There’s a lot of people who need to hear a ready-made, instant-meal, TV-dinner-type thing – where you just put it in the microphone – the microwave, as opposed to potential.”

We arrive at the Hill home, a three-story brick house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of South Orange, New Jersey, five minutes down the road from the house where Lauryn grew up. Lauryn lives here with her parents; she bought the place for them “when I got a little money.” It’s roomy enough for Lauryn, her mom and dad, her children – year-and-a-half-old Zion and three-month-old Selah – and her man, Rohan, as well as a driveway long enough to fit Lauryn’s green Land Rover Defender, Rohan’s red Range Rover and Mom’s Range, too. It’s a house of such grand size and tasteful decoration that the Huxtables, Bill Cosby’s TV family, might have lived here. There are cream walls and a huge ornate mirror in the front room, and all sorts of comfy chairs and couches everywhere. In the bathroom, an exquisite Asian-style dragon’s mouth is a faucet, and dragon tails are knobs.