It was a mild, breezy night in October 2000 and Wyclef Jean stood in the shadow of perhaps the most venerated monument in Ohio -- the Kent State University memorial honoring the students slain in the 1970 anti-war protests. Seated cross-legged in the cool grass were a couple hundred fans who had followed the maverick hip-hop star to this hallowed spot. Just a few minutes before, the fans had been indoors with several thousand others enjoying Jean's eclectic and theatrical Campus Invasion Tour, an unpredictable two-hour spectacle featuring live musicians and a DJ, audience-participation segments and interactive videos, gangsta-flavored hip-hop and world-beat jams. Suddenly, in the middle of the Caribbean classic "Hot, Hot, Hot," the rapper had jumped off stage and run through the university's new sports arena to a back door, shouting, "We're going to the monument!" Mild pandemonium ensued, and only a small portion of true believers made their way to the monument in time to catch him testifying.

After a touching if somewhat bewildering speech about hip-hop's fulfilling the ideals of the '60s, Jean asked for questions. A few young fans responded, and in time the big question came up: what was his relation with his former musical partner, Lauryn Hill, the woman with whom he founded the smash hip-hop trio the Fugees and who had gone on to become a far larger sensation than he is?

Jean paused. "I won't front," he answered with quiet intimacy. "Lauryn and I had a relationship when we were young. We're still working that out." Heads nodded all around in understanding.

Flash forward to July 2001. In a recording studio in New York, Lauryn Hill sets down her own two-hour concert spectacle, one that she justifies with a similar principle -- she's "tired of fronting." Unlike Wyclef's multifaceted sensation, however, Hill's concert is performed from start to finish before a small, devoted audience, and it features nothing more than the artist playing acoustic guitar as she sings and raps a batch of new songs so rough-hewn, many reviews have referred to them as "demos." Certainly Hill's performance provides little framework in which to appreciate them as anything more. On almost every number, her guitar playing is so repetitive and wooden, it makes Woody Guthrie sound like Jeff Beck. And the rest of her performance sinks this primitivism to the level of subcompetence. Again and again, her voice cracks or falls flat, or she flubs lyrics, or she outright stops a song and starts again; in one case, she just breaks down in tears. Although many of the numbers are excruciatingly long, she adds to the endurance test with extended between-song monologues, each one poised between apology and defiance. "I'll be the first to tell you," she says, confessing the obvious. "I'm a mess."

Despite all that, it's easy to imagine that being in the audience for this performance would have felt every bit as special as seeing Wyclef Jean at the Kent State memorial. After all, they were both like little press conferences for the fans, a moment of human communion.

But there's one big difference. Hill was performing not for a select group of fans but for MTV, which broadcast the show in its entirety on its MTV2 subsidiary in March, and then in an edited, one-hour version on the main station early this month. The performance has also been released as a double CD, MTV Unplugged 2.0 (Columbia). The album is Hill's first official release since her unprecedented 1998 debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which sold about 12 million copies worldwide, won five Grammy awards (including Album of the Year), and is credited with revolutionizing both rap and R&B with its easy neo-soul production and tough lyrical intelligence.

No wonder, then, that an unflattering AP wire story preceding MTV Unplugged 2.0's release bore the headline "Lauryn Hill's Baffling Return to Music." As is their wont, the English were far more blunt. In his scathing review in the Guardian, Alexis Petridis wrote, "One popular theory is that Hill is just barking mad." Of course, as most reviewers have taken pains to point out, there are glimmers of worthwhile craft throughout -- a few Ivy League rhymes about the judicial system on "I Find It Hard To Say," a pretty chord pattern underpinning "Adam Lives in Theory," a general loosening of the overwrought emotions on the second disc that allows Hill's final string of numbers to get over without grating too much on your patience. But not one song is polished enough to work on the radio without serious editing. And I doubt any would work in the underground where Hill got her start with the Fugees, either. Being a poet and an MC as well as a music journalist, my friend Daniel Gray-Kontar should appreciate the value of experimentation as much as anyone. His summation? "No one on the street is feeling Hill's album."

But that doesn't mean Hill's album isn't feeling the street. In fact, both Wyclef Jean's concert and Lauryn Hill's are stuck in a concept from which they once seemed to offer an escape -- "being real." If that provided the icing on the cake in his awesome Kent State show, it simply ices her awful Unplugged.

When in 1996 the Fugees exploded with The Score, they appeared to provide mainstream hip-hop with an escape from the oppression of "reality" as it was practiced by gangstas from coast to coast. Back then, Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were just about to go down for the concept that art must imitate life, and the concomitant principle that the more emotionally intense the life, the better the art. With its warmth and humor, its imagination and inclusivity, The Score seemed to offer an alternative to that gangsta death trap, but in fact, it only showed how much bigger "reality" is. All the Fugees did was connect hip-hop's concept of reality to pre-existing folk notions as practiced by everyone from singer-songwriters like Roberta Flack (covered on "Killing Me Softly") to roots reggae superstar Bob Marley (covered on "No Woman, No Cry").

Lauryn Hill's Unplugged just takes that process one logical step farther. In hip-hop, the idea of representing "reality" has always remained clearly distinct from another fundamental principle of the art form -- demonstrating skills. But in rock and folk and pop, oversensitive souls have long undermined their art by mistaking their blood for creative juices. Lauryn Hill's Unplugged album goes the extra distance with the first hip-hop/R&B album that's as embarrassing as the next open-mike night at your local art-student coffeehouse.

As the few brave supporters of the album have tried to claim, this actually makes Hill's disc something of a breakthrough, and a purposeful one at that. As she explains again and again in her songs and monologues, being a star is a tremendous burden that can stifle creativity and hamper personal growth. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything more vacuous than the trite image of sexy success that average pop stars are expected to live by. More power to Hill for rebelling against it.

The contradiction in her rebellion, however, is that she wants to pretend it finally reveals her true self. "Reality is good," she says in one monologue. " 'Cause that means everyone can just exhale and let their bellies out, you know, and chill." But given the amount of planning before and after the recording of this session (Hill is listed as the album's producer), this image is actually as consciously constructed as any other, the same way Wyclef's press conference by the monument was just one more extension of his wily persona. Instead of revealing her true self, Unplugged allows Hill a way to fulfill the opening fantasy of Miseducation, in which she slips out the classroom door and finds her own space. If anything, Unplugged is Miseducation's logical extension. Back then she was just as self-absorbed, as religious, as moony, and as prone to wandering through her numbers with only half a notion of where she was going. She hasn't changed, just moved to where she wanted to go all along.

"Yeah, I'm crazy and deranged," says Hill in her final monologue. "And I'm free. You see? I'm free. I might play these songs and twitch a little bit, just so people know. I'm telling you, when they think you crazy, they don't mess with you. Y'all think that's a curse, I'm telling you it's a blessing . . . When I was a politician, boy, everybody, just all over me. I didn't have a private moment at all. Not one private moment. And now that people think I'm crazy and deranged, we have peace, total peace. As far as y'all know, I'm crazy and deranged. I'm emotionally unstable. And that's my story. I'm sticking to it."

Truer words were never spoken.

Issue Date: May 17 - 23, 2002