God Save the Queens by Kathy Iandoli

Author:Kathy Iandoli
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062878526
Publisher: HarperCollins

Lauryn Hill, singing our lives with her words.

Interlude

Absentee Ballads

I knew that when writing this book, this part of my favorite artist’s career would be the hardest subject to broach: the absence of Ms. Lauryn Hill.

It was the spring of 2001, and the Essence Awards were scheduled to air, featuring a surprise performance by Lauryn Hill, her first since vanishing in 1999 after sweeping the Grammy Awards and embarking on a lengthy world tour to promote The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It was a pleasant tidal wave of exposure for the New Jersey queen, especially in the eyes of someone like me, who hadn’t been able to get enough of her ever since Rita Watson first ripped apart that playground cypher in Sister Act 2.

Lauryn Hill sat onstage at the Essence Awards looking broken. She was wearing a denim jacket and long skirt. Her head had been shaved. A Rastafarian friend of mine once told me that when you shave off your dreadlocks, you’ve either been through something extremely difficult or extremely great. I knew in my heart it was the former. I had been deep in the music industry for two years and had heard the rumors: Rohan was cheating with her personal assistant (who also happened to be a relative of Lauryn’s). The whole family knew, except Lauryn. She exiled herself within the same house as everyone, sequestering herself in a back room. This could be (and probably is) all hearsay, though if you ask anyone tangentially close to the nucleus, this is what they will tell you, almost verbatim. She was blindsided. Allegedly Rohan was also married to someone else, unbeknownst to Lauryn. It was the Wyclef situation all over again. How could the two loves of her life damage her in succession? Whatever truly happened behind closed doors doesn’t matter much. She sat on that stage, cradling an acoustic guitar and wailing her heart out.

I remember an old video from The Fugees’ promotional package for The Score showing Lauryn sitting with a guitar, strumming those same couple of chords. Years later, that video became fodder for guitar enthusiasts, who would often mock her amateur strumming skills. In the promo video, she joked about how Wyclef was teaching her how to play the guitar, but he was the worst teacher. If he spotted fingernails on her hands, he would bite them off. I remember thinking that was a little creepy, but after learning that the two had a clandestine relationship, I guess it was something of a playful gesture. I guess. I often wondered if, during that post-Wyclef, Rohan-pain-causing era, she would play those chords and think of a happier time, possibly the last time she had been so happy. The story goes that during the recording of The Score, Wyclef broke up with Lauryn. A fight happened during the recording of “Ready or Not” and Lauryn burst into tears while singing the hook. I always knew it sounded a little too passionate, especially in a song where she uses the word defecating.

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