{"id":128362,"date":"2018-08-08T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2018-08-08T13:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=128362"},"modified":"2018-08-20T11:13:08","modified_gmt":"2018-08-20T15:13:08","slug":"joan-morgan-hip-hop-feminism-and-the-twenty-year-legacy-of-the-miseducation-of-lauryn-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/08\/joan-morgan-hip-hop-feminism-and-the-twenty-year-legacy-of-the-miseducation-of-lauryn-hill\/","title":{"rendered":"Joan Morgan, Hip-Hop Feminism, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Lauryn Hill.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

One recent midsummer afternoon, I trekked from Central Brooklyn to the South Bronx to meet the pioneering hip-hop journalist and feminist writer\u00a0Joan Morgan, author of the new book She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill<\/em><\/a>. We were to meet off the 5 train\u2019s 138th\u00a0Street stop, in an area some new shop owners and developers have taken to calling \u201cSoBro.\u201d This part of the Bronx feels industrial but also very much in flux. The highways are wide and noisy, and overpasses blot the skyline. On the same block, there are old, seemingly abandoned storefronts, low-level project buildings, and high-rise condos under construction.<\/p>\n

Morgan and I were meeting for drinks and dinner at Beatstro, a new restaurant on Alexander Avenue that serves as an homage to hip-hop\u2014arguably the multicultural borough\u2019s most well-known cultural export. Hand-painted murals and graffiti-inspired paintings adorn the walls; classic records from artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan and MC Lyte line the shelves by the entrance. Definitive books on the art form\u2014Decoded<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Can\u2019t Stop<\/em>\u00a0Won\u2019t Stop<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0The Tao of Wu<\/em><\/a>\u2014lie out on the tables. Soft, textured, and deep-ruby, the lounge furniture comes from Bronx-area manufacturers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Joan Morgan was born in Jamaica, but as a child, in the seventies, she lived in the South Bronx with her mother and brothers. She attended Wesleyan University, then made her name writing about the intersections of art, culture, and politics for the Village Voice<\/em>, Vibe<\/em>, Spin<\/em>, and Giant<\/em> in the nineties. The nineties have been called the golden era of hip-hop writing; it\u2019s also the decade in which hip-hop became cemented as an inescapable commercial force. In 1999, Morgan published her first book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost<\/a>. <\/em>The text is part coming-of-age story and part theory. In it, Morgan coins the term hip-hop feminism<\/em>, which she meant as a way of asserting a feminist identity different from the first or second waves and different from the feminism of late-twentieth-century black academics like Patricia Hill Collins and Paula Giddings. The feminism Morgan proposed would be informed by the same postindustrial, post\u2013civil rights, post-soul milieu from which hip-hop grew. It would be looser, more pliable, supple enough for questions, contradictions, accountability, and personal responsibility. It would not center the wrongs black women suffered at the hands of white people or men. It would be embodied and sex positive. \u201cWe need a feminism that possesses the same fundamental understanding held by any true student of hip-hop,\u201d Morgan writes. \u201cTruth can\u2019t be found in the voice of any one rapper but in the juxtaposition of many. The keys that unlock the riches of contemporary black female identity lie not in choosing Latifah over Lil\u2019 Kim, or even Foxy Brown over Salt-N-Pepa. They lie at the magical intersection where those contrary voices meet\u2014the juncture where \u2018truth\u2019 is no longer black and white but subtle, intriguing shades of gray.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morgan\u2019s book invigorated black women. Glossies like Honey<\/em> excerpted it. My girlfriends and I, at the end of our high school careers, aching to leave home and become women\u2014 though unsure what that meant\u2014devoured it. We\u2019d grown up on a steady stream of MTV and BET, and our significant teen experiences played out to a backdrop of classics such as\u00a0Ready to<\/em> Die<\/em>, Doggystyle<\/em>, Aquemini<\/em>,\u00a0and All Eyez on Me. <\/em>Many of the songs we loved smeared and disparaged women and performed an unfeeling and harsh masculinity, one the men and boys in our lives sometimes mirrored. Morgan\u2019s intervention was critical. It also became canonical. A reissue of Chickenheads <\/em>in 2017 features an introduction written by Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers and the author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Finds Her Superpower<\/a>. <\/em>\u201cThe first graduate seminar I ever taught was on hiphop feminism,\u201d she writes.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Released in 1998, Lauryn Hill\u2019s first solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill<\/em>,\u00a0was also a canonical intervention\u2014to both the previously male-dominated sphere of hip-hop as well as the white-dominated upper echelons of the music industry and pop culture. It immediately went to number one on the Billboard 200 and nearly went gold in its first week of sales. The song \u201cDoo Wop (That Thing)\u201d became the first number one single by a female hip-hop artist in history. It was the first rap project to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year (there has been only one since).<\/p>\n

As an artist, Hill stood out for her assured delivery of intricate rhymes and her singing voice, an alto as bittersweet as memory. She\u2019d blended the two approaches since her work earlier in the decade with the Fugees. Her solo debut was hotly anticipated, and Hill delivered. It\u2019s a book of an album, with diasporic melodies and live instrumentation. She wrote lyrics with specific hyperlocal elements of black memoir, like in \u201cEvery Ghetto, Every City\u201d:<\/p>\n

A bag of Bontons, twenty cents and a nickel
\nSpringfield Ave. had the best popsicles
\nSaturday-morning cartoons and kung fu
\nMain-street roots tonic with the dreads<\/p>\n

July fourth races off of Parker
\nFireworks at Martin Stadium
\nThe untouchable PSP, where all them crazy niggas be
\nAnd car thieves got away through Irvington<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And she wrote vulnerable, romantic negotiations in \u201cEx-Factor\u201d and \u201cI Used to Love Him,\u201d as well as absolutions to a higher power in \u201cTell Him.\u201d The record made a space for hip-hop to be tender and transcendent.<\/p>\n

*<\/em><\/p>\n

Publishing almost twenty years to the date of The\u00a0<\/em>Miseducation<\/em>\u2019s launch, Joan Morgan\u2019s She Begat This <\/em>is a cultural history of the landmark album. With deft, crisp prose, it\u2019s a feat of cultural reportage that examines the impact of\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Miseducation<\/em>, especially on a black female audience. \u201cI didn\u2019t love the album enough to write that kind of treatment of it: track by track by track by track,\u201d Morgan explained. \u201cWhat I loved about the album, particularly twenty years later, was that it was a real cultural moment. I had a very strong reaction to The Miseducation<\/em> when it came out. I was definitely interested in the Lauryn moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the late nineties, before Twitter hashtags and \u201cblack girls are magic\u201d affirmations and natural-hair YouTubers, the \u201cLauryn moment\u201d showed black women possibilities. Morgan wished to examine \u201cwhere black girls were at the end of the twentieth century versus where we are now.\u201d She Begat This<\/em> includes the voices of other pioneers of hip-hop journalism, such as Kierna Mayo, dream hampton, Michaela Angela Davis, and Akiba Solomon, as well as those of activists and culture workers like Lynn\u00e8e Denise and Tarana Burke. Morgan is finishing a Ph.D. in American studies, but She Begat This <\/em>does not feel like a staid piece of theory or criticism. When I asked Morgan about her clear and musical literary voice, she said when she first started writing, \u201cI literally had just moved out of the South Bronx to Harlem. And so I really write the way I speak, and I write the way I think, and that has a lot of different influences. This borough is certainly one of them. Going to school in Riverdale\u2014at a really elite prep school in a completely different part of the Bronx\u2014is one of them. Wesleyan is another one. Being Jamaican. And so I flipped back and forth between those things all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the intervening twenty years since Lauryn Hill\u2019s album was released, I\u2019ve left my mother\u2019s house, lived in three cities, had three careers and four serious boyfriends, gained new friendships, and lost old ones. The queer women\u2013led Movement for Black Lives has changed our lexicon\u2014terms like school-to-prison pipeline<\/em>, mass incarceration<\/em>, and intersectional feminism<\/em>\u00a0are mainstream. The most visible pop star in the world is Beyonc\u00e9; she released a visual album,\u00a0Lemonade<\/em>, that draws from African diasporic spirituality and the lyricism of Alice Walker\u2019s womanism. Morgan\u2019s central premise is that Lauryn Hill gave birth to now. \u201cThis is a really incredible moment to look around in pop culture and see representations of yourself that are diverse enough that somebody goes, Oh, okay, that person reminds me of me. But we didn\u2019t have that for a really long time,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cI\u2019m a Caribbean first-generation immigrant who grew up in the South Bronx in the height of the rubble. I didn\u2019t see me anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morgan and I talked about the confounding highs and lows of this moment, when black women\u2019s representation in the media is perhaps the best it\u2019s ever been, but we still earn sixty-three cents on the dollar compared with white men. We\u2019re four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women and 35 percent more likely to die at the hands of our intimate partners. Even thinking about the glorious success of the Bronx-born Cardi B can be disheartening. Her debut album went to number one this past spring (with a single that sampled Hill\u2019s \u201cEx-Factor,\u201d no less), but she was only the second female emcee ever to earn the number one spot on the Billboard 200. Over the course of two hours, Morgan and I didn\u2019t come to any neat conclusions.<\/p>\n

Morgan told me that we are in \u201ccrisis mode\u201d when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, especially romantic. She said she couldn\u2019t have anticipated this nadir when she first started writing about black women and feminism in the nineties, though perhaps she should have. \u201cI am meeting more and more black women who are suffering from loneliness, a really deep ongoing loneliness that manifests into other things like depression,\u201d she told me. Our increased connectivity and digital intimacy may have come at the cost of sustainable real-life social interactions and community building. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t help if we don\u2019t call things what they are,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cWe need to talk about black women\u2019s health. We need to talk about the things that are making us stressed out. We are carrying such stress within our bodies but not acknowledging that some of it comes from home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lauryn Hill announced an anniversary tour in support of\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Miseducation\u2019s <\/em>anniversary, but as of now, she\u2019s canceled several dates. Many of the live shows she\u2019s performed over the past two decades have disappointed fans with their\u00a0late starts, bizarre wardrobe choices, and manically arranged versions of hits. The\u00a0<\/em>Miseducation <\/em>is her only studio album. It remains to be seen whether she\u2019ll ever release a full-length project again. Morgan wrote an Essence<\/em>\u00a0cover story on Hill in 2006. It concludes, \u201cNot only has L-Boogie left the building but the Lauryn Hill icon we helped create may very well also have been an illusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hill is not an icon for today. The burden of being the first or the only one is onerous. Perhaps she shouldn\u2019t have ever had to carry it. Morgan said she hopes that today\u2019s black women will gain an ability to exist between a \u201cspectrum of identities and experiences,\u201d accept goodness and pleasure, and learn to endure the discomfort of naming our pain. For all her vulnerability on The\u00a0<\/em>Miseducation, <\/em>Lauryn was still oblique about her troubles. She filtered so much of herself through an unattainable, unassailable goddess persona, with stifling, middle-class, ghetto-shaming politics. Beyonc\u00e9 is notable for her media silence, but the narratives of her music speak candidly. \u201cBey is in a much better place than Lauryn was because Bey could talk about her relationship and bare it all,\u201d Morgan said. And yet Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s power and independence probably wouldn\u2019t have been possible without Hill. Morgan\u2019s new book is a useful document, a multidimensional map, of the fruitful era that made it happen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Danielle A. Jackson was born in Memphis and lives in Brooklyn. She\u00a0is an associate editor at <\/em>Longreads and has contributed essays to the<\/em> Poetry Foundation, Literary Hub,<\/em> and <\/em>The New Yorker online.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  One recent midsummer afternoon, I trekked from Central Brooklyn to the South Bronx to meet the pioneering hip-hop journalist and feminist writer\u00a0Joan Morgan, author of the new book She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. We were to meet off the 5 train\u2019s 138th\u00a0Street stop, in an area some new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1570,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[34989,782,34984,34983,12887,34973,34972,34982,34987,34977,34986,34985,34990,34988,34979,34980,34981,34991,14793,34975,34978,34974,34976],"class_list":["post-128362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-akiba-solomon","tag-alice-walker","tag-all-eyes-on-me","tag-aquemini","tag-beyonce","tag-cant-stop","tag-decoded","tag-doggystyle","tag-dream-hampton","tag-joan-morgan","tag-kierno-mayo","tag-loquent-rage-a-black-feminist-finds-her-superpower","tag-lynneee-denise","tag-michaela-angela-davis","tag-patricia-hill-collins","tag-paula-giddens","tag-ready-to-die","tag-tarana-burke","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-tao-of-wu","tag-when-chickenheads-come-home-to-roost","tag-wont-stop","tag-wu-tang-clan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJoan Morgan, Hip-Hop Feminism, and \u2018The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Not only has L-Boogie left the building but the Lauryn Hill icon we helped create may very well also have been an illusion.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/08\/joan-morgan-hip-hop-feminism-and-the-twenty-year-legacy-of-the-miseducation-of-lauryn-hill\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Joan Morgan, Hip-Hop Feminism, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Danielle A. 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