Lauryn Hill is best known for being a member of The Fugees and for her critically acclaimed solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which won numerous awards, broke several sales records and was listed by Rolling Stone as one of the greatest albums of all time. This song was first released by Cher.Limited 140gm vinyl LP pressing includes digital download. This article was amended on 23 September 2014 because the original referred to Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). The big attitude that Lauryn Hill exhibits all night can’t obliterate the impression that she remains an object lesson in wasted potential.Īt O2 Academy, Birmingham, on 23 September. Having growled I Only Have Eyes for You at a volume that would elicit admiring nods from Shirley Bassey, Hill plays the doe-eyed ingenue on Cher’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), subverting its cooing submissiveness by whipping off her cap to reveal a shaven head, then closes by strafing her melodious biggest hit, Doo Wop (That Thing), with eardrum-shredding bass. Fu-Gee-La, originally all honeyed, measured cool, becomes a dancehall reggae roustabout Ready or Not is reimagined as pulverising rap-metal. Instead, the second half of the set is an uneven mix of Fugees songs and Bob Marley covers. She has reportedly been working on her next album for 10 years, but we hear no new material tonight.
When Hill dons an acoustic guitar for relatively sensitive readings of MTV album songs such as Mr Intentional, you wish she’d apply the same courtesy to her better material. Ex-Factor, her soulful dissing of former Fugee and ex-lover Wyclef Jean, deserves better than to be reduced to a funk-metal workout. It’s invigorating, but it lacks light and shade. To Zion, her gentle paean to her eldest son, is rendered as a blare of freeform jazz. Gesticulating to the soundman to turn everything up to 11, she spits the reflective poetry of Final Hours as a rapid-fire rap. It sets the tone for a intriguing but often challenging evening that sees Hill abandon the subtleties and nuances of her neo-soul in favour of old-school hardcore hip-hop. Everything Is Everything – a slyslice of sensual soul on the album – becomes a taut, upbeat exercise in breathless James Brown funk.
#MS LAURYN HILL UNPLUGGED FULL#
When she finally appears, still girlish at 39 in a baseball cap and zebra-effect, knee-length coat, the cheers that greet her are as much of relief as of delight.īacked by a full band, animated and bouncing on the balls of her feet like a psyched-up boxer, she ricochets into an early clutch of Miseducation of Lauryn Hill material like a woman on a mission and a deadline. Last year, she spent three months in prison in the US for tax evasion.Įxpectations for this first show of a rare short UK tour are thus understandably mixed with trepidation, not allayed when there is still no sign of Hill an hour after showtime, leading to boos from the crowd. A solo European tour was pulled after two dates for “health reasons”. On a soon-aborted Fugees reunion tour, her diva behaviour included demanding being addressed as Ms Hill or, ideally, Empress. Hill reportedly spent the early 2000s in thrall to a personal spiritual guru, as well as flogging overpriced merchandise from her website. There was a poorly received 2001 MTV Unplugged album that saw her eschew Miseducation material in favour of strumming an acoustic guitar and rambling between-song ruminations. Her brief, sporadic returns to music have been quixotic and baffling.
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