The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill (1998 – Hires)
100 Best Albums Lauryn Hill’s debut—and only—solo studio album was
October 24, 2024
100 Best Albums Lauryn Hill’s debut—and only—solo studio album was
100 Best Albums There are few pop albums, or even
Abbey Road uses a “less is more” approach to production
Sometime during the half-year stretch when 1984’s Purple Rain was
100 Best Albums In 1974, Stevie Wonder was the most
100 Best Albums A few days after releasing 2012’s good
100 Best Albums Producer Mark Ronson remembers when Amy Winehouse
100 Best Albums Even now, years after you first felt
100 Best Albums There’s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of Lemonade, Beyoncé’s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album—and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar. An elderly woman’s voice cuts in: “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her Blackness, her marriage) and make for her most outwardly revealing work to date. The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. The project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement, released without warning in a time of public scrutiny and private suffering. It is also astonishingly tough. Through tears, even Beyoncé has to summon her inner Beyoncé, roaring, “I’ma keep running ’cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.” This panoramic strength—lyrical, vocal, instrumental, and personal—nudged her public image from mere legend to something closer to real-life superhero. Every second of Lemonade deserves to be studied and celebrated (the self-punishment in “Sorry,” the politics in “Formation,” the creative enhancements from collaborators like James Blake and Karen O), but the song that aims the highest musically may be “Don’t Hurt Yourself”—a Zeppelin-sampling psych-rock duet with Jack White. “This is your final warning,” she says in a moment of unnerving calm. “If you try this shit again/You gon’ lose your wife.” In support, White offers a word to the wise: “Love God herself.”
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