The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Dissect)

As a 15-year-old, I bought Lauryn Hill's solo album 'The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill' as soon as it came out, and I heard it on repeat for months without knowing half of what it was about. More than a backdrop to an epic and rootless adolescence it became a backdrop to endless hours spent playing the hardly legendary CD-rom platform game 'Magic Boy' that I'd randomly discovered in a box of cornflakes. 20 years on, this album sits comfortably and deservedly in hip-hop's Hall of Fame. The first season of the music podcast Dissect is about this album.

Dissect is a radio version of – to stay in the media universe of the 90's – the CD pamphlet and MTV's pop-up videos in one: It's a chronological walk- and play-through of one particular album, with meticulous accounts of each song's creation, musical roots, relation to and fun facts about the artist's life at the time the album was written, and interpretation of the meaning of each line and lyric.

Besides Lauryn Hill, you only hear one voice in the podcast series about 'The Miseducation', and that voice belongs to the host Cole Cuchna, and you will hear that voice a lot, so you have to like his style. He is articulate and precise, but almost devoid of humor, irony or whimsy. He carries the lyrics' slang expressions and phrases out of the streets of Newark and New York and analyses them with 100% stone-face through a solemn academic prism. In particular, the review of the huge hit 'Doo Wop' weaves one thread of hip-hop history after another into Lauryn's biography, and I was at once relieved and surprised when, after 21 years in the dark, I finally understood what it means when Lauryn says 'remember when he told you he was 'bout the Benjamins'. Throughout the podcast I became increasingly aware that Lauryn, at only 23, has a considerably arrogant and lecturing attitude on this album, telling us how girls should behave, and warning us how boys cannot be trusted, so we will not make the same mistakes Lauryn made in her 'youth'. So the whole concept of the album is Lauryn basically 'educating' us because she herself was 'miseducated'. Although she is at the time a 23-year-old musical prodigy, the album itself loses a bit of its youthfulness and street vibe, and instead gets a tinge of religious moral and parentalism.

Before pressing 'play' on The Miseducation, Cole delivers a prologue to the album, focusing on Lauryn Hill's upbringing and her pursuit of a career in showbiz, and about The Fugees, the group that made her world famous – as well as the social dynamics of the group which came to mark and haunt Lauryn long after she left the group in favor of a solo career. Those dynamics are also referred to throughout the podcast series, with a constant focus on Lauryn's capsized relationship to Wyclef Jean from The Fugees, and her spiritual rebirth when she shortly thereafter becomes a mother (an event which, among other things, inspires her to create one of the record's greatest hits 'Zion').

The first episode of the show (i.e. the prologue) is a real treat and it's worth a listen even if you don't feel like diving deeper into the universe of The Miseducation. But if you are up for the full dive and also up for listening to a truly funky album in a really non-funky way, what awaits you is a thrilling deconstruction of a surprisingly multifaceted, music history-conscious, multiculturally referencing and highly complex textual and musical universe.