Lauryn Hill & The Secret Of Her Success

“See fantasy is what people want, but reality is what they need. And I just retired from the fantasy part.”— Lauryn Hill. This is exactly the kind of woman Lauryn Hill was and still continues to be , the kind of woman that was not afraid to speak her truth and expose the things we try to pretend are not there. Her song Black Rage, sole purpose is to help society evolve, raise awareness and inspire in ways our peers can not. Lauryn Hill was born on May 26,1975 in East Orange, New Jersey, to parents Mal and Valerie Hill and one other sibling. From an early age Lauryn Hill was filled with a love for music. Lauryn Hill’s household was a very musical home, with her parents having a love for music and her older brother being well rounded with various instruments.

Lauryn Hill was what some may say a sponge, always ready to learn and soak up as much knowledge and experience as possible. When Hill was just a sophomore , she landed a part in a tv soap opera As the World Turns. A few years later she landed a part in the most popular movies today Sister Act II. In 1992, Lauryn Hill joined a band called the Fugees, the band included herself and two other guys named Pras Michel and Wyclef Jean. The group began performing at local places ,with Hill singing lead vocals. The Fugees did not get famous right away it took sometime, their first album, Blunted on Reality did horribly in sales. For their second album ,they switched up their sound, bringing in old school R&B and reggae, while introducing more explicit social issues.

In 1996, their second album The Score was released , it did incredibly well and was at the top of the Billboard and the R&B charts.One of the songs that did really well was “Killing Me softly with his Song” which was a ballad made famous in the 1970s by singer Roberta Flack. Everything was going super well they won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance of The Year. In its first year The Score sold over 3 million copies, the Fugees were now one of the biggest names in the hip hop game; when they started touring all over America the hectic schedule slowly put a strain on the friendship and the band fell out.

Soon after, Lauryn Hill started working on her solo albums. Some of her albums stayed at the top of the Billboard 200 for a whole month and the Billboard R&B charts for a month and a half and some didn’t even make the cut. Lauryn Hill not only was a dope artist but broke many of glass ceilings for women in the music industry. She was the first woman to be nominated in 10 categories all at once and the first to win 5 trophies in one night.