Everyone but me knows who Lauryn Hill is

19 Replies

Hill (2)

I’m up on the latest technology, even as I resist moving up to the larger, more unwieldy iPhone 6 (and yes, I know that the latest is 6s — I don’t want that, either).

I know all about the multitude of people running for president this year, even though I continue to get Kasich and Pataki confused. I think Kasich’s the one I kinda like. Or is it Pataki?…

I’m up-to-date on most of the hot shows in this new Golden Age of television (which occurs as Television As We Knew It passes away).

But recent pop music can escape me, largely because with only rare exceptions (Adele, LMFAO), none of it cuts through the clutter enough to impress me. I’m pretty current right up to the late MTV period, which is to say the early ’90s (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Green Day, Radiohead, etc.), which is pretty good considering that’s just before I turned 40. I really think that was the last sizable explosion of real creativity in pop — and really kind of the last gasp of rock.

So it was that when this news broke today…

Lauryn Hill will headline Columbia’s Famously Hot New Year on Dec. 31, city officials announced Thursday….

… I went up and down the hall asking the other folks here at ADCO whether they knew who Lauryn Hill was. And they all did. I did not.

They said if I heard some of her hits, I’d know who she was.

I did not, at least initially. I DID recognize her cover of “Killing Me Softly,” and she did some good things with it, but that was always a good song, dating back to Roberta Flack. And she did that not as a solo act, but with the Fugees. And she did it in the mid-90s, at the end of what I refer to as the last creative period in pop music.

All the rest of her stuff hits me in a blank space. And none of it sounds as good, as soulful, as deep, as her version of “Killing Me Softly.”

Dang… If Championship Vinyl were a real place, and it was still in business, Barry, Rob and even the mild-mannered Dick would be giving me a really hard time now. I comfort myself that those snobs would know who she was, but probably not put her in the same league with, say, Solomon Burke or the Beta Band…

19 thoughts on “Everyone but me knows who Lauryn Hill is”

  2. Brad Warthen Post author

    Let me say that I don’t mean to criticize the choice of Ms. Hill to perform at FHNY. I’m sure she’ll put on a great show. No, I’m just holding myself up to ridicule for my own pop ignorance.

    I only barely remembered who “Kool and the Gang” was when they did the show two years ago, and they were awesome. I kept going, “Oh, they did THAT?” I had just sort of figured they were invited because “Celebration” was a perfect New Year’s Eve song…

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  4. Bryan Caskey

    I know her name, but I couldn’t have named anything that she sings. Basically, I know she’s a singer.

    Then again, like Lester Bangs, I’m uncool.

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  5. Ralph Hightower

    Who? Yesterday at the dentist, I heard “Shake it Up”; I think that’s Taylor Swift, but I don’t know.

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      1. Doug Ross

        It’s Shake it OFF, not UP. Shake It Up was by The Cars.

        I hope I never get to the point where I reject anything because it’s new.

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        1. Brad Warthen Post author

          … which is not what’s happening here. As I pointed out, I’m really into all kinds of great stuff that’s new. Ridiculously into it, in many cases.

          We just go through these bad patches in the field of popular music.

          I thought the late 70s was such a period. After the 60s, and the early 70s, there was a real lack of creativity, outside of punk — which, while I respected what it was trying to do in terms of getting music back to elemental basics, I wasn’t that into. Yeah, Elvis Costello came out of that time, and he’s one of my favorites — but I didn’t really discover him until the 80s, at which point I kicked myself for what I had missed.

          Then, in the 80s, there was an explosion of creativity, largely ignited by music videos. That continued until the early to mid 90s. The early 90s saw another revival of very basic rock via grunge, and the increased mainstreaming of hip-hop.

          Since then, what? Yeah, here or there there’s a great song, but where’s the movement? Where’s the real innovation? Where’s the WAVE of creativity we saw in past periods — like the wave we’re seeing right now in television? Pop hits are produced on an assembly line — there’s a book out now about how it works — and they sound like it.

          No, Doug, this is not about things being new. It’s about things being disappointing…

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          2. Doug Ross

            Mumford & Sons, Alabama Shakes, dubstep, the rise of female artists to prominence… plenty of things going on in the music industry. It’s just not targeted at you.

            I listen to Sirius 70’s on 7 and 60’s on 6 when I can. The early 70’s is mostly terrible but it’s better than the 60’s. Other than the Beatles and Rolling Stones, who is listenable? Beach Boys? Ugh.. please. Janis Joplin? Hendrix? The Who? all pretty worn out.

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              1. Brad Warthen Post author

                Also… I confess to being put off by pop music that is TARGETED at anyone.

                I prefer something that is the honest expression of what you refer to as the “artist.” I don’t want anything that is obviously the result of a marketing plan. I never have.

                I mean, Brian Epstein did a great job marketing The Beatles, but without their raw talent, they’d have been nothing more than the Dave Clark Five…

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        2. Brad Warthen Post author

          And you know why I didn’t catch the “Shake it Up” error?

          Because the REASON I know the Taylor Swift song is that I watched as employees at Providence produced this fun little video doing a twist on the Swift song to promote health shakes, and THEIRS was called “Shake It Up”…

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  6. Brad Warthen

    This is the book about the current pop industry I was trying to remember: The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, by John Seabrook. An excerpt from a review:

    Their ap­proach to song­writ­ing, far from the soli­tary com­poser la­bor­ing at a pi­ano, is more akin to a work­shop. It most of­ten in­volves what Mr. Seabrook calls the track-and-hook method. First a pro­ducer, of­ten working with a num­ber of other pro­duc­ers and en­gi­neers, cre­ates the track—made up of the beats, the rhyth­mic un­der­pin­nings of any pop song, consist­ing al­most en­tirely of syn­the­sized and sam­pled au­dio. Pro­duc­ers write a num­ber of tracks in a day and send them in MP3 form to the toplin­ers. These are the Cyra­nos of the mu­sic in­dus­try, vo­cal­ists who sup­ply the song’s melodies, which con­sist mainly of short, catchy, repet­i­tive “hooks.” It is not un­com­mon for pro­duc­ers to send the same track to mul­ti­ple toplin­ers, pick­ing and choos­ing el­e­ments from the dif­ferent sub­mis­sions.

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  7. Barry

    I can’t name one Lauryn Hill song.

    From reading about her, there isn’t much to read about in the last 15 years (she pretty much disappareed from the music scene). Maybe that i why she is free to come to Columbia, SC on New Years Eve.

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