Lauryn Hill performed in Los Angeles on Saturday night (November 4) as part of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill 25th Anniversary Tour. Par for the course, she showed up a bit late but wasn’t afraid to address her tardiness head on. In a clip making the rounds online, Hill spoke passionately about why her fans should be grateful she shows up at all.
“I hear, ‘She’s late. She’s late a lot,’” she said. “Yo, you’re lucky I make it on this stage every night. I don’t do it because they let me. I do it because I stand here in the name of God. God is the one who allows me to do it, who surrounded me with family and community when there was no support, when the album sold so many records and nobody showed up and said, ‘Hey, would you like to make another one?’ So I went around the world and played the same album over and over and over and over again. Because we’re survivors. We’re not just the survivors, we’re the thrivers.”
Lauryn Hill addresses her “lateness”
—“Yo, y’all lucky I make it on this stage every night!” pic.twitter.com/ieulUzn8Bp
— mya. (@myabriabe) November 5, 2023
Of course, Hill was talking about her one and only solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which was released in 1998. The project arrived two years after the monumental success of the Fugees’ hit record, The Score, and was a commercial dynamo. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, selling more than 422,000 copies in its first week, a record for first-week sales by a female artist. It earned 1o Grammy Award nominations and won five, making Hill the first woman to receive that many nominations and awards in one night. In 2021, the album was certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), again making Hill the first female artist to accomplish such a feat.
Hill’s latest tour has been plagued by vocal issues. Last week, she was forced to cancel shows in Texas and Philadelphia. She explained on social media, “As you may know, I’ve been doing my best to overcome a serious case of vocal strain/injury over the past week or so. I fought through the last couple shows, pushing my voice, and masking the injury with medication. This isn’t safe or sustainable. I woke up this morning hoping to have enough voice to get through tonight, but I can barely talk let alone sing or rap.”
