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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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MTV Unplugged 2.0 Artist: Lauryn Hill Label: Sony Length 21 tracks I find it amazing that a star of Lauryn Hill’s no doubt magnitude after Fugees and her critically and commercially massive Miseducation…album, should bring this album out as a second solo work. I find it amazing that Sony would allow her to do so. At the best most of these songs are bedroom works in progress, at worst this an album of so many flaws that a myth could be extinguished in an instant. Here is the newly crowned queen of hip hop taking on a folk singer persona. Your head goes into sonic culture shock. She’s no great guitarist and sometimes the basic strumming style grates and you are wishing for a little more musically. How will these sound if they make her next ‘real’ album? Then she misses notes and is clumsy over many a chord, she stumbles and restarts. It is not the making of a modern big label release. And yet…Maybe this is a brave move by Sony. In allowing the warts and all, they allow Hill to conjure a two CD set that as a happening is unique and powerful and as spiritually deep and prophetic as anything that is sent out from the Big Studios of the Big Music empires. The sum here is much, much greater than all of its parts. Indeed the parts are in places less than mediocre but the sum is quite a sensational happening. This is the document of a pop idol stripping back her skin to pour the contents of her soul all over a stage, a television and a pop record. This is the journal you lock away in your drawer being read to the entire world. Hill’s songs in progress are actually her soul speaking aloud through her own life in progress. It is almost like a huge cross between a testimony and a sermon where the songs are just nails to hang the pictures of her main points that are spoken between rather than sung in the songs. There is twenty five minutes of chat broken into an introduction, seven interludes and rather than finishing with a big musical crescendo there is an outro that closes the show with her telling the audience that she is crazy and deranged but at peace. Throughout Hill is sharing how she has dealt with her voice, her dress and her public persona, breaking free from who the world thinks she is and has made her think she is to find herself. She says “fantasy is what people want but reality is what they need and I’m just retired from the fantasy part.” Without doubt it is a spiritual exorcism, confession and recommitment. She speaks about how God has taught her what is wrong and then given her the aids towards a solution. When she says that there have been “alot of miracles have happened in a short time,” you sense that we are listening to God at work on a life. She breaks down during "I Gotta Find Peace of Mind" as she repeats, ““wonderful merciful merciful God…” In the end the Gospel According to Lauryn Hill is about being yourself and letting God set you free to be that person, ““the real you is more interested than the fake somebody else…true healing is from the inside out.” The songs are almost an aside to the message and yet there are some powerful lyrical diatribes against third millennium society ills, exposing the sin of hedonism, celebrity, industry, government, commerce etc. It is prophetic stuff and though the rapping is what struggles most in the minimalist music, there are some catchy melodies too and all in all the entire preach is a very gripping thing. Just how those outside the Church will take to her spiritual obsessions will be very interesting indeed. Steve Stockman 6/10/2002
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