Vol 6: September 18 - QuietTunes VI: Just Like Water
There’s more to music than music. Often, the stories around music, the context in which the music is made, performed, and received is as important as the music itself (honestly, often more important).
That is the case with Ms. Lauryn Hill’s Unplugged 2.0 album, an album of acoustic songs which showed a new vulnerability for the singer, songwriter, and rapper. The creation of the work and the reception to it are as impactful as the music, which is powerful and raw, in content and delivery.
Ms. Lauryn Hill - Just Like Water
Let’s start with the music. First, some important structural notes: most of the song consists of two alternating chords (B Major and a sort of diminished triad or AMaj7/E (the voicing of this chord is very E based and the predominant effect is a kind of plagal suspension-y type thing brought on by the bass motion, the 6/4 reading with the high A, and the neighborly voice leading which wants to return to the B Major)), punctuated by two bass notes. A chromatically descending chord sequence appears in the fourth verse, which coincides with a lyrical change I’ll get into later. The stasis given by the vamp (alternating chords) creates an emotional contextual vehicle and then get out of the way for the lyrics, which are the focal point. This is low-information rhetoric, a kind of quietness (see the post on lo-fi hip hop and Terry Riley). In extending a metaphor of water, the strong base of the B Major voicing with the suspended character of the diminished triad create a sense of rise and fall, ebb and flow, which, musically, give a certain rhythm to which are entrained and entranced, but also act like cycles of ocean current or of breath. Imagine Ms. Lauryn Hill on the beach in a meditative mind, breathing slowly and deeply, feeling the waves come and go on her legs, the current pulling along her feet.
Lyrically, this is a biblical song. Water is a key metaphor in scripture, associated with cleansing and sustenance: Christ washed the feet of those whose houses he visited, John baptised in water, Ezekiel sprinkles water to cleanse, God gave the fleeing Hebrews water from the Rock at Horeb to sustain them in the desert, Glory emerges from the water in Genesis and John, God cleanses the Earth with a flood. Water is key to the stories of Rebirth in the Bible. And it is so for Hill here: she is being cleansed and reborn and expressing the peace and joy felt by the spiritual water which courses through her. Every line is rife with aquatic imagery of a new heart. When the chromatic descent begins, on the final verse, the tenses change from imagery to action:
Cleaning me, he's purging me, and moving me around
He's bathing and he's cleaning me, and moving me around
Around, and around and around. and around
Washing me, cleaning me, moving me around
He's purging me, he's been cleaning me and moving me around
And around. and around
This has reference to Psalm 51, in which the psalmist asks God to cleanse them of sins and iniquities and create in them a new heart. The chromatic descension could be seen as that dripping water, that baptism, which has created in Ms. Lauryn Hill a new heart.
Like the last post about self-refinement, there is an element of self-refinement here: the stasis and vamping chords are meditative kinesthetically, allowing the player to enter into a flow state in which their minds can roam, which is supported by the reflective, repetitive lyrical and melodic structure and the quiet, introspective nature of spiritual rebirth.
These themes of stasis, water, cleansing, and rebirth come as Ms. Lauryn Hill was recreating her public image. Before this album came out, in 2002, Ms. Lauryn Hill was known as Lauryn Hill, member of the extremely famous hip-hop group the Fugees, sole artist on one of the most popular and influential albums in rap history, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, sex symbol, and an outspoken political voice. Her music was club-ready, yet socially conscious and her voice ranged from soulful, swoonful, divatic, and melodious to incisive and cutting, when singing or rapping . She was hip-hop royalty expected to create an empire like that of Beyonce or J-Lo.
After the insane success of the massively produced Miseducation, fans expected another classic album of club and radio hits. For years they waited, years at the hey-day of plastic boy bands and starlets. The echoes, posturing, and animosity of East-West coast battles still hung in the air as the culture saw the rise of rise of Eminem, Nelly, and a widening, whitening audience for hip-hop packaged ‘well.’ The turn of the 21st century was a revolution against the realness and rawness of the early 90s: a computerist, consumerist public, eager to swallow up bite-sized morsels of perfect, pre-packaged media.
What came to those fans was MTV Unplugged 2.0. It was raw, unpolished, and LONG. Hill flubs notes, misses chords (to be fair, that second chord is awkward and a lot is asked of the left hand pinky…), starts songs over, and rambles about God and personal growth in cryptic diatribes full of associative references which, clearly, meant something to her, just not to the audience. The reception was overwhelmingly negative. Fans didn’t understand. Critics lampooned it. Tabloids said she was having a public mental breakdown. It sold poorly. Ms. Lauryn Hill pulled back from the public eye.
What they hadn’t seen, what was quiet to them, were the experiences Hill had gone through over the last four years since Miseducation and the last six since the Fugees blew up. She had two kids, was pregnant during Miseducation then went on a long, draining tour, she had a bitter falling out with the Fugees, trouble in her marriage (cheating and a hidden marriage). Much of this played out in a public which was hungry for celebrity gossip and without empathy. This fed into her perfectionism, requiring her to appear perfect at all times in public, to maintain that sex symbol status. And much more than that, she was a young mother of two.
She had taken years between Miseducation, the tabloids said because of the scandal in her life, but friends said because she was being a mother and re-evaluating her life and her relationship with fame.
So, this raw album comes at a time when Hill is soul-searching, when she is rebuilding herself after setbacks and betrayals, when she is staking out a private personhood against the objectification of the public. It is her in transition, working things out, and expressing her in-progress growth, that thing we all do all the time, in an uncensored way. But people didn’t want or couldn’t accept that kind of quiet strength. Their expectations were denied.
I think, within some of those expectations, was an unfamiliarity or uncomfortableness with the quiet life of a young, Black sex symbol. This is not what Lauryn Hill was to them and not what they wanted to hear from a young Black woman: an expression of a rich, contradictory inner life mediated through folk music, a musical form primarily seen as White. There are, and have always been, caveats to the expression of inner Black lives, especially of Black women and girls. Their inner machinations must come with limited dynamic range, must be about their relations to others and the world rather than their own self-image, their thoughts on larger conversations or events, or their inventions and ideas, must come in Black-associated forms and media, and they be safe emotions in contexts that don’t implicate power structures or inspire guilt. For a young, Black woman to defy market expectations and bare her imperfect soul imperfectly was an act of defiance, one of those quiet acts that, like Christ washing the feet of his followers, shows a deeper humanity against the expectations of a society.
There is a quiet in this music: a structural quiet, sure, but also a personal quiet writ large. It is the quietness of internal acts of self-assessment, self-love, and baring oneself, broadcast out into a noisy world like how a fire gives warmth or how a glass of water satiates you. It is quiet in nature, quiet in action, and quiet in impact.