Lauryn Hill, Hip-Hop and Mental Illness

By Chakara

A musical selection of emotions and empowerment, respect and just soulful music is what the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill provided for young women who enjoyed R&B/Hip-Hop music across the world. Recently, we’re drenched in stories providing assumptions of signs of ‘mental illnesses’ were being reason for her musical absence. Lauryn hill traveled mentally from being one of the sharpest and motivational artists in music, to someone who sporadically responds to media accusation thru a Tumblr page – providing rants that include dialogue that can’t be properly understood. Instead of worrying, empathetically – our hip hop family can be found daily placing jokes and unnecessary names on Lauryn Hill’s name. Instead of understanding the fruit Lauryn carried to widen the door for female hip hop, today’s hip hop connoisseurs would rather make jokes about how ‘weird’ the dresses, or the dialogue of her written letters. You see with the many mentally ill people out here, fighting to their ‘life’ back from the grasps of their own ‘unintentional’ thoughts. I just can’t laugh at Lauryn Hill. Thinking about her birth children who will face even more confusion, much more personally, than the rumor thriving worlds of social media, can’t allow me to ridicule or joke.

Real or fake, true or false, rumors about Lauryn Hill and her ‘reason for going crazy’, as the public loves to mention, just don’t sit well with me. Being a child who witnessed their mother experience mental illness downs, can’t allow me to push the fact that mental illnesses affect the AA community to an extreme.

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