Post by AinA on Jan 28, 2017 13:03:04 GMT 1
like how it's the "standard of the culture."
Producer 9th Wonder has been tapped to curate Harvard University’s We Are the Breaks project, which will archive 200 hip-hop albums that are a “standard of the culture” to their esteemed library.
The first four albums that 9th picked to be enshrined in the library are A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, Nas’ Illmatic, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Each album will be archived with liner notes and the vinyl that was used in the original production.
9th Wonder went on his Instagram account to formally announce his four distinguished honorees to start with for the Harvard Library. He wrote:
In 2012, I was chosen to be a Harvard University Fellow at The Dubois Institute under the direction of @henrylouisgates and Dr. Marcy Morgan. I chose the research project “These Are The Breaks”….a collection of albums that are the standard of the culture…..200 in all in no particular order. These are the first four we chose to start with….to live for forever in the Harvard Library…and to be forever placed in the canon…complete with liner notes and the vinyl that was used in the production of the album…… To live forever….shouts @levelsoundz and @madtwiinz for the masterful design of the boxes and content. @harvarduniversity @thehiphoparchive 4 down.. 196 to go….”
Although it was not mentioned, according to reports, MC Lyte’s 1988 debut album Lyte As a Rock will also be inducted into the Harvard Library.
Read More: 9th Wonder Picks A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, Lauryn Hill and Kendrick Lamar to Be Enshrined in Harvard Library | theboombox.com/9th-wonder-a-tribe-called-quest-nas-lauryn-hill-kendrick-lamar-harvard-library/?trackback=tsmclip
I just hope he remains true.
So far, good choices
eta: hiphoparchive.org/albums/the-miseducation-of-lauryn-hill
The liner notes really open up how MISED changed the game. MISED gave a balance to hip-hop and allowed for more emotional input from men and women within hip-hop. She didn't get a lot of just dues for what she infused into the culture. I think that's begun to turn around and has for a while now.
“Herein lies the opportunity of the Negro artist as a world reformer.”
Carter G. Woodson
The Miseducation of the Negro (1933)
“Say What? Hiphop Started out in The Heart
Yo, Now Everybody Tryin’ to Chart”
Lauryn Hill - Superstar - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
Lauryn Hill is an artistic innovator whose creative labor has performed an essential and unique role in imagining and inventing a new and necessary cultural space for Hiphop. It is a soul space, a space that Martin Luther King Jr. might have called a “beloved community.” It is a desperately desired world made of, by, and for Hiphop culture and the people who have always loved it. It is also an invitation to enter and inhabit that world for those whose ears, minds, and cultural sensibilities would be educated to love Hiphop by Lauryn Hill’s first solo album. Make no mistake, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) ‘is’ a concept album about love and freedom. It represents a secret covenant with the people who loved Hiphop for years before the album’s release and a welcoming embrace to the people who learned to love Hiphop culture through and due to the education of Miseducation. It remains a transformative and redemptive cultural event in the history of Hiphop, contemporary music, and popular culture. It was also a media phenomenon that renewed and reframed discourses about music and culture and expanded and exposed existing discourses about art, ethics, and politics, including the politics of feminism, gender, race, family, community, and nation. However, beyond – perhaps, even, despite – its record-breaking successes and social significance, Miseducation is an album characterized by artistic depth, not just in terms of its quality of moral resonance but, also, in terms of its musical, cultural, and political wholeness.
At first listen, it may seem that The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is an album about popular notions of romantic love. Throughout the album a teacher, performed by poet-politician Ras J. Baraka, interviews precocious and thoughtful children about their theories of love. One student answers his questions about love by sighing, “Looooove…” The entire class laughs, and the teacher says “Yo! Yo! He’s about to give us a dissertation, the way he said THAT! Go ahead, break it down, break it down!” With every song, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill carefully creates her musical dissertation on love, re-educating the emotions and the aesthetics of her listener as she “breaks down” love of all kinds: from the private to the political, the artistic to the cultural, and from the erotic to the esoteric.
By invoking Carter G. Woodson’s classic Miseducation of the Negro (1933) in the title, Hill both affirms her historic connection to black people as a group and suggests that she herself has been re-educating herself and us. Carter G. Woodson’s work is a cautionary tale, and Miseducation suggests that Lauryn Hill has absorbed many of its painful lessons. In return, she encourages us to learn love and learn to love in a new way that, to paraphrase Woodson, avoids imitating what others do, but is instead about loving in ways that result in "great achievements, unusual insight" and the ability to imagine and hear love as it spits and sings in a new voice. Miseducation’s most powerful love message is directed to, for, and through Hiphop music itself. The album’s legacy is an enduring record of one of Hiphop’s great love stories and of Hiphop’s broken heart, a heart tended to by The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’s honored promise of creating Hiphop music defined by devotion to the cultures that created it, a heart broken anew by what some interpret as the culture’s betrayal of that promise.
Miseducation becomes a contemplative rumination about love and freedom as it teaches lessons from at least two different perspectives that evolve from both of these elements. It explores both emotional love and cultural love while exploring and exposing the journey to find freedom within both of them. It interrogates the emotional politics of love in intimate relationships. Hill explores how dynamics and conflicts can produce or prevent the freedom to love, particularly as men and women struggle to love themselves and each other while also participating in political struggles against freedom-destroying forces like racism, sexism, and classism. Miseducation centralizes the love experiences of women through a lyrical analysis of how vulnerability and strength, sex, family, trauma, ambition, spirituality, success, and other themes have affected Hill as a woman artist. By centralizing emotion in general, and love in particular, on an album that is unabashedly a Hiphop album, Hill invites the theme of love into the center of Hiphop’s lyrical discourse.
This invitation to include love may have ultimately, and ironically, been more liberating to men and male artists than it has been for women. Artists who may have found the vision of masculinity and femininity promoted within commercial ‘90s ‘Gangsta Rap’ to be too limiting, found that Miseducation opened, re-opened, or kept open emotional doors within Hiphop music, such as those opened previously by artists like Tupac, and opened them wide enough for emcees of all genders and backgrounds to rhyme their humanity through Hiphop in complex and nuanced ways. While many hoped that this would create more opportunities for women emcees, nearly twenty years later many more men than women are supported by commercial Hiphop and more of those men than women have been able to explore their emotional lives as part of their Hiphop careers. Miseducation¸ through its analysis of different kinds of love, challenged listeners to recognize love as a politically and socially meaningful subject of lyrical discourse, as well as an emotionally compelling site of creativity. Miseducation, thus, centralized emotional consciousness and emotional politics – psychocultural dynamics where feeling, cognition, introspection, and power meet – as viable components of Hiphop.
Miseducation, by presenting R&B and Hiphop as equal and equally eloquent partners in a musical dance throughout the album contributed along with its predecessors, to the process of turning the dialogue between Hiphop and R&B into a permanent and intimate musical conversation, one that continues to define both art forms. Moreover, Miseducation, like Missy Elliot’s Supa Dupa Fly, demanded. Missy Elliott would remark on this in the record “Not Tonight” (1997) which featured, Elliott, Lil’ Kim, Da Brat, Left Eye, and Angie Martinez by rhyming “You ain't gonna use me to just be singin hooks/What I look like?/Patti LaBelle or somebody?” Elliott was not disrespecting LaBelle but was critiquing the common practice in many songs of only including women as singers, not as emcees, a practice which continues to this day as women emcees continue to struggle for recognition of their significant talents. The following year, Miseducation would echo and validate the legitimacy of Elliot’s critique with an entire album of evidence that women’s skills as emcees deserve recognition and celebration. The R&B dynamics that were sustained vocally and instrumentally throughout the album did not only contribute to the album’s exquisite musical sound, they also ensured that the skills of women emcees would actually be heard within and beyond the Hiphop world.
Because it asserted Hiphop Music as a uniquely exquisite medium of emotional expression, a role previously reserved for genres like Soul and Folk music, Miseducation became a source of emotional liberation for anyone who crossed the bridge to Hiphop music and culture. As stated above, due to the gender dynamics of Hiphop, Miseducation also became a source of emotional liberation for men. This is culturally significant. Most cultures throughout the world, including all American cultures, are emotionally repressive for men, in some cases to the point of emotional dehumanization and devastation. Because Hiphop music achieved recognition as a valid and important medium for expressing masculinity, Miseducation’s success helped transform Hiphop into a valid and important medium for expressing emotion. As a result, Miseducation, along with a few other albums and artists, helped create a Hiphop culture that can serve, though it does not always do so, as a safe, sanctioned, significant, and sustaining space of emotional expression for both women and men. It is a space that men need every bit as much as women do and it is a space that, in recent years, male artists like Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Drake, and others have both explored and expanded. That so few women Hiphop artists have been given the same opportunities as men to be heard and respected on multiple levels, emotional and others, remains a cultural and artistic tragedy.
The combination of the Hill’s emceeing and singing alongside the contributions of remarkable artists to the album’s exquisite instrumentation turned Miseducation into an education unto itself. Its display of the cultural wealth of African Diasporic musical forms including Hiphop, R&B, Reggae, Classic Soul, Neo-Soul, Doo-Wop, Jazz, etc. did not merely represent those forms, it synthesized and harmonized them in new ways. By doing so, it celebrated them as a performance of cultural love and aesthetic devotion. It transformed the way many people heard Hiphop either by forcing them to really listen to it for the first time or by inspiring them to hear Hiphop and the other musical genres on the album in new ways, with a new “ear,” a “miseducated” ear. Miseducation’s sound was a symbol of the cultural freedom of Hiphop, a freedom that rejected narrow musical boundaries and embraced multiple sounds, voices, heritages and audiences.
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http://instagr.am/p/BPtqLRyB9Kv
Producer 9th Wonder has been tapped to curate Harvard University’s We Are the Breaks project, which will archive 200 hip-hop albums that are a “standard of the culture” to their esteemed library.
The first four albums that 9th picked to be enshrined in the library are A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, Nas’ Illmatic, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Each album will be archived with liner notes and the vinyl that was used in the original production.
9th Wonder went on his Instagram account to formally announce his four distinguished honorees to start with for the Harvard Library. He wrote:
In 2012, I was chosen to be a Harvard University Fellow at The Dubois Institute under the direction of @henrylouisgates and Dr. Marcy Morgan. I chose the research project “These Are The Breaks”….a collection of albums that are the standard of the culture…..200 in all in no particular order. These are the first four we chose to start with….to live for forever in the Harvard Library…and to be forever placed in the canon…complete with liner notes and the vinyl that was used in the production of the album…… To live forever….shouts @levelsoundz and @madtwiinz for the masterful design of the boxes and content. @harvarduniversity @thehiphoparchive 4 down.. 196 to go….”
Although it was not mentioned, according to reports, MC Lyte’s 1988 debut album Lyte As a Rock will also be inducted into the Harvard Library.
Read More: 9th Wonder Picks A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, Lauryn Hill and Kendrick Lamar to Be Enshrined in Harvard Library | theboombox.com/9th-wonder-a-tribe-called-quest-nas-lauryn-hill-kendrick-lamar-harvard-library/?trackback=tsmclip
I just hope he remains true.
So far, good choices
eta: hiphoparchive.org/albums/the-miseducation-of-lauryn-hill
The liner notes really open up how MISED changed the game. MISED gave a balance to hip-hop and allowed for more emotional input from men and women within hip-hop. She didn't get a lot of just dues for what she infused into the culture. I think that's begun to turn around and has for a while now.
“Herein lies the opportunity of the Negro artist as a world reformer.”
Carter G. Woodson
The Miseducation of the Negro (1933)
“Say What? Hiphop Started out in The Heart
Yo, Now Everybody Tryin’ to Chart”
Lauryn Hill - Superstar - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
Lauryn Hill is an artistic innovator whose creative labor has performed an essential and unique role in imagining and inventing a new and necessary cultural space for Hiphop. It is a soul space, a space that Martin Luther King Jr. might have called a “beloved community.” It is a desperately desired world made of, by, and for Hiphop culture and the people who have always loved it. It is also an invitation to enter and inhabit that world for those whose ears, minds, and cultural sensibilities would be educated to love Hiphop by Lauryn Hill’s first solo album. Make no mistake, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) ‘is’ a concept album about love and freedom. It represents a secret covenant with the people who loved Hiphop for years before the album’s release and a welcoming embrace to the people who learned to love Hiphop culture through and due to the education of Miseducation. It remains a transformative and redemptive cultural event in the history of Hiphop, contemporary music, and popular culture. It was also a media phenomenon that renewed and reframed discourses about music and culture and expanded and exposed existing discourses about art, ethics, and politics, including the politics of feminism, gender, race, family, community, and nation. However, beyond – perhaps, even, despite – its record-breaking successes and social significance, Miseducation is an album characterized by artistic depth, not just in terms of its quality of moral resonance but, also, in terms of its musical, cultural, and political wholeness.
At first listen, it may seem that The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is an album about popular notions of romantic love. Throughout the album a teacher, performed by poet-politician Ras J. Baraka, interviews precocious and thoughtful children about their theories of love. One student answers his questions about love by sighing, “Looooove…” The entire class laughs, and the teacher says “Yo! Yo! He’s about to give us a dissertation, the way he said THAT! Go ahead, break it down, break it down!” With every song, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill carefully creates her musical dissertation on love, re-educating the emotions and the aesthetics of her listener as she “breaks down” love of all kinds: from the private to the political, the artistic to the cultural, and from the erotic to the esoteric.
By invoking Carter G. Woodson’s classic Miseducation of the Negro (1933) in the title, Hill both affirms her historic connection to black people as a group and suggests that she herself has been re-educating herself and us. Carter G. Woodson’s work is a cautionary tale, and Miseducation suggests that Lauryn Hill has absorbed many of its painful lessons. In return, she encourages us to learn love and learn to love in a new way that, to paraphrase Woodson, avoids imitating what others do, but is instead about loving in ways that result in "great achievements, unusual insight" and the ability to imagine and hear love as it spits and sings in a new voice. Miseducation’s most powerful love message is directed to, for, and through Hiphop music itself. The album’s legacy is an enduring record of one of Hiphop’s great love stories and of Hiphop’s broken heart, a heart tended to by The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’s honored promise of creating Hiphop music defined by devotion to the cultures that created it, a heart broken anew by what some interpret as the culture’s betrayal of that promise.
Miseducation becomes a contemplative rumination about love and freedom as it teaches lessons from at least two different perspectives that evolve from both of these elements. It explores both emotional love and cultural love while exploring and exposing the journey to find freedom within both of them. It interrogates the emotional politics of love in intimate relationships. Hill explores how dynamics and conflicts can produce or prevent the freedom to love, particularly as men and women struggle to love themselves and each other while also participating in political struggles against freedom-destroying forces like racism, sexism, and classism. Miseducation centralizes the love experiences of women through a lyrical analysis of how vulnerability and strength, sex, family, trauma, ambition, spirituality, success, and other themes have affected Hill as a woman artist. By centralizing emotion in general, and love in particular, on an album that is unabashedly a Hiphop album, Hill invites the theme of love into the center of Hiphop’s lyrical discourse.
This invitation to include love may have ultimately, and ironically, been more liberating to men and male artists than it has been for women. Artists who may have found the vision of masculinity and femininity promoted within commercial ‘90s ‘Gangsta Rap’ to be too limiting, found that Miseducation opened, re-opened, or kept open emotional doors within Hiphop music, such as those opened previously by artists like Tupac, and opened them wide enough for emcees of all genders and backgrounds to rhyme their humanity through Hiphop in complex and nuanced ways. While many hoped that this would create more opportunities for women emcees, nearly twenty years later many more men than women are supported by commercial Hiphop and more of those men than women have been able to explore their emotional lives as part of their Hiphop careers. Miseducation¸ through its analysis of different kinds of love, challenged listeners to recognize love as a politically and socially meaningful subject of lyrical discourse, as well as an emotionally compelling site of creativity. Miseducation, thus, centralized emotional consciousness and emotional politics – psychocultural dynamics where feeling, cognition, introspection, and power meet – as viable components of Hiphop.
Miseducation, by presenting R&B and Hiphop as equal and equally eloquent partners in a musical dance throughout the album contributed along with its predecessors, to the process of turning the dialogue between Hiphop and R&B into a permanent and intimate musical conversation, one that continues to define both art forms. Moreover, Miseducation, like Missy Elliot’s Supa Dupa Fly, demanded. Missy Elliott would remark on this in the record “Not Tonight” (1997) which featured, Elliott, Lil’ Kim, Da Brat, Left Eye, and Angie Martinez by rhyming “You ain't gonna use me to just be singin hooks/What I look like?/Patti LaBelle or somebody?” Elliott was not disrespecting LaBelle but was critiquing the common practice in many songs of only including women as singers, not as emcees, a practice which continues to this day as women emcees continue to struggle for recognition of their significant talents. The following year, Miseducation would echo and validate the legitimacy of Elliot’s critique with an entire album of evidence that women’s skills as emcees deserve recognition and celebration. The R&B dynamics that were sustained vocally and instrumentally throughout the album did not only contribute to the album’s exquisite musical sound, they also ensured that the skills of women emcees would actually be heard within and beyond the Hiphop world.
Because it asserted Hiphop Music as a uniquely exquisite medium of emotional expression, a role previously reserved for genres like Soul and Folk music, Miseducation became a source of emotional liberation for anyone who crossed the bridge to Hiphop music and culture. As stated above, due to the gender dynamics of Hiphop, Miseducation also became a source of emotional liberation for men. This is culturally significant. Most cultures throughout the world, including all American cultures, are emotionally repressive for men, in some cases to the point of emotional dehumanization and devastation. Because Hiphop music achieved recognition as a valid and important medium for expressing masculinity, Miseducation’s success helped transform Hiphop into a valid and important medium for expressing emotion. As a result, Miseducation, along with a few other albums and artists, helped create a Hiphop culture that can serve, though it does not always do so, as a safe, sanctioned, significant, and sustaining space of emotional expression for both women and men. It is a space that men need every bit as much as women do and it is a space that, in recent years, male artists like Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Drake, and others have both explored and expanded. That so few women Hiphop artists have been given the same opportunities as men to be heard and respected on multiple levels, emotional and others, remains a cultural and artistic tragedy.
The combination of the Hill’s emceeing and singing alongside the contributions of remarkable artists to the album’s exquisite instrumentation turned Miseducation into an education unto itself. Its display of the cultural wealth of African Diasporic musical forms including Hiphop, R&B, Reggae, Classic Soul, Neo-Soul, Doo-Wop, Jazz, etc. did not merely represent those forms, it synthesized and harmonized them in new ways. By doing so, it celebrated them as a performance of cultural love and aesthetic devotion. It transformed the way many people heard Hiphop either by forcing them to really listen to it for the first time or by inspiring them to hear Hiphop and the other musical genres on the album in new ways, with a new “ear,” a “miseducated” ear. Miseducation’s sound was a symbol of the cultural freedom of Hiphop, a freedom that rejected narrow musical boundaries and embraced multiple sounds, voices, heritages and audiences.
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