What made Lauryn Hill follow a mysterious spiritual leader in 2000?
Despite being arguably the most exciting figure in hip-hop in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lauryn Hill was going through it.
She’d been the heart and soul of one of the most critically acclaimed and beloved hip-hop groups of the 1990s with The Fugees, then stepped out on her own and released The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It was a critical and commercial smash that put the New Jersey native on the cusp of mega-stardom
On the surface, everything seemed hunky-dory, but as is often the case, the story behind the scenes was much more traumatic.
Case in point, the album was released with Hill being credited as the sole writer, producer and arranger on every track. After its release, a group of four male producers claimed that they had helped produce and write enough of the album to deserve credit on it. While her label and her team urged Hill to settle out of court, Hill took the producers to court, a gamble that went so badly that Hill settled out of court anyway to the tune of $5 million.
This was the final straw. She was a working mother of two, estranged from her partner, living out of a hotel and with the eyes of the world on her, begging for a follow-up to Miseducation.
However, the whole point of the record had been to prove herself as an artist who could do it all, and now she felt as if she’d been exposed as a fraud. Someone going through that amount of stress needs affirmation and comfort, and Lauryn Hill tried to do as she’s always done, and turned to her faith for reassurance.
You see, despite faith being a vitally important part of Hill’s life, she had grown suspicious of mainstream religion and in particular, mainstream Christianity. She wanted a direct relationship with God, away from any kind of church, which a mysterious man in his mid-40s who went by the name Brother Anthony seemed to provide. There’s no record of how the two met, but within a matter of months of meeting him, Hill was taking Bible studies from him three times a week.
After that, every decision or statement Hill made in the early 2000s seemed to be prefaced by the words “Brother Anthony says…” He said that she should step back from the spotlight, so she did. He said that she should fire her management team, so she did. He said that she should adopt the moniker “Ms. Hill” going forward, so she did. Despite never mentioning him by name in public, the singer was all in. The closest she came to mentioning him was an MTV Online interview from the early 2000s.
She says, “I met someone who has an understanding of the Bible like no one else I ever met in my life. I just sat at [his] feet and ingested pure Scripture for about a year.” One can see this in the new material aired during her disastrous MTV Unplugged show. Her material on Miseducation was informed by her faith. The matieral on Unplugged seemed entirely about explorations of her faith and finding strength in God.
Which should be good, right? Religion can inspire strength and resilience at the hardest of times, and the industry was exploiting Hill left, right and centre. However, not everyone was thrilled by the presence of this new spiritual guide. After all, no one in Hill’s life could really work out what Brother Anthony stood for. In Touré’s spectacular Rolling Stone article ‘The Mystery of Lauryn Hill’ from 2003, a source close to Hill said that, “I don’t think he had a religion, I think he was more like, ‘My interpretation of the Bible is the only interpretation of the Bible. I’m the only one on earth that knows the truth.’”
Pras, Hill’s erstwhile Fugess bandmate, was more direct in his criticism of the spiritual leader. “Brother Anthony was definitely on some other shit,” Pras said. “I had a tape of [his teachings]. That shit is ill. Fucked me up. I can’t really explain it. It was some weird shit, man. It was some real cult shit. When I heard the tape, I couldn’t believe that this dude was really serious. He was sayin’, ‘Give up all your money.’ I don’t know if that meant ‘Give it to me’ or whatever, but on the tape he said, ‘Money doesn’t mean anything.’”
Hill’s life has been so shrouded with mystery since then that we don’t know whether he’s still a part of her life or not. However, one can only hope that the way her career has gone since has been genuinely her decision, and not the will of anyone else.
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