Product description Grammy-winner Lauryn Hill releases her solo debut album, a follow-up to the Fugees's The : Soul/R&BMedia Format: Compact DiskRating: Release Date: 25-AUG-1998 The first solo album by the Fugees' most distinctive voice quickly wipes away the pretensions of so many current hip-hoppers' discs. It does so by both engaging their widescreen ethos--"To Zion," with its martial drums and gospel choir, is as epic a production as has been heard in 1998's pop music--and speaking the plain truth. Reminiscent in its scope of nothing so much as Aretha's early-'70s Spirit in the Dark and Young, Gifted and Black, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill also easily earns its late-'90s place next to Erykah Badu's Baduizm. Even more personal, if hardly any more political, than cohort Wyclef Jean's Carnival, Miseducation focuses equally on her life (especially the birth of her child) and social concerns about the present and future. Its often quiet surface, if anything, lends intensity. "Everything you drop is so tired," she scolds artistically dead-ended rappers on "Superstar"; if more artists shared her vision, occasional eccentricities and bottom-line talent, she wouldn't have to complain. --Rickey Wright Review ...With a mix of hard-core hip-hop, danceable doo-wop, and sultry soul, Hill creates a satisfactory, even appealing set. -- The Los Angeles TimesThe Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is an exhilarating mix of warmly expressive singing, hip-hop and reggae-flavored rhythms and Hill's often no-nonsense lyrics.... -- PeopleThe Miseducation of Lauryn Hill pounds, bounds, clowns, and resounds, a feast that turns nearly every song into its own separate conceptual miniproduction. -- SpinEasily flowing from singing to rapping, evoking the past while forging a future of her own, Hill has made an album of often-astonishing power, strength and feeling. -- Entertainment WeeklyInfectious grooves percolate under warm, silky vocals or ear-popping raps; the whole album's a listening pleasure. -- USA Today[Lauryn Hill's] religious fervor is not what makes Miseducation exceptional; it is the way that her faith, based more in experience and feeling than in doctrine, leads her to connect the sacred to the secular in music that touches the essence of soul. -- The New York Times