SUPERSTAR
Lauryn Hill (Photo by Jim Smeal/WireImage)
Lauryn Hill succeeded in creating a work of art that inspired many by condemning racism, sexism, and complacency within the black community. As a result, she earned a multitude of awards. At the 41st Grammy Awards, Hill was nominated for 10 Grammys and won five which was unprecedented. She was the first woman to receive that many nominations and awards in one night. She won Album of the Year, Award for Best R&B Album, Best New Artist, Best R&B Song, and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance.
Throughout her career, she has even nominated for 19 awards and has won 8. Her album the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill went on to win Billboard, American Music, MTV, and NACCP awards. In the scholarly article, “ Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance” , “Women are achieving major strides in rap music by continuing to chisel stereotypes about females as artists in a male-dominated tradition and by women’s culture and identity from a Black feminist perspective” (Keyes 265). Though many women have not been successful in musical engineering, Lauryn Hill’s ability to parallel her audience by sharing both the struggles and beauties in their intersectional identities of being both black and women has led to having an unprecedented impact on her audience and multiple awards. She has “defied sexist repression by writing [her] own songs [and] producing records” (Keyes 265).
Several Songs on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill Were Produced at the Bob Marley Museum in Jamaica
Despite Hill, producing almost every song on her album, she did not win Grammy for producer of the year, nor has any women ever. Despite her engineers-hip, she was only celebrated by Grammys for her singing and performing showing the prevailing male dominance. This denotes how women producers only receive notary if they are performers further revealing how women are supported when they have sex appeal but not in a “man’s territory”. Essentially women have not completely been given the notary they deserve despite the many success Lauryn Hill has had. Black women’s intersectional identities have coerced them into decades of being exploited and isolated; however, they gain agency through their independence and formidability.
