Selah Marley spills the tea on why her mother Lauryn Hill is always super late for her shows.
We just celebrated the August 11 birthday of hip-hop, and it’s a veritable fact that The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is one of the genre’s single greatest masterpieces to date. As the first hip-hop compilation to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, the project scored four other awards for Ms. Lauryn Hill and spawned several hit singles that pushed the envelope and parted the waters for the music to become a mainstream force. The album’s supernova status made Hill’s hiatus from music almost unbearable, and her eager fan base became even more aggravated as her reputation for tardiness at her own shows grew. Her daughter Selah Marley, who’s been dishing the dirt recently on growing up a Marley, shed some light on the issue in her IG Live.
Responding to a concerned fan’s query on why her mom tends to be tardy, Selah said, “Why is she always late? Um, I don’t know actually. That’s more for her to figure out, honestly. I can’t really…I think my mother gets anxiety sometimes. I also think that she be on Black people time, you know what I mean? I’m not her, like, I don’t know. Ask her.” Going a bit further on Hill’s avoidance antics, Selah added, “Lauryn Hill was a f***ing revolutionary who gave up all that s***, it’d be one thing if my parent was like Hov, Beyonce or Diddy. My mom was a little bit more of ‘I’ll reject that.’”
Lauryn Hill’s prolonged absence and artistic relevance is often speculated on, with many questioning as her daughter put it, why she “gave up all that” with such profound versatility and limitless potential. Theories range from the usual Illuminati banter, her affiliation with an arcane spiritual leader, Brother Anthony, who has long been rumored to advise her to abruptly fire her entire management team back in 2001. There’s also the story of her developing a diva mentality, after insisting on being referred to as Ms. Lauryn Hill.
A Rolling Stone interview with a close friend of the GOAT female emcee tells an entirely different tale, however. Their account echoes Selah’s sentiments that the intuitive triple-threat simply shunned celebrity and its accompanying adulation. “I think Lauryn grew to despise who Lauryn Hill was,” the source said. “Not that she despised herself as a human being, but she despised the manufactured international-superstar magazine cover girl who wasn’t able to go out of the house looking a little tattered on a given day.”
As fans cling to the venerable 1998 opus and hope desperately for another willful project from Lauryn Hill, they’ve been assured at least once that she does value their patronage despite some personal drawbacks. “I don’t show up late to shows because I don’t care,” Hill wrote in a Facebook post after a set of disappointing fans took her to task on social media. “The challenge is aligning my energy with the time, taking something that isn’t easily classified or contained, and trying to make it available for others.”
