Thank You - Lauryn Hill

The music industry is a blood sucking billion dollar machine that churns out blockbusters music every year.  Most singers who are artists come into the industry with rose colored glasses on, most times the initial contract is such a ripoff, but you're so happy to be doing what you love doing, so caught up on the 'show' of it all, that you forget the 'business' part which is the ONLY true part to focus on.  It's important to know what you're signing, to know where you money is going, and above all to know what your truth is.  The image that is put out to the masses, is a high powered machine telling a story that will sell, but in the end make sure it's not your soul that you lose.
 
Lauryn Hill is an artist often misunderstood, she came into this industry with hopes for success, fame and fortune,  and she got just that, but in the end did the industry give her the treatment that she really deserved. The public and mass media can be such a fickle lot, to deal with .  We want to ride the successes of celebrity life, but when that image turns out not to be what 'we' want it to be, the aftermath can be a vicious place to be.  To live under constant scrutiny can't be an easy place to be, so it's like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.  At the end of the day, the singer/artist really just came to sing, perform and entertain.  Their personal life should be their own. no one wants to live under a microscope, and if the shoe were on the other foot, I think we could all recognize that it gets to be a little much.

I thank Lauryn Hill, for giving of herself, her debut CD "The Misseducation of Lauryn Hill" is a classic masterpiece that NO one can take from her.  To this day I have never taken it from my music rotation, some fifteen years later, it's still just as relevant as the day it was released and will go down as a CD that helped changed the music game.  Unfortunately the media started to pay more attention to Hill's personal life than the music.  It's a very sick industry and I personally would like to see it get well soon.  The pimps, drug dealers, hit men and corruption are the music executives who never cared about nothing but the money, so what if someone dies (Elvis, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin,Ray Charles Michael Jackson, Phyllis Hyman, Eazy E,Amy Winehouse. Etta James, Jimi Hendrix, and Whitney Houston, just to name a few), hey lets release a greatest hits package, making MORE money.  I say support the artists while they are here, enjoy the art of storytelling, and one of the best poets ever is Ms. Lauryn Hill ... and I can never thank her enough for delivering such fine product into the market place whether it's her as a Fugee, an actress, a Poet, a Producer, whatever the hat that she's wearing, she's in complete control, and maybe her guilty pleasure is just wanting to be accepted for being beautifully human with vulnerabilities that makes the canvas just a little flawed but so much more interesting than perfection, as it shows that beauty is really in the imperfection.