If you’re anything like me (white, male, twenty-something, getting pudgy, own a wide assortment of Harry Potter t-shirts), you’ve probably been wondering when ex-Fugee/current wackjob Lauryn Hill was going to piss you off again. The last time the Great Miseducated One raised our ire was back in October when she popped out of her spider hole to pose for a photo op with history’s most contemptible homemaker, and before that was in 2006 when Hill forced the breakup of the freshly reunited Fugees by demanding that everyone working with the band (including Wyclef and Pras) call her “Ms. Hill.” Along the way, she’s enjoyed alienating her fan base with increasingly erratic performances, preferring to shirk the time-tested pop music maxim “I do it all for the fans!” for the less than cordial “You simpletons are lucky I’m stooping so low as to play my extraordinary work for such common trash.” Hell, in 2003 she even took the liberty of calling the Catholic Church a bunch of Satanists and baby rapers right on their home fucking turf. Actually, that was really cool. Props to Lauryn Hill on that one.
But I grant Hill no props for her latest advancement in the field of divanautics. Festival organizers announced last week that Hill had cancelled her headlining performance at the Stockholm Jazz Festival along with every other date on her now defunct European tour. Hill reportedly cited “health reasons” for the cancellations, despite the fact that her opening gig at Stockholm is a full month away. So one of two things is happening here: Either Lauryn Hill has a life threatening illness and is really bad off, or she just felt the need to shoot her career in the foot yet again. It’s more than likely a combination of the two: Lauryn Hill possesses some debilitating illness where she cannot help but squash her career into icky icky goop every time she is presented with a chance to redeem herself. Man, whatever happened to the pluck and determination of this Lauryn Hill?
