The 1998 album Vince Staples called “perfect”
Vince Staples was born in Compton during the summer of 1993, which, arguably, was the epicentre of rap music at the time. This, you might imagine, would make him entirely loyal to the music of his home city, but it turns out that his favourite album of the ’90s wasn’t from the West Coast at all.
When Vince was five years old, an album came out that ultimately proved to be “a constant” throughout his life thereafter. It was by the East Coast’s Lauryn Hill, with her first solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
“It’s really unique,” Vince said of Miseducation during a conversation with Pitchfork for a 2021 feature. “Nowadays, we get a combination of singing and rapping in a lot of music. But back then, it was a risk.”
It feels strange today to think of Miseducation as a “risk” in light of its immense success. The album is literally one of the best-selling of all time, having secured Hill with a couple of Grammys and legendary status within the music business. To call the album a big success undersells it.
But the fact is that this was Hill’s first solo album, released in 1998, during a hiatus from her successful group, The Fugees. Doing something like that is always inherently risky for an artist, and there is never any guarantee of success. That was especially true for Hill, in light of what the album itself was about.
Miseducation is a concept album, focused on the idea of learning about love, life and relationships. Musically, it lifts from a wide range of influences, from hip-hop to R&B to soul to even reggae. On paper, nothing about this project says it was going to be one of the most successful albums ever.
But, as Vince noted, what Hill created proved to be “definitely a classic body of work”. Through some strange act of alchemy and circumstance, everything came together for her to produce a masterpiece. It was an album that touched so many people, of whom a young Vince was just one.
“It’s a spiritual thing,” he said of the album. “The music feels like you’re being brought towards it. You can feel the point of view. Black music to me is rooted in spiritual connectivity.”
Vince cited the history of rock ’n’ roll, blues and soul to illustrate the “spiritual connectivity” he feels is inherent to Black music. This is what Hill tapped into on Miseducation. That sense of spirituality was apparent on the record, and it’s why, for Vince, it remains “just perfect.”