"In Defense of Ms Hill"

What a beautiful Sunday morning!

After a much needed 15 hour nap (more on that one later) I was woken up by the birds outside my window, and a morning that was fresh and cool - a welcome relief in the muggy, pre-summer heat.

In the spirit of Sundays, I've been relaxing, reading, and basically having a lovely slow start to the day. Something I'd love to say I do every day, but alas! Not yet to be.

So this morning I was having a look through Gala Darling's weekly round-up (aka 'Carousel'). Carousel is almost always full of some pretty interesting articles - thought provoking, cute, uplifting, or just giggle inducing.

Talib Kweli's article 'In Defense of Ms Hill' definitely falls into the thought provoking category. It's long for the twitter / instagram-age standards of today, but certainly worth a read.

I'd suggest you read the article, but as a summary, Kweli talks about the criticism and judgement that seemed to be thrust upon Lauryn Hill after her musical style changed direction. She was in the press on fewer occasions, her music sounded different, and she generally seemed to want to have her own life and pursue things for herself and her family, rather than live her life on a public stage.

Which, yannow, seems like a pretty reasonable thing to want to do.

But what seemed to happen was that people felt that Lauryn Hill owed them something. Like her live show should remain in stasis and always be perfectly representative of the songs we heard on 'The Score', or 'The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill'.  Like she should perform when and how we wanted her to.

There were blogs posted about why Ms Hill was no longer worthy of our attention, like 'we' were some pubescent brats with an overinflated sense of entitlement.

I thought about how we view public figures, and artists particularly - musicians, visual artists, writers, or otherwise.  I can't think of a great artist whose career has endured who HASN'T gone through different creative periods - these different periods allow the artist to develop and hone their own style.

Picasso is a great example in the art world - most people know him for his cubist works like 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' or 'Guernica', but if you look back over the course of his career, you can see certain stylistic devices developing over time, and it is these devices that help us to recognise his unique style.

In terms of a dramatic change of style in music, we need only look to Madonna. I can't imagine she'd be doing too well if she were still running around playing only 'True Blue', 'Holiday' and 'Material Girl'.

Lots of artists live parts of their lives in the public sphere, but it doesn't mean we should have an access-all-areas pass to know and judge everything about them. At the end of the day, even people like Madonna (who has actively courted the media through her career) are entitled to change their creative style, do so more or less in the public sphere, and retain their privacy to their personal lives.

Kweli makes such a great point - that we as an audience are gifted with the fruits of an artist's creative labour. They do not owe us anything. We are in fact privileged that they have chosen to share something so personal with us.

Creating is a personal process, it's humbling and vulnerable - it's not like manufacturing, where you produce thousands of identical items to a brief from your client. You're creating something which is uniquely of yourself, and your personal experience.

For an audience, what could be more privileged than that?