Grammy-winning singer Lauryn Hill
had drifted to the margins of the pop culture radar in recent years until
Monday, when she made surprising headlines by being sentenced
to three months in prison for failing to pay nearly $1 million in taxes. She
then raised some eyebrows even further by audaciously comparing her situation
to the slavery of her ancestors.
“I am a child of former slaves who
had a system imposed on them,” Hill exclaimed in a forceful statement to the
court. “I had an economic system imposed on me.” A little bit of advice to
millionaire rock stars: unless you want your credibility rating and degree of
public sympathy for you to plunge to zero, don’t compare the outcome of your own
choices to the crushing misery of a slave.
Despite her mixed creative output
and audience reception in recent years, Hill is one of the most successful
women in the history of the music business. Now 37, she hit it big as a
teenager in the 1990s with the Fugees before hitting it even bigger with her
multiplatinum 1998 album The Miseducation
of Lauryn Hill. She has a shelf full of Grammys, including one for
co-producing Santana’s blockbuster Supernatural
album.
In 2000, Hill began to feel the oppressive demands of fame and the music
industry, and dropped out of the public eye supposedly
to protect herself and her children, now numbering six, from its pressures. “I was told, ‘That’s how it goes,
it comes with the territory.’ I came to be perceived as a cash cow and not a
person. When people capitalize on a persona, they forget there is a person in there.”
But that isn’t what happened to Hill.
She dropped out and simply refused to pay all the taxes she owed during this
period. “I embraced my right to resist a system intentionally opposing my right
to whole and integral survival,” she later wrote. Someone needs to explain to
Hill that her “right to whole and integral survival,” whatever that is, does
not include a right to break the law.
The prosecutor correctly called Hill’s
explanation “a parade of excuses centering around her feeling put upon” that
don't exempt her from her responsibilities. The judge agreed. In addition to
doing time in prison, Hill must pay a $60,000 fine. She will be under parole
supervision for a year after that, the first three months of which will be
spent under house arrest.
Hill complained recently that
she’s “been fighting for existential
and economic freedom, which means the freedom to create and live without
someone threatening, controlling, and/or manipulating the art and the artist,
by tying the purse strings.” She doesn’t seem to understand that it’s called the music business, not music
charity, and she has profited enormously from it, regardless of her personal
dissatisfaction. “Over-commercialization and its resulting restrictions
and limitations can be very damaging and distorting to the inherent nature of
the individual,” Hill wrote.
No question about that. And no one
is denying her the artistic right to go off and create music on her own terms,
with little or no commercial value if she prefers, that feeds her soul. She
just shouldn’t expect that to satisfy the executives at Sony, with whom she
just signed a recording contract. They’re going to expect her to make big money
for them, and if she resents that, she shouldn’t have signed. There are
countless penniless, unknown musicians out there who would kill for that
contract.
Lauryn Hill also shouldn’t expect
to get away with refusing to pay taxes on that big money. And she shouldn’t expect
her sense of entitlement to earn the sympathy of law-abiding, hard-working taxpayers
all across this country who are struggling for a fraction of the “existential and economic freedom” she
attained at a young age, and for which she and her children should be grateful.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 5/7/13)
