'The Score'

What's wrong with Lauryn Hill and why can't anyone help her?

Timeline: The Fugees -- Wyclef Jean, Pras Michel and Hill -- release the beautiful and mind-blowing album The Score. A year later, despite all the rumors of a follow-up, the group wound up putting together their solo careers including Hill's The Miseducation of ... which is even more brilliant and I think one of the greatest albums of all time.

Following that album, Hill disappeared. The rumors were she got caught up into motherhood. She also apparently got caught up into religion bordering on a cultish precipice. Relatively speaking, she's been in complete exile except for an odd reunion of The Fugees in 2004 for a European tour and album.

It all fell apart when tensions between Hill and Jean and Michel festered at least partly to Hill's diva tendencies.

Needless to say, she is weird, weird, weird.

Jean and Michel have both stated publicly that it would take a minor miracle for them to work with Hill again, Jean even suggesting that she needs to consult a psychiatrist, which, on the surface seems like a really good idea. Somewhere a screw popped loose. The passionate, young and beautiful woman who supposedly cried while doing the vocals for "Ready or Not" is a pariah and a reclusive weirdo unfit to do much of anything but rant and not necessarily do what she is really good at.

In the 1990s, hip-hop was Greek to me. I was busy exploring just how loud and angry music could get and if there was a song that embodied heartbreak more than the next.

Oddly, I purchased The Score. That and Paul's Boutique being my hip-hop collection as a teenager. I can't say enough about the album even today. It hold's up like a skyscraper. It's meaningful and thoughtful hip-hop with the crispest of production despite not having the big-name producer or guest rappers. It's not gangsta and they're not trying to blow the doors off the establishment.

They did it anyway.