Lauryn Hill’s commitment was to present the most authentic version of herself, without appealing to commercial interests.
Ocean’s set seemed like a rebuke to this trend. New arrangements of her most beloved songs, such as “Bad Religion” and “White Ferrari” It sounded more astral and expansive than ever. “Only” it approached something akin to crashed electric jazz and almost brought me to tears. The speech Ocean gave about his younger sister, who died in a car accident in 2020 and with whom he went to Coachella several times, made it immediately. The songs sometimes showed the seams of him, letting her voice reach higher and skate across the sky. Delicate acoustic takes of “Pink + White” and “Self Control” he recalled the intimacy of a theoretical Ocean appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”
The history of pop music is full of incidents in which famous artists polarized their audiences from the big stages, but an important precedent is Lauryn Hill’s 2001 performance on “MTV Unplugged.” On that show, and on the no-frills album that followed the following year, “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” he sang his biblical depths of hip-hop folk in a gorgeous, raspy voice, backed by his acoustic guitar. Between songs, she delivered monologues of uncompromising creative wisdom. At the time, this live session was considered puzzling and received mixed reviews. Hill’s commitment was to present the most authentic version of herself, without appealing to commercial interests. “Fantasy is what people want,” Hill said then, “but reality is what they need.”
You can imagine Ocean, now 35, growing up, absorbing Hill’s messages and reflecting his own raw reality in concert. When she played Coachella in 2012, she covered “Tell him” from “Lauryn Hill’s Impoliteness”. Ocean has a documented fondness for her rendition of “Unplugged”: her song “Rushs,” from “Endless,” interpolates Hill’s “Just Like Water”; she once rapped over a sample of “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind”, a song in which Hill cries. “What I am is what I am, and I can’t be afraid to expose it to the public,” Hill said during the presentation of “MTV Unplugged.” She defended her right to have her voice break, which was a reflection of her lived experience. Such honesty calls people to be artists. But contemporary streaming culture and the rigid aesthetic standards it broadly supports are hostile to frayed edges.
In the spontaneous Ocean Instagram broadcast, I caught the glory in the blink of an eye. Ocean’s set, which he himself called “chaotic” while emphasizing “beauty in chaos,” was a presentation of his own humanity. In a merely popular culture, that’s what a “live” album, a “live” broadcast, a “live” concert, and a “live” artist are: raw, fallible, and human.
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