Following the success of her debut album, Hill largely dropped out of public view, in part due to her displeasure with fame and the music industry. After a four-year hiatus, she released MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, a live recording of "deeply personal songs" performed mostly solo with an acoustic guitar. In more recent years, Lauryn Hill has recorded songs for soundtracks and mixtapes, as well as performing live at several music festivals. To date, she still avoids publicity, and is the mother of five children with Rohan Marley, the fourth son of reggae musician Bob Marley.
Lauryn Hill was born in East Orange, New Jersey, the second of two children born to high school English teacher Valerie Hill and computer programmer Mal Hill. As a child, Hill listened to her parents' Motown 1960s soul records. Music was a central part of the Hill home. Mal Hill sang at weddings, Valerie played the piano, and Lauryn's older brother Malaney played the saxophone, guitar, drums, harmonica, and piano. In 1988, Hill appeared as an Amateur Night contestant on It's Showtime at the Apollo. She sang her own version of Smokey Robinson's song "Who's Lovin' You?", where she was booed tremendously, but persevered and ended up with audience applause.
Hill was childhood friends with actor Zach Braff and both graduated from Maplewood, New Jersey's Columbia High School in 1993, where Hill was an active student, cheerleader, and performer. Braff has spoken of Hill attending his Bar Mitzvah in 1988. Hill enrolled at Columbia University in 1993 and attended for nearly a full year before dropping out to pursue her entertainment career.
The Refugee Camp ("Fugees") formed after Prakazrel "Pras" Michel approached Hill in high school about joining a music group he was creating. Soon after, she met Michel's cousin and fellow Haïtian, Wyclef Jean. At some point, Hill was nicknamed "L Boogie", as she began to convert her poetic writing into rap verses. Hill's singing gained worldwide acclaim with the Fugees' remake of "Killing Me Softly with His Song", accompanied by a sample from Rotary Connection's "Memory Band".
The Fugees' first album, Blunted on Reality, peaked at #49 on the U.S. Hot 100. The album sold over two million copies worldwide. Blunted on Reality was followed by The Score, a multi-platinum, Grammy-winning album that established two of the three Fugees as international rap stars. Singles from The Score include "Ready or Not", "Fu-Gee-La", "No Woman, No Cry" (made famous by Bob Marley), and "Killing Me Softly" (made famous by Roberta Flack).
In 1996, Hill began production on an album that would eventually become The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The title was inspired by The Mis-Education of the Negro book by Carter G. Woodson and The Education of Sonny Carson, a film and autobiographical novel. The album featured contributions from D'Angelo, Carlos Santana, Mary J. Blige and a then-unknown John Legend. Songs for the album were largely written in an attic studio in South Orange, New Jersey and recorded at Chung King Studios in Jamaica. Wyclef Jean initially did not support Hill recording a solo album, but eventually offered his production help; Hill turned him down. Several songs on the album concerned her frustrations with The Fugees; "I Used to Love Him" dealt with the break-down of the relationship between Hill and Wyclef Jean. "To Zion" spoke about her decision to have her first baby, even though many at the time encouraged her to abort the pregnancy so as to not interfere with her blossoming career.
The Miseducation contained several interludes of a teacher speaking to what is implied to be a classroom of children; in fact, the "teacher" was played by Ras Baraka (a poet, educator and politician) speaking to a group of kids in the living room of Hill's New Jersey home. The singer requested that Baraka speak to the children about the concept of love, and he improvised the lecture. Though The Miseducation was largely a collaborative work between Hill and a group of musicians known as New Ark (Vada Nobles, Rasheem Pugh, Tejumold and Johari Newton), there was "label pressure to do the Prince thing," wherein all tracks would be credited as "written and produced by" the artist with little outside help. While recording the album, when Hill was asked about providing contracts or documentation to the musicians, she replied, "We all love each other. This ain't about documents. This is blessed." Hill, her management, and her record label were sued in 1998 by New Ark, claiming to be the primary songwriters on two tracks, and major contributors on several others. The suit was settled out of court in February 2001 for a reported $5 million.
In 1998, Hill released The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which was both critically and commercially successful. It sold over 423,000 copies in its first week and topped the Billboard 200 albums chart for four weeks and the Billboard R&B Album chart for six weeks; it would go on to sell more than 18 million copies over the next decade. The first single off the album was "Lost Ones" (US #27), released in Spring 1998. The second was "Doo Wop (That Thing)", which reached #1 in the Billboard charts. Other singles released in support of the album were "Ex-Factor" (US #21), "Everything Is Everything" (US #35), and "To Zion". At the 1999 Grammy Awards, Hill was nominated 10 times, becoming the first woman ever to be nominated 10 times in one year: Hill won five Grammys including Album of the Year (beating Madonna's critically acclaimed Ray of Light and Shania Twain's bestselling Come on Over), Best R&B Album, Best R&B Song, Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, and Best New Artist. Hill set a new record in the industry, becoming the first woman to win five Grammys in one night. Between 1998 and 1999, Hill earned $25 million from record sales and touring.
Hill became a national media icon, as magazines ranging from Time to Esquire to Teen People vied to put her on the cover. In the late 1990s, Hill was noted by some as a humanitarian. In 1996 she received an Essence Award for work which has included the 1996 founding of the Refugee Project, an outreach organization that supports a two-week overnight camp for at-risk youth, and for supporting well-building projects in Kenya and Uganda, as well as for staging a rap concert in Harlem to promote voter registration. In 1999 Hill received three awards at the 30th Annual NAACP Image Awards. In 1999 Ebony named her one of "100+ Most Influential Black Americans". She was named with Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. and others among the "10 For Tomorrow," in the EBONY 2000: Special Millennium Issue.