Now that I think about, I am not so sure. I think she had her own lane and what's odd about her is that for someone as massive as she was, she has had little to no effect on the music scene at the present time. It's like she has no legacy.

Nah, she was hip hop and r&b/soul, very reminiscent of spoken word, but she was not hip hop soul like mary j blige...

No.

Seemed to me like she straddled the fence between Neo-Soul (The Sweetest Thing, Nothing Even Matters, The Ex-Factor), Hip Hop Soul (Everything Is Everything, That Thing), and straight ahead Hip Hop (The Lost Ones.)

scriptgirl said:

Now that I think about, I am not so sure. I think she had her own lane and what's odd about her is that for someone as massive as she was, she has had little to no effect on the music scene at the present time. It's like she has no legacy.

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I think her legacy is seen in artists like, Alicia Keys and Janelle Monae to a certain degree.

Musicslave said:

scriptgirl said:

Now that I think about, I am not so sure. I think she had her own lane and what's odd about her is that for someone as massive as she was, she has had little to no effect on the music scene at the present time. It's like she has no legacy.

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I think her legacy is seen in artists like, Alicia Keys and Janelle Monae to a certain degree.

She didnt continue to nourish and maintain her craft in the public eye, youre only as good as your last record if you dont do that, and she chose to focus on her personal life and bow out gracefully. It was a pretty huge album during its time and won album of the year at the grammys as well. I agree it paved the way for not only alicia and janelle, but a lot of underrated acts and spoken word artists as well.

Lauryn Hill has a legacy but it could have been bigger if she continued to make more albums. Her "Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" album is one of the greatest albums ever made and has obviously made a impact till this day. So she definitly has some influence and I have heard current artists site her as an influence. I can also see her influence in certain artists as well.

I would not give her the title of just neo soul because she dabbled in other genres such as hip hop, soul, R&B, spoken word etc.

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I'd say 'neo-soul', when it was first coined, was kind of a catch-all term to begin with. Not unlike 'conscious hip hop', it wasn't really embraced by the artists themselves. The music journalists just needed to pin a label on artists in the mid-to-late 1990s who were not making the drum machine-driven contemporary R&B/soul that was making it big back then.

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Artistically, I don't see a common direction between the works of any 2 artists who were branded as neo-soul. Throwing Lauryn into the category doesn't do any harm, imo. 'Miseducation' wasn't a conventional hip-hop album either. It takes its roots from a lot of sources, and is cross-genre before anything else.

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