One third of hip-hop  group The Fugees, Lauryn Hill went solo in 1998 with the her only real album ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’, which has to be one of the best hip-hop albums of the nineties. From that album, this is track is ‘Lost Ones’.

‘The Miseducation..’ featured heavyweights like D’Angelo, Carlos Santana, Mary J. Blige and John Legend. It topped charts around the world, got Lauryn Hill ten nominations at the Grammys (She won five). Columbia records and Lauryn Hill got into a protracted legal battle about the credits for the album. (Credits are really important because they dictate who gets paid how much)

Lauryn Hill pretty much dropped out of the public eye after the media frenzy over ‘Miseducation’ was over. She popped up a few years later and at a live performance ranted against the Catholic Church about the molesting little choir boys controversy.

Despite repeated rumours that she has another album in the works, there is no sign of one..

Crap. If I have to hear another Akon song I’m gonna kill myself.

So. Earlier this month I snagged a pre-release copy (cough…  piratebay… cough)  of soul singer Musiq Soulchild’s new album ‘ONMYRADIO’.

Despite the fact that he never really made it big, this crooner from Philly is still one of my favourite soul singers from this decade. (The others being D’Angelo and Jill Scott)

He had his fifteen minutes back in 2000 with his debut album Aijuswanaseing off which the hit single ‘Just Friends’ still has to be one of the coolest, funkiest combos of hip-hop and soul ever with its brilliant beat-box intro’d bass line. Too bad it was the on the soundtrack for one of the shittiest films ever: Nutty Professor 2. Watch the video here, since Youtube has disabled embedding of the clip.

He followed  it up with the albums Juslisen,SoulStar and LuvanMusiq. (He dropped out of school before they got around to teaching spelling and grammar obviously) He had a few more hits and all of them had the same, distinctive if slightly repetitive sound which led to more than a few hit singles.

This is ’143′ from ‘Aijuswanaseing’

So, back to his new album:ONMYRADIO. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s almost nine years later and he still sounds like the tail end of the nineties. The kind of motown sound that John Mayer parodies in his live shows. On one of the songs in this album, I swear he sounds like Bobby Brown (which is never a good thing). The highlight of the so-so album filled with really bland, by-the-book, nondescript slowjams has to be his duet with Mary J. Blige, ‘Ifuleave’ (the track at the beginning of this post) which is not really saying much.

All I can say is that this probably isn’t a great album to introduce anyone to Musiq’s music (Sorry, couldn’t resist) It may have sounded quite decent in ’98 or even ’02 but now it just sounds generic, jaded and stuck in a time capsule.

This is the first single,’Radio’ from the album.

He could probably do with a talented young producer on his next album and to be really scathing, he could probably do with a new song writer too. His tunes and lyrics sounded cute and disarming nine years ago but now they just sound lame.

Much as I like Musiq Soulchild and think he is capable of so much more, all I can say about this album is – NOTONMYRADIO