On Lauryn Hill’s New Album, Less Would Have Been More

When Lauryn Hill asks, “What’s going on?” during a song on her new live album, she’s trying to draw a parallel between the anxious social consciousness in her new tunes and the classic strains of the late Marvin Gaye.

Puzzled listeners of Hill’s disjointed new album, however, may be asking themselves, “What’s going on?” in a less flattering way.

If it seemed Hill could do little wrong four years ago when her acclaimed debut album arrived, she doesn’t seem able to do much right in the new “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” which will be released Tuesday by Columbia Records.

Unlike most “Unplugged” albums, this two-disc package is not a career retrospective. None of the material from Hill’s richly absorbing, Grammy-winning “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” album is featured.

Instead, Hill, whose stylishly arranged tales of pride and sisterhood opened commercial doors for such inviting soul newcomers as Alicia Keys and Jill Scott, offers 11 new songs, backed almost exclusively by her own acoustic guitar work. This kind of daring is all too rare in pop, but the boldness isn’t accompanied by any consistent discipline and craft.

At times you can’t tell whether the album, recorded last summer, is drawn from a concert or a press conference. Hill, who has been largely absent from the pop scene for three years, wants to chronicle some traumatic personal times, and she apparently doesn’t feel the songs alone are enough to tell the story.

The 26-year-old New Jersey native spends nearly a quarter of the 100-plus-minute album talking to the audience, and the commentary is often rambling, tedious and self-indulgent.

In the new songs, Hill celebrates a spiritual awakening that followed what she describes as a soul-draining period filled with disillusionment stemming from show-business demands, the legal system and the country’s social apathy.

“It’s a new day,” she says at the start. “I used to be a performer. I really don’t consider myself a performer so much anymore. I’m sharing, more or less, the music that I’ve been given.”

Later, Hill reaffirms the changes in her world since the night she accepted five Grammys for her work on “Miseducation,” a record at the time for a female artist on a single night. She tells the audience that she had to overcome a lot of resistance, presumably from friends and business associates, in shedding her old show-biz ways. “People were saying, ‘Money is changing her.’ I say, ‘Listen, the money is not changing me. God is changing me.’”

The singer-rapper speaks a lot about torment and redemption in the songs, and there are times when she is touching through her images and raw emotion.

“I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel)” is an eloquent prayer for social justice inspired by her sense of outrage after the 1999 New York City police killing of Amadou Diallo, a black West African immigrant who was shot 44 times. “Just Want You Around” is also a moving expression of devotion that could be directed at either a lover or God.

But some of the tunes, such as the opening “Mr. Intentional,” are so vague that they are meaningless, while others, including “Mystery of Iniquity,” an attack against the justice system, seem more a personal diatribe than a thoughtful reflection. (Hill went through a highly publicized legal skirmish with four musicians over production credit on the “Miseducation” album. The case was settled in 2000 for an undisclosed sum.)

Rather than insist that every minute of the MTV taping be included on the album, Hill should have slashed most of the 25 minutes of talk, dropped some marginal songs and edited the remaining ones more tightly.

In fact, you can see what the resulting single-disc collection would have sounded like in the one-hour version of the “MTV Unplugged” taping that debuts tonight at 10 p.m. on MTV. (A longer version of Hill’s “Unplugged” session has already been shown on MTV2.)

In the shorter show, Hill, dressed casually in a denim jacket and jeans, ranges from joyful to tender, sometimes testifying to her religious faith, then suddenly breaking into tears during the reflective “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind.”

There are moments in the program when you feel a link with the command and insight of the artist who delivered “Miseducation.” But in the full album, the excesses simply smother the few moments of genuine creative impulse.

Why would Hill’s record label let her put out such a cumbersome effort?

“It’s a work of art that is incredibly deep,” a label spokesman said in March. “We’re completely behind it.”

Well, maybe.

Even if the Columbia management team fears the worst, however, it has to publicly support Hill’s wishes. The last thing the label wants, at a time when record companies are being widely accused of artistic insensitivity, is to get into a public debate with someone whose debut album was such a major commercial and critical success.

If the album is an unexpected hit, the label is a double winner. Besides the sales, it will have maintained the artist’s respect and trust. If “Unplugged” is a failure, it might be seen by the public as simply a side step and the next Hill album could be promoted as the true follow-up to “Miseducation.”

Either way, the responsibility for releasing the unedited “Unplugged” ultimately rests with Hill.

During one of her talks on the album, Hill says life is all about learning from mistakes. “A friend of mine once said to me that if we weren’t supposed to turn around, why does the car have a steering wheel?” she says. “We just supposed to crash into the wall?”

From the looks of this album, the friend must have forgotten to also tell her about the brakes. In “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” she simply didn’t know where to stop.