On August 25, 1998, Lauryn Hill released her first solo album,The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It begins as a bell rings and attendance is called. The music to the first track subtly begins to fade in as a supposed daydreaming student misses her name being called. Where is Lauryn Hill? Prior to its debut, the album was not expected to do well. According to Rohan Marley, Hill’s former partner, Hill’s album was turned down by Sony Records who referred to her solo sound as “coffee table music”(Marley, 1999). Hill took her vision and collected a group of producers, singers, and musicians to create and release, arguably, one of the greatest (female) hip-hop albums ever. Artists such as D’Angelo, Carlos Santana, and the, then, University of Pennsylvania college student, John Legend all contributed to Hill’s masterpiece of sounds. The vision of the album is titled perfectly as it was meant to “discuss those life lessons, those that you don’t get in any textbook, things that we go through that force us to mature”(Hill, 2013). Her outlook on the production of her own music, in regards to this, is to “write songs that lyrically move me and have the integrity of reggae and the knock of hip-hop and the instrumentation of classic soul” (Hill, 1999). Hill wanted to create a thick, raw sound; one that was unperfected by computers.