MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 | ||||
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Live album by Lauryn Hill | ||||
Released | May 7, 2002 | |||
Recorded | July 21, 2001 | |||
Venue | MTV Studios in New York | |||
Genre | Folk, soul | |||
Length | 106:31 | |||
Label | Columbia | |||
Producer | Lauryn Hill, Alex Coletti | |||
Lauryn Hill chronology | ||||
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Professional ratings | |
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Review scores | |
Source | Rating |
AllMusic | |
Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
Entertainment Weekly | B– |
The Guardian | |
NME | 5/10 |
Q | |
Rolling Stone | |
The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
Slant Magazine | |
The Village Voice | D– |
MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 is a live album by American recording artist Lauryn Hill. The performance comes from her 2002 MTV Unplugged special recorded on July 21, 2001 at MTV Studios in Times Square, New York City. Hill abandoned the hip hop sounds of her debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) in favor of folk and soul songs she performed with an acoustic guitar. The songs were interspersed with spoken interludes about her personal and artistic struggles.
When MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 was released, it received mediocre reviews and did not sell well. Most critics found Hill's performances self-indulgent and repetitive, although some appreciated the album as a bold and sincere change in artistic direction. It has been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, having shipped one million copies in the United States.
For MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, Hill departed from the hip hop sounds of her debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) in favor of austerely performed acoustic soul and folk songs. She jokingly described herself as a "hip-hop folk singer", and according to Robert Hilburn, assumed the role of a folk singer accompanied only by her acoustic guitar. Rather than singing any of her previous hits, Hill debuted all new songs in a folk style and, in between songs, spoke at length about her personal and artistic struggles.
MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 was released to mediocre sales and reviews. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 before quickly falling down the charts, while most critics questioned Hill's discipline as an artist on the album. In Entertainment Weekly, David Browne said it was "perhaps the most bizarre follow-up in the history of [popular music]", appreciating some of the music's "poetic flow" but finding it exhausting to hear Hill's "strummed sermons directed at unspecified enemies and soul crushers".Alexis Petridis panned the record as "messy" and "inconsequential", mostly because of what he felt were her clichéd self-help lyrics and self-indulgent monologues: "A scant handful of powerful moments, including a furious meditation on the police shooting of a young black man, 'I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel)', are outweighed by repetitious rambling." In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau called it one of the "worst albums ever released by an artist of substance", finding the songs overlong, verbose, and unmelodic. Christgau was also critical of Hill's singing voice, calling it typically poor, and "a solo guitar [she] can barely strum (the first finger-picked figure occurs on track 10, where it repeats dozens upon dozens of times, arghh)."