I suppose by now Lauryn Hill’s status in the exalted realm of pop stardom has been reduced to the almost entirely negligible, at kindest a cautionary tale and at meanest a punchline. Back in the mid- to late-nineteen-nineties, though, she was widely considered to be the next great music artist, the one destined to crank out classic after classic following her beloved solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She was treated as some sort of creative revolutionary, reclaiming the nearly lost sounds of old school soul and delivering a finished product with a powerful replacement engine, assembled from the sterling spare parts of modern hip hop. I was never an adherent. I could hear what people were flipping out over, but it didn’t sound radical to me. To my ears, Hill wasn’t doing anything that Neneh Cherry hadn’t been doing, and doing far better, for nearly ten years at that point. It wasn’t until I heard Hill’s efforts for a different artist that I developed some inkling that there might indeed be a tremendously talented creator there.

It had been about seven years since her last album when Aretha Franklin started reaching out to different producers to help her work on what would become A Rose is Still a Rose. Officially the great singer’s thirty-sixth studio album, it was a clear attempt to fully reestablish her primacy as the Queen of Soul, and the likes of Sean Combs and Daryl Simmons were supposed to get her there. As Franklin’s supposed heir, Hill was also brought aboard, and she wound up delivering a beauty with a track that opened the album and became the lead single. Including a borrowed lyric riff from the biggest hit of Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, the song did exactly what it was intended to do: it made Franklin sound vital, relevant, and fully up-to-date. It required casting back decades to find the last previous interest where Franklin’s talents were so well used and, consequently, that she seemed so at home on a track.

On the evidence of this cut, maybe Hill could have been something special, a sort of proto-Jack White for the neo soul set, creating her own sharp music while shrewdly elevating the unduly discarded legends with style and grace. Of course, that’s the not what the years between then and now brought. Listen to “A Rose is Still a Rose,” though. The better alternate history starts there.

Listen or download –> Aretha Franklin, “A Rose is Still a Rose”

(Disclaimer: It appears to me that A Rose is Still a Rose is out of print as a physical object that can be procured from the proprietor of your favorite local, independently-owned record store in a way that duly compensates that individual as well as the original artist and songwriter. It can be purchased digitally, but, you know, gross. Have we forgotten the lessons of Record Store Day so soon? Even though I truly believe that sharing the track here is fair game, I also acknowledge that the law doesn’t necessarily agree. Should I be contacted by someone with due authority to request the song’s removal and they are making such a request, I will gladly and promptly comply.)