Ms Lauryn HillIt feels like just yesterday that we were reporting on the much anticipated first taste of new material from the renowned R&B songstress Lauryn Hill, and today she's been sentenced to three months in prison on a tax evasion conviction.
With fans waiting just 15 years for the new record, the ferocious track was released yesterday with the note that it was “a piece that I was 'required' to release immediately, by virtue of the impending legal deadline.”
Hill has pleaded guilty to the charges, which attested that she failed to file tax returns from 2005 to 2007, last year. According to the Associated Press she rapped at times during her statement in court to US Magistrate Madeline Cox Arleo and claimed she hadn't paid taxes during the period to protect her six children as she dropped out of the music industry. During the period relating to the charges Hill earned $1.8 million.
“I am a child of former slaves who had a system imposed on them,” she said before the judge. “I had an economic system imposed on me.”
She said her decision to leave music at that time was due to “veiled threats, there was blacklisting. I was told, 'That's how it goes, it comes with the territory.' I came to be perceived as a cash cow and not a person. When people capitalise on a persona, they forget there is a person in there.”
She will report to prison on Monday 8 July with a further three months of home confinement to take place following the sentence.
Hear the intense track below:
American singer Hill found fame as the frontwoman of Fugees before her solo career and classic The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill 1998 album.
