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The thing is, Carlie is a good girl. She wants to be a math teacher. We know all her friends, she's responsible, she happily spends most of her time with family, and she's in no hurry to date much. When she does, she prefers her dates to hang at the house with her, watching videos and being abused by her horde of smart-mouthed aunts. But can she really dress "like that," immerse herself in hip-hop culture and still be a good girl, i.e. a girl who's not going to screw up her life? It's against this personal backdrop that I've watched the gathering storm over the status of hip-hop star Lauryn Hill in the black community.

Hill is young black womanhood writ large. She's only 23, but her sultry alto, enormous talent and furious drive have made her the female artist of her generation. Her debut solo album, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill," won every award you can think of -- ethnic, mainstream and international -- and went triple platinum. "Miseducation," which she single-handedly wrote and produced, is both a dead-on critique of negative behaviors in the black community and a love letter to it. An accomplished movie and TV actress, songwriter, producer and video director, Hill is firmly in control of her own career.

And there's more. On leave from Columbia University, she's also created the Refugee Project for inner-city kids in her spare time. She still lives with her revered parents in the New Jersey home she grew up in. A fervent Christian whose every utterance and song lyric proclaim her belief in God, she simultaneously exudes New Age grooviness ("Cause karma, karma, karma comes back to you hard" goes one line of "Miseducation") and old-time religion ("You can't hold God's people back that long" thunders the next).

But Hill, the rhapsodic Christian proselytizer, is not everybody's idea of a black female role model. For one thing, she often dresses hoochie-style. Worse, she has two out-of-wedlock children with her live-in boyfriend, Rohan Marley (one of Bob's many children). Hill may embody the best of young black womanhood to some people, but to others she's just a hypocrite, or worse, a danger to the community's endangered morals with her hip-hop halo.

The calls for her head crescendoed recently with the June 2 television broadcast of the Essence Awards. In a tearful acceptance speech, Hill said: "I want to let young people know that it is not a burden to love Him, and to represent Him, and to be who you are, as fly and as hot and as whatever, and to still love God and to serve Him. It's not a contradiction."

Radio call-in shows, letter-to-the-editor pages and, especially, online venues were deluged by the debate over Hill. Lee Bailey, founder and publisher of the Electronic Urban Report (EUR), said, "I was totally surprised by the outpouring. We received 300-400 e-mails before we stopped counting and it's still coming in." Indeed, the EUR ran a special section of the Hill e-mails. As one disgusted e-mailer wrote, "Lauryn's lifestyle doesn't match her sermons. If she's gonna shack up (and in her parents' home, no less) with her man and her two babies, that's her business, but Lauryn's crossing the line when she gets on every available TV screen talking about how 'holy' she is. God is not in that mess." Another e-mailer wrote, "If Lauryn Hill weren't famous, but instead worked the register at [McDonald's], black folks would be the first people saying what a poor role model she is and how she needs to get her life together." Still another fulminated: "If most of these people we 'hero worship' weren't celebrities, we'd probably be dogging them for some of their lifestyle choices. It makes it difficult to explain the difference to my son." Many e-mailers supported Hill, but it was the fulminators who grabbed the most attention.

Clearly, some of Hill's detractors are mere player-haters. "True," Bailey says, "but she really has touched a nerve. The undercurrent has been there for some time."

Next page | Sleeveless churchgoers are harlots!