How Chief Keef and MIKE, former rap prodigies, escaped the attention economy

There's a moment on the forgotten 1994 Fugees debut, Blunted on Reality, where you can hear everything lock into place for a 18-year-old Lauryn Hill on a song called "Some Seek Stardom." Listening now, it's easy to recognize the lyrical and ideological nucleus of her music forming — its spirituality and literacy, a focus on enlightened skill and a future as one of rap's peerless performers. Blunted on Reality flopped, but its all-in follow-up, 1996's The Score, broke rap open with Hill at its heart in a new capacity, and set the stage for one of the more curious careers of the last few decades. I think often of Blunted on Reality, marked as a colossal failure even now, and what might have happened if Ruffhouse Records had pulled the plug instead of advancing the group $135,000 to take another crack at seeing their vision through. Perhaps they would have found another way, but such a scenario could have meant leaving all of Hill's latent possibility, and the nurture inherent to realizing it, frozen in an album few would ever hear.