Lauryn Hill is going all out for her upcoming 20th Anniversary The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill tour. The GRAMMY-winning singer/songwriter announced her upcoming tour to celebrate her Album Of The Year GRAMMY-winning 1998 album, The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, this past April.

<iframe width="620" height="349" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x8QP8S9d4Vk" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

She just upped the tour's ante by announcing artists such as Nas, M.I.A, Dave Chappelle, A$AP Rocky, SZA, Big Boi, De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, Dave East, Jo Mersa Marley, Talib Kweli, Bambaata Marley, Shabazz Palaces, Patoranking, Tierra Whack, Protoje, Kelela, Victory, Raury, and Iman Omari will join her for selected dates.

The tour begins July 5 in Virginia Beach, Va., and will feature special guests A$AP Rocky and Marley. M.I.A. will join the celebration for three dates starting July 7 in Boston, along with Busta Rhymes for five dates. Nas will make multiple appearances, including stops in Las Vegas, New Orleans, Portland, Ore., and more.

SZA will play Sept. 20 in Mountain View, Calif., along with De La Soul and Shabazz Palaces. Hill also announced a new show Sept. 18 at the legendary Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles with Chappelle and De La Soul.

The announcement of these special guests sweetens an already must-see tour from Hill. To find out what else is in store during her trek across North America, visit Hill's website to get tickets for the show nearest you.

Catching Up On Music News Powered By The Recording Academy Just Got Easier. Have A Google Home Device? "Talk To GRAMMYs"

After shaking up the rap game with a breakout verse on the Main Source’s "Live at the Barbeque," a 17-year-old, chip-toothed MC named Nasir "Nas" Jones was crowned a prophet. His silk-smooth delivery and poetic rhymes on the 1991 jam were reminiscent of hip-hop greats like Kool G Rap and Rakim.  

The verse — which included the line "Verbal assassin, my architect pleases. When I was 12, I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus" — bestowed heavy expectations on the Queens native. While Nas was discovered by Main Source’s Large Professor, the young MC was soon drawing the attention of music label heads who wanted to ink a deal with the emerging artist. 

"I must have rewinded that [verse] like a hundred times," former 3rd Bass rhymer MC Search said in the 2014 documentary Nas: Time Is Illmatic. "This Main Source album is brilliant, but who’s that kid? It almost felt like within a week, everybody wanted to know who that guy was." 

Through Nas’ connection with Search, he found a home at Sony Music’s Columbia, and notched another memorable verse on 1992’s "Back To The Grill." But on April 19, 1994, Nas delivered the greatest debut in rap history: Illmatic. 

Thirty years later,. Nas’ masterful stroke of poeticism and the gritty boom-bap loops on songs "It Ain’t Hard to Tell," "The World Is Yours," and "N.Y. State of Mind" still resonate. The album also revived the fleeting dominance of NY rap, and unexpectedly inspired other rappers to release albums with their baby pictures on the cover. Its influential power, and the amalgam of musical forces that threaded the album together, made Illmatic one of the definitive East Coast rap albums of the golden age. Few hip-hop albums have been as widely heralded for as long as Illmatic.

The landmark project chronicled Nas’ life growing up in the Queensbridge housing projects while helping restore the influence of East Coast rap on a now bicoastal scene. By '94, the West coast was taking the reins for the first time in the genre’s history. In Southern California, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle popularized G-funk, which soon permeated the airwaves and topped the Billboard charts. Alternative West Coast acts like Oakland's Souls of Mischief and South Central's the Pharcyde were also establishing firm ground.

The mecca of hip-hop was no longer atop the leaderboard, but with his first full-length release, Nas was inspired to reclaim New York’s dominance and rekindle Queenbridge’s spark from the late 1980s. "I had to represent," Nas said in a 2019 interview with Drink Champs. "The pressure was on the borough and my project. And just getting into the game, you had to have something to say, so I definitely had to push the pen hard because, if not, it would’ve never [flown]."

Queensbrige is home to the largest housing project in the U.S., and birthed pioneers like MC Shan, Marley Marl, and the fearsome Juice Crew. They fell to South Bronx’s KRS-One and the Boogie Down Productions collective in the infamous "Bridge Wars," which left the Long Island City section seeking a new heir. And Nas, inspired by the lyrical warfare, took up the mantle. 

Nas and Large Professor hired legendary producers DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, L.E.S, and others to work on Illmatic. They set the sonic lines, and Nas filled the gaps in spoken word form. 

Read more: A Guide To New York Hip-Hop: Unpacking The Sound Of Rap's Birthplace From The Bronx To Staten Island

From their first studio session together, Q-Tip knew Nas’ skills were unlike any other he’d seen before. "You automatically knew," the A Tribe Called Quest legend (and fellow son of Queens) said in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy. "When Large Professor first played him for me, I heard him on the Live at the Barbeque,’ but then Large [Professor] played me his s— and I was like, ‘This dude is crazy, you know what I’m saying?’ I knew it was going to be the impact it was."

The project was a storybook of lived experiences, even down to the iconic album cover. Nas peeled back the layers of street violence, mass incarceration, and generations of disenfranchisement throughout the 10-track LP. "Memory Lane (Sitin’ in da Park)" and "One Time 4 Your Mind" transported listeners to the hardened corners of Queens, where the air was filled with marijuana smoke and the distant whispers from street hustlers. 

On the Tri-State anthem "N.Y. State of Mind," Nas’ creative equilibrium was at full balance. In Time Is Illmatic, Nas said the song’s early placement on the LP was intentional. He knew it would "bring [listeners] to hell and back." 

"One Love" captured the pain of incarceration, with Nas’ descriptive story of distrust and heartbreak overlaying a chillingly euphoric beat. The AZ-assisted "Life’s a Bitch" is a celebratory toast to survival, and "It Ain’t Hard to Tell" is a masterful showcase of braggadocious rap. 

The topics that I talk about were topics that were around before ‘Illmatic’; streets, social economic status, people’s struggles," Nas told Clash magazine. "I just told it crazy real, and it just talks about how to live in the circumstances and goes beyond, dreaming at the same time. Never just stay in the situation that you’re in."

The album was showered with praise upon release, with the Source blessing the album with a highly-coveted five-mic review. The rare score was administered by  former Hot 97 radio personality and then-Source intern Minya Oh, who declared it one of the best albums she had ever heard. "Lyrically, the whole s— is on point. No cliched metaphors, no gimmicks. Never too abstract, never superficial."

The rave responses didn’t initially translate to album sales. Ilmatic debuted at No. 12 on the Billboard 200, only selling around 60,000 copies in its first week. The low sales were attributed to pre-Internet leaks, with renderings of Illmatic in circulation up to a year before its official release date, according to Clash. The standout singles also failed to scratch the charts. 

Illmatic eventually sold more than two million copies, but the underwhelming start surprised DJ Premier. "We knew it was going to be that big of a deal, that’s why I never understood why it didn’t go like super platinum quick," Premier said to Mass Appeal. "I thought it was going to be super fast and it didn’t. I thought this one was going to be a big platinum album."

But three decades after its release, Illmatic influenced several generations of rap stars and retained its status as one of the best albums in rap history. In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked the album no. 44 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Large Professor, who continued to work with Nas on later albums, said Illmatic is a pillar of hip-hop history. "It’s one of the roots of the tree of hip-hop because a lot of styles came from that. A lot of rhyme styles. He got people thinking outside of the norm," the producer said to HipHopDX in 2014. The stuff that he was rhyming was just crazy, man. But, it’s definitely one of the roots that hold the tree of hip-hop up strong." 

Nas’ contributions has placed him among the best MCs of all time, and justifiably so. He’s continued to deliver No. 1 albums and hit singles throughout the decades, and scored his first GRAMMY Award for Best Rap Album in 2021 after more than a dozen nominations. 

While Nas no longer listens to Illmatic and avoids celebrating the project, telling Haute Living that it’s "corny" to continue championing one album when he’s done so many others. But fans’ continued admiration for the album proves that his early goals were met. The reputation of East Coast rap and Queensbridge was restored, and Nas’ legacy will forever be immortalized. Mission accomplished, Esco. 

'Run-DMC' At 40: The Debut Album That Paved The Way For Hip-Hop's Future

Hip-hop has lost another legend. Rico Wade, an integral part of the bedrock of Southern hip-hop, the godfather of modern Atlanta rap, and one-third of the production crew Organized Noize with Patrick "Sleepy" Brown and Ray Murray, has died. He was 52. 

Wade was a force that helped launch the careers of OutKast, Goodie Mob, Ludacris, and Future, and produced and co-wrote hits for artists including TLC's "Waterfalls," as part of a mid-'90s Southern hip-hop renaissance. The epicenter of this revolution was the Dungeon, his mother's basement in East Point, Georgia. The location built a reputation as a haven for Dungeon Family artists like André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton among a generation of ATL creatives formulating their own flavor of Southern rap. 

"We're deeply saddened by the passing of Rico Wade, one of Atlanta’s most prolific music producers," said Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. "Rico's influential contributions to the Atlanta music scene beginning in the 1990s helped foster the rise of some of hip-hop’s most prominent artists and played a pivotal role in shaping the genre as we know it today. Our hearts go out to his family, friends, and all those whose lives he influenced.” 

Wade was nominated for two GRAMMYs during his lifetime including Record Of The Year for TLC's "Waterfalls" and Album Of The Year for OutKast's Stankonia. 

“Rico left an indelible mark on music and culture around the world and for that, the South will always have something to say,” said Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens in an issued statement echoing the famous battle cry of André 3000's 1995 Source Awards Best New Artist acceptance speech. 

It's been more than 30 years since OutKast dropped their first-ever single "Player's Ball" in 1993 and on that track Wade's voice is the first. He sets the tone for the legendary duo's entire career and Southern hip-hop at the same time with the introduction: "Man, the scene was so thick/ Lowriders, '77 Sevilles, El Dogs/ Nothin' but them 'Lacs/ All the players, all the hustlers/ I'm talkin' 'bout a Black man heaven here/ You know what I'm sayin'?"

"Rico Wade brought us to his house studio, where I heard the most interesting music production I'd ever heard from Atlanta," André 3000 told the Recording Academy in a 2019 interview reflecting on his experience working on OutKast's debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. "It was Rico, Ray, and Sleepy's vision to make sure [OutKast would put] Southern lifestyle first. I was just playing my part the best I could."

Outkast's Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik would go on to sell 500,000 records and became certified platinum within a year. "When we were working on the OutKast vibe, even though there were two members in the group, we all considered ourselves OutKast at the time — including all of Organized Noize and the Goodie Mob members who appeared on the album," Murray told the Recording Academy in 2019. 

Read more: OutKast Examine Their Southern Experience On 'Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik'

Organized Noize signed a publishing deal with L.A. Reid and Babyface's label LaFace Records in 1993, setting the foundation for their work on OutKast's seminal "Player's Ball" single. It was a lasting connection that would serve the rest of Wade's career.  

Wade would continue to work with Reid during Reid's tenure as chairman and CEO of Epic Records from 2013 to 2017, building a hub for hip-hop artists at the label including Wade's cousin, Atlanta rapper Future. Future would become the first artist ever on the Billboard charts to debut back-to-back albums at No. 1 with his 2017 release HNDRXX. In March, Future and Metro Boomin jointly released another No.1 album, We Don’t Trust You. 

Wade nurtured Future's talents through his Dungeon connects. The two didn't meet until Future was well into his teens, but once they did Wade quickly put his cousin's clear drive and talent to use, introducing him to the Dungeon Family and bringing him into the studio to work on in-house production projects including Ludacris' "Blueberry Yum Yum" (Red Light District), which earned Future a songwriting credit in 2004.

“That's how he ended up writing the record for Ludacris, becoming part of a group that could make music, and getting a record deal,” Wade told Complex in 2013. “It showed him that the music industry money is real."

Inspired by his cousin, Future studied the industry through the in-roads made by Wade. “I took everything I learned from him and applied it to my everyday craft from being in the studio,” Future told Complex. "Just knowing how to feel records so I know how to make songs and write for people to keep around and go to the next level.” His devotion to Wade's tutelage and legacy is apparent in the Olde English script tattooed across his arms that matches Wade's own markings — "DUNGEON" appears on the right and "FAMILY" on the left. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Killer Mike (@killermike)

Killer Mike, a constant collaborator who worked with Wade on his latest album Michael which swept the 2024 GRAMMYs rap categories with three wins for Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song, and Best Rap Performance, announced Wade's passing in an Instagram post on Sunday. "I don't have the words to express my deep and profound sense of loss. I am Praying for your wife and Children. I am praying for the Wade family. I am praying for us all," Killer Mike wrote. "I deeply appreciate your acceptance into The Dungeon Family, mentorship, Friendship and Brotherhood. Idk where I would be without ya'll." 

How 1994 Changed The Game For Hip-Hop

The Recording Academy has announced 10 recordings to be newly inducted to the distinguished GRAMMY Hall Of Fame as part of its 2024 inductee class and in celebration of its 50th anniversary this year. This year's GRAMMY Hall of Fame additions, the first inductions since 2021, include four albums and six singles that exhibit qualitative or historical significance and are at least 25 years old. The inducted recordings, which will be added to the iconic catalog residing at the GRAMMY Museum, will be honored at GRAMMY Museum's inaugural GRAMMY Hall Of Fame Gala and concert, presented by City National Bank, taking place Tuesday, May 21, at the NOVO Theater in Los Angeles. Tickets for and performers at the Gala will be announced at a later date. 

The 2024 GRAMMY Hall Of Fame inducted recordings range from Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction. Others include recordings by De La Soul, Buena Vista Social Club, Donna Summer, Charley Pride, Wanda Jackson, Kid Ory's Creole Orchestra, the Doobie Brothers, and William Bell. Eligible recipients will receive an official certificate from the Recording Academy. With these 10 newly inducted titles, the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame currently totals 1,152 inducted recordings.

See below for a full list of the 2024 recordings inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame, and see the full list of all past GRAMMY Hall Of Fame inducted recordings.

Full list of 2024 GRAMMY Hall Of Fame Inducted Recordings:

3 FEET HIGH AND RISING
De La Soul
Tommy Boy (1989)
(Album)
Inducted: 2024

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION
Guns N' Roses
Geffen (1987)
(Album)
Inducted: 2024

BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB
Buena Vista Social Club
World Circuit/Nonesuch (1997)
(Album)
Inducted: 2024

“I FEEL LOVE”
Donna Summer
Casablanca (1977)
(Single)
Inducted: 2024

“KISS AN ANGEL GOOD MORNIN'“
Charley Pride
RCA Victor (1971)
(Single)
Inducted: 2024

“LET'S HAVE A PARTY”
Wanda Jackson
Capitol (1960)
(Single)
Inducted: 2024

THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL
Lauryn Hill
Ruffhouse/Columbia (1998)
(Album)
Inducted: 2024

“ORY'S CREOLE TROMBONE”
Kid Ory's Creole Orchestra (As Spike's Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra)
Nordskog (1922)
(Single)
2024

“WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES”
The Doobie Brothers
Warner Bros. (1978)
(Single)
Inducted: 2024

“YOU DON'T MISS YOUR WATER”
William Bell
Stax (1961)
(Single)
Inducted: 2024

"We're proud to unveil the diverse mix of recordings entering the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame in its 50th year," Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. said in a statement. "The music showcased here has played a pivotal role in shaping our cultural landscape, and it's a true honor to recognize these albums and recordings, along with the profound influence each has had on music and beyond."

"The artists, songwriters, producers, and engineers who composed this year's inducted recordings are a reflection of the sheer talent and hard work that goes into creating such seminal music," GRAMMY Museum President/CEO Michael Sticka said in a statement. "It's a privilege to be able to welcome these new additions into our distinguished catalog and celebrate the recordings at our inaugural gala on May 21."

The GRAMMY Hall Of Fame was established by the Recording Academy's National Trustees in 1973. The inducted recordings are selected annually by a special member committee of eminent and knowledgeable professionals from all branches of the recording arts with final ratification by the Recording Academy's National Board of Trustees.

This year, the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame Gala will be the first of what will become an annual event and includes a red carpet and VIP reception on the newly opened Ray Charles Terrace at the GRAMMY Museum, followed by a one-of-a-kind concert at the NOVO Theater in downtown Los Angeles. 

The inaugural gala and concert is produced by longtime executive producer of the GRAMMY Awards, Ken Ehrlich, along with Chantel Sausedo and Ron Basile and will feature musical direction by globally renowned producer and keyboardist Greg Phillinganes. For sponsorship opportunities, reach out to halloffame@grammymuseum.org.

Explore the history of the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame

As Doja Cat put it herself, the 2022 GRAMMYs were a "big deal" for her and SZA.

Doja Cat walked in with eight nominations, while SZA entered the ceremony with five. Three of those respective nods were for their 2021 smash "Kiss Me More," which ultimately helped the superstars win their first GRAMMYs.

In this episode of GRAMMY Rewind, revisit the night SZA and Doja Cat accepted the golden gramophone for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance — a milestone moment that Doja Cat almost missed.

"Listen. I have never taken such a fast piss in my whole life," Doja Cat quipped after beelining to the stage. "Thank you to everybody — my family, my team. I wouldn't be here without you, and I wouldn't be here without my fans."

Before passing the mic to SZA, Doja also gave a message of appreciation to the "Kill Bill" singer: "You are everything to me. You are incredible. You are the epitome of talent. You're a lyricist. You're everything."

SZA began listing her praises for her mother, God, her supporters, and, of course, Doja Cat. "I love you! Thank you, Doja. I'm glad you made it back in time!" she teased.

"I like to downplay a lot of s— but this is a big deal," Doja tearfully concluded. "Thank you, everybody."

Press play on the video above to hear Doja Cat and SZA's complete acceptance speech for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 2022 GRAMMY Awards, and check back to GRAMMY.com for more new episodes of GRAMMY Rewind.

How 'SOS' Transformed SZA Into A Superstar & Solidified Her As The Vulnerability Queen