LAURYN HILL'S NEW record, MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, breaks my heart. Not in a staggering genius sort of way, but in shit-we-lost-another-one, pang-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach way, like how I felt when I saw this girl I went to high school with on the corner of Mission and 23rd, noserunninghippopped, wearing a stained white tube top, lime green hot pants, and six-inch clear plastic stiletto heels. Her name was Christine. I sat behind her in choir.

Hill sounds like how Christine looked that night. Tore up. Tired. Lost. And it isn't just that every tune on Unplugged seems to be built around the same three chords, all played at the same tempo, all in pretty much the same key. Or that Hill sounds as sick as a dog, her usually thick, creamy alto reduced to a crackly, raspy mess (at one point, she asks the audience to let her finish sucking on a lozenge). It's not even that there's an evangelical, Bible-thumping zeal on every track, a myopic sermonizing that at one point leads Hill to introduce a song titled "Adam Lives in Theory" by explaining that by "Adam," she means "all of humanity." No, the heartbreak hits me during Hill's rambling interludes, moments of self-validation in which she attempts to justify every crack she perceives in her facade, acknowledging her flaws so doggedly that eventually the acknowledgment itself becomes her biggest flaw of all. "I used to get dressed up for y'all," she says to the audience at the start of her set. "I don't do that anymore.... Don't have the energy." She goes on to explain that she's found more important things to spend her time on, that she's "not a performer" anymore but a vessel for a higher calling, whatever that happens to be.

That Hill needs to deflect any criticism of her appearance (even wearing a bandanna topped with a baseball hat, she looks as gorgeous as ever on the cover photo, by the way) and that she chalks up her dressing-down to some sort of spiritual awakening (i.e., her "energy" is being spent in better places, it seems) appears contradictory. After all, if you honestly don't give a fuck that you look tore up, you aren't going to go around saying, "Hey look! I look tore up, and I like it!" Later, she attempts to rationalize why she has crap in her throat, saying, "I know I sound raspy, but ... I used to be a prisoner on tour, on tour when you're supposed to enjoy and have a good time, and I'd be in the hotel drinking tea because I wanted to maintain this immaculate-sounding voice. But that's just not realistic. Sometimes I stay up late, and this is what I sound like when I wake up the next day." OK, excuse me, but what?!? First off, Ms. Hill is not on tour and hasn't done a show for God knows how long, and last I checked with real musicians (not VH1 Behind the Music has-beens), touring is work, just like selling Hoovers is for the door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesperson. If that's what you do to put food on the table, you better do it right. Not taking care of yourself and staying up late and coming to work sounding like Tom Waits on crack is, to put it simply, just not professional. And if I'm going to pay $15.98 plus tax (the price of the disc on CDNOW) for music – money I had to work for – I really don't need to be told that Hill doesn't give a shit enough to take better care of herself than that.

Now, I'm well aware that it isn't my place to psychologize, or even judge, Hill's behavior. Asshole critics (a group, by the way, that I'm not excluding myself from) have spent enough time speculating about whether Hill is emotionally and mentally unstable, wondering if she lost it after all the drama with Wyclef (Did they fuck? Do they hate each other? Who cares???), the lawsuits she's been hit with, and every single other aspect of her personal life, etc. Problem is, critics do the same thing all the time with female artists – i.e., rape and pillage lives for copy – never allowing the possibility of a separation between a woman's art and her life. So all of Billie Holiday's art is viewed through a lens of addiction and death, Sylvia Plath's through one of abuse and suicide, Frieda Kahlo's through handicap and suffering. And though this happens with male artists as well – Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison, for example – women never seem to be allowed to transcend their supposed pathologies; their art is forever relegated to the space of their pain, art that was, in all likelihood, their only source of relief from the space of that pain.

Hell, I'm not saying pain and suffering aren't great fodder for material, just that there's got to be something more than that, that pain must be somehow transformed, redeemed, in order for it to mean anything. As German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters on Cezanne in 1903 (in, I must note, dated, gendered language), "Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further" – a place he later calls "the utmost" because "therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it ... the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness." However, he concludes, we are "bound to keep silence regarding the utmost, to beware of sharing it ... as long as it has not entered the work of art." There're no knots to be found anywhere on Unplugged, no proof of anything except that a woman is being exploited for her pain, and as much as Hill might want there to be, there's definitely nothing that feels like a prayer. The entire album exists in the space Rilke warns against sharing – the space before redemption, before catharsis, before art.