A lot of people have a lot of thoughts (not to mention feelings) about the elusive hip-hop star Lauryn Hill, but only the journalist Joan Morgan could have written a slender book as capacious as this one. When Hill released her first and only full-length solo studio album in 1998, the ensuing critical and commercial success was so extraordinary that it fueled two decades’ worth of speculation about future projects and opinions about existing ones. With “She Begat This: 20 Years of ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,’” Morgan takes an album that was a cultural touchstone — the kind of work that elicits ardent devotion and ardent backlash — and holds it up to the light, showcasing its brilliance and its shadows.

“I loved ‘Miseducation,’” Morgan writes. “I was one of the score of hip-hop loving and/or pregnant women who swore the album was soundtracking her life.” (One of the tracks, “To Zion,” was about Hill’s decision to have a child.) At the time of the album’s release, Morgan was putting the finishing touches on her first book, “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost” (1999), a blend of memoir and manifesto that introduced the term “hip-hop feminism,” delineating the contours of a movement that she and her “post-Civil Rights, post-feminist, post-soul” generation might call its own.

Morgan insists that loving something isn’t the same as giving it a pass. “She Begat This” makes a full-throated case for Hill’s artistic and historical importance, but this appreciation doesn’t translate into gauzy praise for some of the stickier parts of Hill’s career — including legal tussles over writing and production credits on “Miseducation.” Similarly, in “Chickenheads,” Morgan didn’t go easy on hip-hop’s prominent strains of misogyny and materialism. Love, she suggests, is too complicated to be reduced to flattery.

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

As Morgan recently put it to The Paris Review, “She Begat This” is resolutely a volume of cultural history, rather than a “track by track by track by track” treatment. The book depicts the 1990s as a pivotal moment, especially for black women who “were squeezed between competing narratives” of “having it all” on the one hand and President Bill Clinton’s Republican-placating policies — like welfare reform and the 1994 crime bill — on the other. Hip-hop at that time was settling into what Morgan calls “the dual sweet spots”: hitting its artistic stride while getting paid too.