MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 is a live album by American singer and rapper Lauryn Hill. The performance comes from her 2002 MTV Unplugged special recorded on July 21, 2001 at MTV Studios in Times Square, New York City. Hill abandoned the hip hop sounds of her debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) in favor of folk and soul songs she performed with an acoustic guitar. The songs were interspersed with spoken interludes about her personal and artistic struggles. MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 was met with mixed reviews. Most critics found Hill's performances self-indulgent and repetitive, while some appreciated the album as a bold and sincere change in artistic direction. The album has since received retrospective acclaim by critics who have praised the album for its uniqueness and rawness, and a variety of hip hop, R&B and pop artists have cited it as an inspiration. The album sold approximately 122,000 copies in its first week, debuting at number three on the Billboard 200. It has been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, having shipped one million copies in the United States. The song "Mystery of Iniquity" received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Rap Solo Performance, and was famously sampled by Kanye West on his 2004 song "All Falls Down". Music and lyrics For MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, Hill departed from the hip hop sounds of her debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) in favor of austerely performed acoustic soul and folk-based songs. She jokingly described herself as a "hip-hop folk singer", and according to Robert Hilburn, assumed the role of a folk singer accompanied only by her acoustic guitar. Rather than singing any of her previous hits, Hill debuted all new songs in a folk style and, in between songs, spoke at length about her personal and artistic struggles. Release and reception MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 was released to mixed reviews and modest sales. It debuted and peaked at number three on the Billboard 200, where it charted for fourteen weeks. The album was certified Platinum by RIAA, a month after its release. Most critics questioned Hill's discipline as an artist on the album. In Entertainment Weekly, David Browne said it was "perhaps the most bizarre follow-up in the history of [popular music]", appreciating some of the music's "poetic flow" but finding it exhausting to hear Hill's "strummed sermons directed at unspecified