Lauryn Hill will take the stage when she’s ready

When Lauryn Hill takes the stage at the Blaisdell Arena Friday before thousands of fans …

Hold on. Given Hill’s recent history, that sentence practically begs for an edit.

When will Lauryn Hill take the stage at the Blaisdell Arena Friday before thousands of fans?

Hill has a reputation for late arrivals at her own concerts. Yet it’s all part of an overall reputation for transcendent, soul-feeding shows that keep her fans coming back for more. Fans gamble with the possibility of a frustrating wait, but that bet comes with one heck of a payoff: the chance to hear one of the best rapper/singer double threats live.

Hill has enough material to fill a show with hits, alternating between her solo output and her work with hip-hop trio the Fugees. Though her pop chart relevance was limited to two keystone, late-­ ’90s albums, the woman her band-mates called “L-Boogie” has a legacy befitting an artist with a much deeper catalog — and a mystique to match.

The Fugees made a minor splash with their 1994 debut, “Blunted on Reality,” but their 1996 hip-hop update of the Roberta Flack chart-topper “Killing Me Softly With His Song” made them instant superstars, propelling their second album, “The Score,” to No. 1 in six countries and worldwide sales of nearly 20 million.

With her sweet-but-not-showy contralto backed by spare percussion, the strikingly attractive Hill got the lion’s share of attention for “Killing Me Softly.”

The follow-up single, “Ready or Not,” gave fellow Fugees Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel a chance to shine a bit, but it also announced to the world what others more familiar with the band already knew: Hill had serious rap skills as well. Dual threats of that caliber were even rarer in pop music then than they are now, and Hill backed that up with a knack for songwriting and the attitude of someone who knew she could change the world.

The last lines of her verse — “While you’re imitating Al Capone, I’ll be Nina Simone … and defecating on your microphone” — simultaneously tipped a cap to one of her musical idols, stuck a middle finger at hip-hop’s cliched fixation on “Scarface” and declared that she deserved a share of the spotlight in the male-dominated genre.

That boldness and awareness foreshadowed what would come from Hill as a solo artist. The Fugees broke up without recording another album, and in 1998 Hill dropped her landmark solo debut, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.”

With no band-mates to consider, Hill could finally make exactly the music she wanted to make, and her independent spirit blossomed.

Written and produced almost completely by Hill, “Miseducation” included the No. 1 single “Doo Wop (That Thing),” a radio-friendly look at male- female relations, but it also featured the heartfelt, soul-baring “To Zion,” on which Hill sang openly about her decision to keep the son she was pregnant with while recording the album, as some around her told her having an abortion would be better for her career.

Hill kept it real with her lyrics, and she aimed to do the same with the album’s sound, telling Rolling Stone magazine in 1999 that her goal was to produce music with “the integrity of reggae and the knock of hip-hop and the instrumentation of classic soul.” (The Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s interview request to Hill went unanswered.)

“I was raised on music that was recorded before technology advanced to the place where it could be smooth. I wanna hear that thickness of sound. You can’t get that from a computer, because a computer’s too perfect. But that human element, that’s what makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” she said.

“Miseducation” inspired hip-hop artist Nas to describe Hill as having “the soul of Roberta Flack, the passion of Bob Marley (and) the essence of Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson and … hip-hop,” writing in XXL magazine in 2013.

The album has become one of hip-hop’s most universally lauded albums. Among the honors were five Grammys, including album of the year (a first for a hip-hop album). But that would also be Hill’s only solo studio album, as she grew disillusioned with the music industry and focused on raising her children.

In the nearly 20 years since, Hill has let loose a stray single here and there and performed live more and more, but the absence of a follow-up album has added an element of mystique that in some ways burnishes her legacy.

Deepening that mystique is a concert history littered with cancellations and, more commonly, long waits.

Concerts rarely start at the advertised time, and Hill has been known to start her shows sometimes more than two hours after scheduled. She explained on her Facebook page in 2016 that the delays are out of a need to “align (her) energy.”

“I don’t have an on/off switch,” she said. “I am at my best when I am open, rested, sensitive and liberated to express myself as truthfully as possible.”