Lauryn Hill Performs “Ex-Factor” Live At BET Awards ’26 [Video]
Lauryn Hill performs “Ex-Factor” at the BET Awards ’26 after receiving the inaugural Living Legend Icon Award.
Lauryn Hill’s BET Awards ’26 appearance didn’t need spectacle to feel heavy. After being honored with BET’s inaugural Living Legend Icon Award, she stepped into “Ex-Factor” and let the record do what it has done for nearly three decades: turn heartbreak into something controlled, wounded, and still almost impossibly graceful.
Taken from her landmark solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, “Ex-Factor” remains one of those songs that changes the air around it. On the BET stage, Hill treated it less like a victory lap than a lived-in performance, stretching the emotion without overplaying the drama. Her voice carried the cracks, pauses, and phrasing that make the song feel human rather than preserved behind glass.
The performance followed a larger tribute segment featuring artists including SZA, Doechii, Nas, Doja Cat, Queen Latifah, Tems, Lizzo, Rapsody, and Tierra Whack, before Hill herself took the stage. That context mattered: the night framed her catalog as living music, not museum material. “Ex-Factor” closed that thought with the kind of presence only Hill can bring — intimate, unsettled, and unmistakably hers.