(Oh and didn't blog at the time, but The Sunday Time's 1/5 review of the record was so way of the mark I actually let loose a gasp of disbelief. DICKheads!)
Step back you good-for-nothing wannabe biatches - the Queen is back and this time Miss Mary J Blige ain’t playing. Long recognised as R&B’s realest, souls most street, the New York native is undoubtedly the rawest vocalist modern music has seen. She’s battled booze and an all-consuming coke habit, been booed offstage, swindled out of cash, sulked over cover shoots, seen the murders of Pac and Big, been crushed by the loss of Aaliyah (“I couldn’t hardly sleep”) and thrown punches at journalists whose questions she wasn’t feeling. At one point in her life, Mary Jane LaTonya Blige just didn’t give a fuck. “My life has been such an embarrassment,” she shrugs with a smile. “I’ve fallen down flat on my face in front of people. But now, I don’t feel any kind of way. People don’t put fear in my heart, it’s me that made me afraid, it’s my parents that made me afraid. The things that have happened to me hurt me so bad.”
Putting it all out there though has been the secret to Mary’s success. Her legions of fans have so far bought some 20 million copies of her soon-to-be-seven albums (not including lives and remix spin-offs) and regularly stop her in the street just to touch her tattooed arms. “I’ve given a lot,” she says of her warts-and-all attitude. “I’ve given things that I know people on a daily basis deal with. If something’s really hurting me, then there’s some other girl out there that’s really feeling bad about it. So I come out and say ‘This is why you’re fucked up.’ I begin to talk about it, and normally it ends up really helping somebody.”
Indeed, were it not for the never ending drama – beginning in Schlobohm Gardens, Yonkers and ending around the time she released Family Affair when she finally fell in Real Love – maybe we wouldn’t love Mary as hard as we do. It was life in the PJs with an absentee dad and a mother at the end of her tether where the vocal that could tear the heart from its socket began to form. “I’m someone who’s been miserable and abused by men. I’ve watched my mother get abused and my aunts get abused and punched in the face by men and watch them abuse their kids. It’s not easy,” she admits. “Those men were brutal, so I hated men all my life. I got older, I was looking for love but at the same time I hated myself so I couldn’t love or really like a man. It’s just confusion,” she frowns.
Entering the music industry after dropping out of school to be a hairdresser should have been the beginning of a brand new Blige; but things were about to get worse. As fans lapped up the back-breaking beats and hood-rich vocals of her Puff Daddy produced debut What’s The 411?, Mary began a downward spiral into drugs and bad dudes. A relationship with Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey ended the day he told Mark Lemar on The Word that they weren’t involved as she announced their engagement. More messed-up men followed as did a full-on coke habit. “I’m good friends with Method Man now, but honestly? I don’t really remember much about being in the studio that day,” she says of their classic cover of Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell’s duet You’re All I Need. “I didn’t know what was going on. I was too busy sniffing and drinking.”
While real life was ugly, the music that came out was the best R&B fans had heard in years; second album My Life become an instant classic; a pained peon to ghetto life and love that saw an emotive Mary on the brink. “Making that album was the lowest point in my life, it was pure death, total misery. I was gone by then,” she remembers. “But it was when I actually began to see how messed up I was, that was an even lower point. That was recently, around No More Drama in 2001. That was like, ‘I gotta start from scratch trying to find myself?’ That’s a low point. Now you gotta deal with who you really are and sometimes it’s not a pretty picture.”
Renewing her faith in God and finally falling in love with a good guy, Kendu Isaacs, saw Blige finally turn a corner to normality. The drugs are done with and while she enjoys the odd glass of champagne, Issacs has helped her leave the demons far behind. “I forgive them,” she insists of the men that beat her, held guns to her head, cheated on her, abused her, drained her of confidence and cash. “That’s just people. That’s just life. People are damaged and hurt; society has painted the picture that it’s a man’s world. So women suffer automatically because they have it painted in their head by men that they rule the world, that we’re just slaves.”
Just because life is good doesn’t mean the music has turned bad. While she recognises that 2003s overly-sentimental Love And Life wasn’t the album it should have been, Mary’s still going through it. “I can’t do anything but be honest with you, and tell you it’s a lot of work being married when you’re the type of person I am. And a marriage like this, to a nice guy,” she nods over at Isaacs who also acts as manager. “ It’s kinda hard. The day I got married I said to my man, ‘You better not cheat on me.’ I’m about to get married and all I can think of is me being hurt again. I try to change the way I’m thinking but it’s not easy cause the seeds that have been planted are seeds of doubt, negativity, and suspicion. That’s where I came from y’know.”
Breakthrough is vintage Mary J and a definite and defiant return to former glory. From Darkchild’s dark and dirty No One Will Do where Mary talks good sex gone sour, don’t-do-me-no-wrong Ain’t Really Love, the all-rapping throwback title track and her personal favourite Take Me As I Am, Mary kicks ass. Hate her or love her, the underdog will always be on top cos she truly is R&B’s MVP. “Mary J Blige is a human with issues,” she decides, slipping into the third person for a minute to get some perspective on her turbulent 14 year career. “But at the end of the day, I’m a human being and that’s it. No regrets. None.”
The Breakthrough is out now.
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