Mary J. Blige’s Chronic Brilliance

Mary J. Blige’s eighth studio album, “Growing Pains,” defies the conventional wisdom that aging works against female entertainers. Blige has a robust, dark voice, and she moves around melodies in a pleasingly unruly way. She can irrigate a song with pain but is judicious about adding flourishes to her performances—a decision that makes her sound more like a sixties soul singer than like a modern R. & B. star. Her commercial rival and aesthetic antipode is Mariah Carey, another R. & B.

Blige grew up in Yonkers, in a housing project known as Slow Bomb, and she has talked of being abused as a child and in romantic relationships. Her 1994 hit “Be Happy” began the narrative of chronic misery. “All I really want is to be happy,” the chorus goes. In 1997, we got “I Can Love You” and “Not Gon’ Cry,” a gospelly confirmation that crying was, at least for a while, Blige’s default activity.

Which was true, at least for a while. She was given to drunkenness and drug use during her early years, missing interviews and occasionally lashing out physically at members of the press. Around 2001, the idea of Mary Reborn—usually attributed to Blige’s newfound relationship with the producer Kendu Isaacs , or with God, or with both—started to circulate. Self-help slogans became the order of the day, mitigated by her idiosyncrasies and a tendency to refer to herself in the third person.

Nah. That entire article was racist. Did a non-Black woman write that? Whew. What a mess!

And yet, still so underrated 😔 hailmary 🙌🏽👑❤️

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