Mary J. Blige titled her 2001 album No More Drama, but there's been plenty of drama to go around over the course of her career. From the beginning she was dubbed the fresh-voiced Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, a title she's maintained even...
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Mary J. Blige titled her 2001 album No More Drama, but there's been plenty of drama to go around over the course of her career. From the beginning she was dubbed the fresh-voiced Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, a title she's maintained even as she's evolved into a more polished and expressive vocalist who's managed to turn personal happiness into a rich and inspiring sound. As Blige sings in her 2001 track "Testimony," "Everything will be okay ... Trouble don't last always."
There's been plenty of turmoil for the Bronx-born Blige to work her way through in her songs, however -- an abusive relationship with K-Ci Hailey of Jodeci and rugged bouts of drug and alcohol abuse and depression. Unlike numerous other songwriters who have succumbed to the darkness in their lives, however, Blige's lyrical work has always been marked by a desire to find the light and achieve a genuine inner peace, with a strong spiritual underpinning. In the title track of My Life, her sophomore album and first as the primary songwriter (her landmark 1992 debut, What's the 411?, was written mostly by others), Blige advises that "I know we are all struggling/But we will all get by/And if you don't believe in me/Just believe in He."
The rest of Blige's albums have tracked the gradual improvement of her personal fortunes, which accelerated in 2000 when she hooked up with music executive Martin Kendu Isaacs, who she married in 2003. Two years later she achieved a new high water mark of expression with The Breakthrough, a stock-taking opus on which she confronts the "Baggage" of her earlier years, while "Father in You" pays tribute to Isaac's filling of a deep void in her life that helped send Blige into some of her more destructive behaviors. The emotional levy is apparently holding; in the lyrics to "Just Fine," the first single from her 2007 album Growing Pains, Blige assures us that she's "got my head on straight/I got my mind right/I ain't gonna let you kill it/You see, I wouldn't change my life/My life's just fine, fine, fine ..." You go, girl.
