Goin' down and up with Mary J. Blige

Ebony, Oct, 1995 by Muriel L. Whetstone

SHE is the undisputed Queen Hip-Hop Soul.

We could leave it at that and move on. But that glib characterization is much too confining to fully describe Mary J. Blige--the singer, lyricist, daughter, sister, friend, and woman behind the labels.

And vet labels have been easier to come by for Blige than deeper interpretations of her life and art. It was easy to label her "a rising star" after her debut CD, What's the 411?, sold over 2 million copies. As the first singer to successfully combine hip-hop and R&B, she was soon heralded as "the new Chaka Kahn" and "the new Aretha Franklin." When her second CD, My Life, zoomed to the top with its chartbusting single, "I'm Goin' Down," she suddenly became a household name, a music industry product.

Forced to stand alone on the public stage--unprepared and unaccustomed to its blinding spotlights--it is hardly surprising that she sometimes faltered under the glare of public scrutiny She often wore dark glasses, for example, and pulled her hat down low on her face, fueling rumors that she was "distant and alien, reluctant and uncertain."

Journalists began accusing her of being sullen and withdrawn during interviews and responding with one-word answers, if she chose to respond at all. Soon the word on the street was that Mary J. Blige had an attitude problem.

"From what I hear, people tend to think that I'm a real nasty person with a bad attitude, but I'm not," she says quietly. "A lot of interviewers come to me and they ask me stupid questions, so I give them stupid answers. Or I tell them I'm tired of them and to get out of my face. I'm straight up."

Asked to give an example of a stupid question, she responds: "If you're reading in magazines every week that I'm engaged to K-Ci [the lead singer of the group Jodeci], don't come to me and ask me the same thing. It's not really stupid, but you see him in my house, you see us together ... I don't really like to be asked who I'm sleeping with--`Are you sleeping with K-Ci and do you have kids?'--that kind of stuff is aggravating to me. If You were in my shoes, would you want someone to ask you a bunch of personal stuff about you and your man?"

To understand where Mary J. Blige is coming from, you have to climb with her--in her own shoes--from the projects of New York to the musical mountaintop. Born on Jan. 11, 1971 in the Bronx and raised in Yonkers, N.Y., Blige never lived in a world resembling that of the Huxtables'. For most of her life, her mother, Cora Blige, reared her and her older sister, LaTonya J. Blige, alone. Later, two more children, Bruce, 13, and Jonquell, 8, were born.

Blige's father, whom she does not name, reportedly left the family when she was four years old. "My father played the bass guitar and he played in a band," she says. "He taught me how to sing my notes and gospel gave me the depth."

For 11 years, Cora Blige reared her children in Schlobohm Houses, a Yonkers public housing development. Growing up in "Slow Bomb," so nick-named by its residents, Blige says: "It seemed like I was always an older person. I was always worrying about stuff and I didn't have anything to worry about. I was young, like 16. What did I have to worry about?"

In almost every other aspect, she says her childhood was normal. She liked to comb and perm and twist and fix her hair and that of her friends. When she was 11, a car hit her and broke her leg. She attended the House of Prayer Pentecostal Church and enjoyed singing in the junior choir. Blige and her sister went to block parties and danced at house parties.

"I'm smarter now. I was a stupid little girl then, thinking I was grown and I wasn't," Blige tells a writer and her sister, LaTonya. "My mother was hard on me.

"You weren't stupid," LaTonya interjects.

"I mean, I was a teenager. My mother was hard on me and I couldn't understand why until now," she says. "I didn't understand there was a reason for it."

At home, she stood in front of the minor, brush in hand, and pretended to be Meli'sa Morgan. "I used to say, `Shut up, Mary! Just shut up!... LaTonya remembers. "She'd wake up in the morning while everybody else was asleep--all morning long--singing."

"I like to sing," Blige says. "I like to see what can come out of me."

Like legions of other youngsters, Mary hung out at the local mall with her buddies. At age 17, one of those mall trips changed her life forever.

Blige and her friends were hanging out at the mall in White Plains, N.Y., when she decided to make a karaoke-style recording of herself singing Anita Baker's single, "Caught Up In The Rapture." Her mother gave the tape to her stepfather, James Dillard, after which it found its way to Uptown Records' CEO Andre Harrell. In 1990 Harrell brought her into his stable of recording artists that included Jodeci and Al B. Sure!

"I always wanted to sing," says Blige, "but I never thought in a million years that I would be right where I am, right now. I swear I didn't."

Beyond singing what she was told to sing, Blige wasn't heavily involved in the production of her first CD. "I wanted to be involved on the first album but I couldn't," she says. "Well, it's not that I couldn't; it's just that I wish I had known about the outcome of it all, the writing. Writing is better than being a singer. A lot of times I feel that if I just continued to write, I would be so happy and content. And it would keep down all that drama and rumors and stuff because people wouldn't really see me. And I think not being seen a lot, that's kind of good. I think I'd like being in the background."