Blige isn’t tacky she’s incapable of bad taste, which sometimes cuts into her sense of fun. Indeed, she has less in common with her soul forebears than with Annie Lennox, also blessed with pipes so formidable that she sings like a lead guitar, bending and stretching notes on material that, fortunately, didn’t stint on tackiness and depended on shows of vocal derring-do. Less gifted predecessors compressed Blige’s whole career into five minutes, as Karyn White did with “Superwoman.” When Blige out-sings on tracks like “Don’t Go,” her technique strands her. Tensile, brassy, and confident, her mezzo-soprano has little warmth. Belters like Blige rely on audience submission: Admire the voice, ignore the material. While pairing artists for the sake of consolidating streams is the way the business works in the 21st century, the guest spots expose My Life’s often ho-hum songwriting.
and Method Man’s “The What” into a transformed “I’m Goin’ Down”? And who knows how many young listeners gave rap a try after Combs and Thompson wove Notorious B.I.G. The presence of Smif-N-Wessun and LL Cool J on the second disc’s remixes attest to her dialogue with hip-hop Blige had no interest in settling for Anita Baker’s market share. Hayes and White, after all, had long stopped scoring pop crossovers here was a Black woman artist modernizing them as part of glistening triple-platinum product. The anniversary edition confirms the novelty if not radicalism of the Hitmen’s approach: R&B as tradition and living history.
#Listen to mary j blige my life album how to
A ’90s fly girl hearkening back to Ella Fitzgerald over a Reagan-era jam, Blige had learned how to contextualize her melancholy. On the other hand, “Mary Jane (All Night Long)” finds her and the source material in harmony: by brightening Rick James’ original synth-flute line, Thompson and Combs give Blige the chance for some old school scatting over the outro.
The title track interpolates the hook and ascending three-note keyboard from Ayers’ 1976 “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” creating a healthy tension between Blige’s blue mood and the sample’s shafts of light. These ancestral voices reassure but offer subtle contrasts, too. There's Isaac Hayes and Barry White, Roy Ayres and Slick Rick-history as group therapy. Sandwiched between the buoyant debut What’s the 411? (1992) and the austere, inevitable divadom of Share My World (1997), My Life positions Blige as heiress to an R&B fortune, thanks in large part to the sampling acumen of Bad Boy’s Hitmen team members Chucky Thompson and Sean “Puffy” Combs.
0 kommentar(er)
