Mary J. Blige's Post-Divorce Press Tour Is as Candid and Confessional as Ever
LatestThe narrative surrounding Mary J. Blige’s formidable career as the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul has, from the beginning, been one of overcoming adversity.
Blige’s game-changing debut, What’s the 411?, was recorded amid an abusive relationship with K-Ci Hailey of K-Ci and JoJo, and her struggles with depression and alcohol and drug abuse. Her catalogue, a powerful one that changed the course of both R&B and hip-hop, is entirely candid about these struggles, and in interviews, eventually, she was never shy about speaking on it; the straightforwardness and honesty with which she described her pain and struggles were, too, groundbreaking in the category of women documenting their truths through music and literature, something she should get more credit for. She has also, always, kept herself true, and on par with everyone else; in 2005, she told VIBE’s Ayana Bird, “I don’t let myself absorb [being called a legend] because I want no man idolizing me. Icon? No, I’m you. I’m working on things that you’re working on.”
The “overcoming” aspect seemed to come first with 2001’s No More Drama and especially with 2005’s The Breakthrough, an album in which Blige seemed more at peace with her life and past than ever, a sort of reckoning through song; this also coincided with her 2003 marriage to her manager, Kendu Isaacs, a time in which she seemed happier than she’d ever been. For longtime Blige fans, it was heartening, a chance to see her shine, having been struggling to climb up from the dark side of the moon for so long. We were rooting for her.
All of this frames Blige’s current press tour for her forthcoming album, Strength of a Woman, an aphoristic title that we believe because lord knows she’s earned it. Blige filed for divorce from Isaacs in 2016, and it was clear she would be forthcoming, or at least seem to be, in her music; her just released single “Love Yourself,” with Kanye West, details plainly the growth she’s been through, and the truths she’s learned, in a life that both mirrors the kinds of problems regular women go through, and valorizes and preserves them through art in a way that means more than she’ll perhaps ever comprehend in the totality of its scope. “I know myself to much to ever fold, dark clouds are moving past you,” she sings. “Whoa, you gotta love yourself, if you really wanna be with someone else/You gotta feed yourself before you feed somebody else.” It’s the kind of advice that makes it into movie scripts and in therapy sessions, but the weight that Blige brings to it—the knowledge that she knows it firsthand, and is singing it to us so gravely—gives it all the more meaning.