Mary J. Blige wears the hoop earrings, stiletto heels, gleaming jewelry and wig of a diva, but she also sports the tattooed biceps and salty, hand-on-hip demeanor of a round-the-way girl raised in the ghetto. One minute she’s trilling like the sweetest soprano in the church choir, the next she’s cracking notes in half, musical pitch flying through the roof with her spontaneously combusting emotions.
Blige’s contradictions make her the most volatile female soul singer of the last decade, a mix of velvet and burlap, penthouse glamor and street earthiness, hip-hop grit and torch-ballad vulnerability — an Aretha Franklin for the ’90s and beyond. She may be a star, the “queen of hip-hop soul,” but she has never seemed inaccessible, her life and her art bleeding together so that it becomes impossible to separate one from the other.
“Go, Mary! Go, Mary! Go, Mary!” was the spontaneous chant that burst from the audience during one song early in her breathless 90-minute set Friday at the Auditorium Theatre, a performance that traversed an emotional landscape of Vegas hokum, soul-deep ballads and exultant disco. Audiences don’t just applaud Blige, they openly root for her. That’s because unlike many of her contemporaries, who place a premium on visual spectacle, choreography and acting ability, Blige is all about projecting her personality through song with a spontaneity that can be electrifying. She is unafraid to rub salt in her wounds, make light of her weakness and confront the demons (abusive lovers, drugs, poverty) that give her life the arc of a soap opera.
Little wonder that she kicks off her latest single, “No Drama,” with the piano chords from the “The Young and the Restless Theme.” Blige gave it a bravura performance at the Auditorium, declaring her emancipation from every breakup, disappointment and tragedy that has befallen her.
Her passion was a necessary antidote for the show-biz convention that occasionally marred her show. She poured on the glitz at the start, with six musicians, three backup singers and four superfluous dancers gyrating while she roared in a form-fitting orange vinyl outfit. Even in these more stagy moments, she still put her faith in the song. On “Love,” she demonstrated her feel for the cadences of hip-hop, her voice breaking off into rhythmic sing-speak interludes. On Lauryn Hill’s midtempo ballad “All that I Can Say,” she brought an exuberance that spiraled into ecstatic wails.
When the volume dipped and the dancers exited, Blige prowled the lip of the stage and got down to business. For “Keep Your Head,” a reggae lilt crept into her voice for this ghetto anthem to perseverance, evoking the strength and dignity of Rita Marley. The raw ache that pervaded her signature song, “My Life,” was expected, the gut-wrenching coda to “Your Child” was not. This was a performance far more lacerating than the one found on her 1999 album, “Mary,” with Blige embodying the voice of an abandoned child who comes back later in life to haunt her absentee father.
A few minutes later she laid into “Not Gon’ Cry” with equal, finger-wagging ardor, pushing higher and harder against the top end of her range until something had to break: her voice, the song, the ceiling, the memory of the man who done her wrong. Blige was wrung out, and so were her fans, but she made sure to end the concert on an upward-looking note, closing with songs that testified to personal healing. It was a mixture of therapy and schmaltz, but who could resist the inescapable Dr. Dre-rides-the-“Soul Train” groove of “Family Affair”? Blige danced and smiled, as if to enjoy a little short-lived bliss after the maelstrom.
