Mary J. Blige is trying hard to think positive. Her latest album, “No More Drama” (MCA), is about healing and moving on from a world of abusive relationships, drugs and self-loathing.
But every night on tour the past catches up with her. The pain comes flooding back in songs such as “Your Child,” “My Life” and “Not Gon’ Cry,” which Blige performs as if she were reliving them. These turn her concerts into an extended catharsis that leaves both performer and audience wrung out. Pity the performers who must follow Blige on stage at this weekend’s B-96 Summer Bash concert at the Route 66 Raceway in Joliet. (Performers include Ja Rule, Shakira, Ashanti, P. Diddy and Nelly.)
“Every single night it’s like therapy for me, because I’m not completely delivered from those things I sing about,” says Blige in a recent phone interview. “There are so many things that people don’t know about me that really hurt me deep. Things I can’t talk about publicly, but which I can express on stage in a song.
“Every time I go back to those songs, it hurts to the pit of my stomach just like the first day I wrote them,” she says. “But I have to go back there, if only to remind myself not to ever do those things again.”
Blige’s splendid, splintered voice and deeply personal subject matter should be too raw for mainstream R&B, a world of processed beats and manicured emotions that she has nonetheless dominated since debuting at 21 in 1992 with the album “What’s the 411?” It was a startling transformation into stardom for a girl who grew up in a housing project in Yonkers, N.Y.
“Woke up at 17 and got nothing going for me except the fact that I sing,” Blige sings on “Where I’ve Been,” one of the best tracks on “No More Drama.”
It’s not exaggerating to say that music saved Blige’s life.
“When I listened to music and was able to hit all those notes I heard on my dad’s Stevie Wonder albums or my mom’s Mavis Staples albums, it gave me the things that people said I didn’t have,” she says. “It made me feel pretty. It made me feel strong. It made me feel rich. It made me feel I had everything. It made me feel like I could conquer something.”
She was mentored by a young executive, Sean Combs, future paramour of Jennifer Lopez and multimillion-selling studio mogul of the ’90s. Combs was never better as a producer than on the first two Blige albums, particularly the tumultuous “My Life” (1994).
But Blige’s personal life was in turmoil; at 19, she was so desperate to escape the ghetto that she signed a contract she acknowledges she didn’t even read. Her management company successfully sued her for violating terms of that deal when she started to score hits. It brought her to the verge of bankruptcy. Her drug use and tempestuous romantic relationships became grist for songs almost too unbearable for her to sing at times. She finally turned things around a few years ago, a spiritual transformation documented on the albums “Mary” (1999) and “No More Drama.”
“What changed? It was an accumulation of things,” she says. “Mostly it was a lot of self-abuse. You walk around as a teenager thinking no one loves you, so you start hating yourself, and you start hurting yourself. There are so many people walking around today with the same poison. That’s what the shows are all about. It’s like I’m talking to all the mothers out there: `Don’t call your children stupid or dumb or little MF’s. Build their confidence, so that when they grow up, they’ll feel their mothers and fathers were there for them.’ “
Even in conversation, Blige sounds almost desperate to be heard. Her lack of artifice worked against her early in her career when she refused to cooperate with the media or producers who could not accept her for who she was: a child of the ghetto committed to telling it, and singing it, exactly as she feels it.
“Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan–that’s real, and that’s what I grew up with,” she says. “I can’t even feel half the stuff on radio now. I can feel Jill Scott–she’s from the past–and India Arie. But I don’t hear a whole lot of the realness anywhere else. A lot of performers today want to look real and act real, but they haven’t gone through the struggle to get there. It gets me in trouble sometimes, but I refuse to be anything but real.”
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Mary J. Blige
When: Multi-act show starts at 2 p.m. Saturday
Where: B-96 Summer Bash, Route 66 Raceway, Joliet
Price: $20-$75; 312-559-1212
