Mary J. Blige, American Voice
by Mark Anthony Neal
Recently Mary J. Blige appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, to perform her interpretation of Led Zepplin’s, “Stairway to Heaven.” It is perhaps easy to think that as the founding, and still reigning, Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, Blige has no business covering a classic rock recording—a song that for all intents, was initially recorded during the last stand of white male hegemony on the pop charts. But I’d like to suggest that there is more at work with Blige’s willingness to tackle “Stairway to Heaven;” that she is acting on a long articulated claim that she—and by extension Black women vocalists—be read as a quintessential American Voice.
Nineteen years after Mary J. Blige’s “You Remind Me” appeared on the soundtrack of the Buppie romance Strictly Business, she is often referred to as the “Aretha Franklin” of the hip-hop generation. The comparison is less about Blige’s technical skill, but rather her emotional connection to the generations that have come of age in the aftermath of the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement—a connection that Franklin had with the Civil Rights Generation. Specifically, Mary J. Blige tapped into the emotional center of a generation for which loss and betrayal were always the first and foremost expectations, whether in romance or public policy. Hence a song like “Real Love” resonates powerfully, in part, because it captured the hip-hop generation’s utter fixation with delineating “the real”—their existential quest for authenticity.
Unlike the Civil Rights generation which was often consumed with defending their legitimacy in the face of an all-too-present White gaze, the hip-hop generation rejected the significance of the White gaze, instead defining “the real” within the context of community. What is at stake in this quest for “the real” is the very real possibility of rejection and censure from community—a product of the apprehensions and ambivalence associated with coming of age in an era where you are “free to be” whatever. In other words while the hip-hop generation has the “freedom” to explore notions of identity beyond that which was defined within the contexts of Jim Crow segregation, there are very real concerns that such freedoms can undermine the value of community, both fictive and real.
In viscerally representing hip-hop generation anxieties, Blige has also vocally reproduced the dissonance that has come to define the period. Blige’s penchant for singing out of tune, replicates the ways the hip-hop generation has been deemed as out of tune with black tradition and bourgeois notions of black progress and respectability. Such dissonance though is not simply the product of bad training (vocally), but a response to the ways that post-Civil Rights era generations hear the world. Issues like the crack cocaine epidemic, the prison industrial complex, police brutality, voter disenfranchisement, wage depression, lack of access to quality and affordable healthcare and housing, black-on-black crime, sexism and misogyny, sexual violence, the failing infrastructure of public schooling, and homophobia, have often left post-Civil Rights era generations grasping for straws, much the way some many of its vocalist frantically grasp for the right pitch.
With the weight of these contexts, Blige has successfully transformed herself from the proverbial round-the-way girl (from Yonkers, NY) into one of the most singular American voices of the last two decades. Blige’s choice to cover “Stairway to Heaven” is not some attempt to remake herself to a more diverse audience, but an effort to render more explicit her claim as an American voice. As one of the first and most successful stars of sampled based R&B, Blige’s music has always been in conversation with great American pop. Tracks like “Be Happy,” and “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By” liberally sampled from the music of Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Though Blige’s music has often made use of classic Soul samples and hip-hop beats, she and her producers have also ventured beyond the block, if you will. The most famous examples are “No More Drama,” which sampled the theme from popular soap opera The Young and The Restless and “Deep Inside” which featured a classic riff from Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets.”
Throughout her career, Blige has also carefully chosen to cover African-American female vocalists. As her reputation as the voice of the hip-hop generation was being cemented, Blige covered the Carole King penned, Aretha Franklin classic “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” Though purists might have cried foul, Blige’s rendition of the song allowed her to embrace a femininity that had been missing in her earlier performances. As witnessed in the video shot for the song, which originally appeared on the soundtrack of the series New York Undercover (1995), the Mary J. Blige that performs “Natural Woman” evinces a glamour that allowed her to be read within the trajectory of black female performers like Diana Ross, Chaka Khan and Anita Baker.
A year later, Blige would tackle Natalie Cole’s “Our Love,” on the recording Share My World (1996). In the mid-1970s, Cole was the first female vocalist to significantly challenge Franklin’s supremacy on the charts and the popular imagination. As Cole was an iteration of the “real” for a generation of Black overachievers ambivalent about their success, she was also an ideal model for Blige who was struggling with self-esteem issues and addiction in the full view of a demanding public. Those struggles can be heard in Blige’s voice on her 1998 live recording The Tour, where she records a stellar version of Dorothy Moore’s “Misty Blue,” a top-five pop song from 1976. Though Moore, Franklin and Cole were standard bearers of the Soul tradition, they also recorded the kind of crossover pop that Blige would have heard growing up in Yonkers in the 1970s on Top-40 Pop stations like New York City’s WABC or WXLO (the precursor to the legendary 98.7 KISS)—tracks that on any given night might have been in regular rotation with Led Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven” or Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me,” which Blige covered (likely inspired by the Isley Brother cover) on her 2007 recording Growing Pains.
As Blige grew, so did the capacity of fickle audiences to see her as more than simply a Black woman R&B singer. Blige’s well publicized emotional and personal struggles, including her experiences with domestic violence, and her willingness to share them in her music made her an inspiration to millions. This is perhaps why it was fitting that Blige was paired with U2 frontman Bono, in a performance of U2’s classic “One” during Shelter from the Storm, one of the many live telethons broadcast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levee system in New Orleans. In her essay “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Daphne Brooks writes of the collaboration, “the transformation of [U2’s] most recognizable anthems, ‘One,’ into a duet with Yonkers’s hard-scrabble, hard-singing, sometimes-hard-on-the-ears Mary J. Blige, opened up a space to make rich, powerful, multi-layered references to the complex intersections of race, gender, and class embedded in the Katrina catastrophe.” (Meridians vol 8, no 1, 189)
Brooks forwards an even more provocative thesis about the post-Katarina performance, arguing that “Blige’s surplus performance highlights the unheralded position of black women in rock, the unheralded position of black women in America, the violence of white patriarchal political neglect and discrimination, the violence of white patriarchal sexuality in rock—all of this comes to the surface in her performance. Off key,” adding that “Never before (nor perhaps since) have Mary J. Blige’s tonal eccentricities been put to more powerful use.” (190).
I’d like to hang a bit on Brooks’ “nor perhaps since.” Blige was one of the many artists that was transformed by the campaign and eventual election of Barack Obama. Blige, like contemporaries, Beyonce Knowles, Sean Combs, Hill Harper, and Shawn Carter, functioned as a surrogate for Obama in the waning moments of the 2008 Presidential campaign. Additionally, Blige was featured on Big Boi of Outkast’s “Sumthin’s Gotta Give,” which was released during the summer of 2008 and helped circulate pro-Obama sentiment among hip-hop generation voters. In the years since her performance of “One,” Blige’s public profile has been marked by her own recognition of her increased gravitas. It was that gravitates that she utilized during the Obama campaign and perhaps most stunningly, during her performance on Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief, that was broadcast nearly two-weeks after the Haitian earthquake in January of 2010.
Hope for Haiti Now was produced by MTV Networks and hosted by actor and humanitarian George Clooney. Performers included current chart-toppers like Alicia Keys, Shakira, Coldplay, Keith Urban and Beyonce, alongside classic pop artists such as Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, Sting and Madonna who sang “Like a Prayer.” Of the songs performed that evening, there was a particular focus on the American Song Book. Springsteen, for example, sang the Civil Rights-era anthem “We Shall Overcome,” Urban, Crow and Kid Rock performed a dutiful version of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me,” Wonder revived Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Jennifer Hudson (backed by the Roots) put a cosmopolitan spin on classic American pop with Lennon and McCartney’s “Let It Be.”
“Hard Times No More,” the song that Blige sang during Hope for Haiti Now, was likely not immediately recognizable to many viewers, but during a tribute that was, in part, a celebration of the power and elegance of the American Song Book, it might have been the most apropos choice. Written by Stephen Foster, the literal father of the American Song Book, in 1854, the song has been recorded in recent years by Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, and notably Mavis Staples, who weathered voice takes the song to new depths. Staples might be the most relevant precursor to Blige. While Franklin might have been the voice of the Civil Rights Generation, women like Staples and Nina Simone (who Blige digitally duets with on "About You") were the voices of the movement that propelled that generation. In transitioning from the personal trauma that informed so much of her earlier music to interpreting music that speaks to the trauma of nations, Blige has reached a new plateau in her life and career.”
Indeed Brooks might have been thinking about Blige’s performance of “Hard Times Come No More” or Blige's duet a nine days later with Andrea Bocelli on the aforementioned “Bridge Over the Troubled Water,” when she writes that “Blige’s performance reminds of the ways that the black singing voice is not confined to the ethereal netherworld…her rendition of this song gives living voice to the mythically-driven, over-determined, under-theorized scapegoat figure, allowing instead to enter in the flesh into public conversations to which she had been denied access.” (190)
“In the flesh” was how Blige appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, prepared to sing a song that many fans of AOR (album oriented rock) music consider sacred. And yes the decision to debut the song on the Queen-of-all-media’s daily show on the very day that the song was made available on ITunes bespeaks a calculating commercial move on Blige’s part. But no one who saw her performance, regardless of how one might feel about the song itself, could deny that she transformed it into an anthem of anguish, trauma, and ultimately spiritual catharsis. And again, it is useful to take a riff from Daphne Brooks, who will have the last word here: “Blige steps into the rock pantheon here in a moment that musically resonates with exposed erasures and absences—the erasure of black female artists from rock genealogies, the erasure of black female sexual exploitation in rock memory, and most critically and urgently, the absence co-joined with the spectacular presence of black female suffering in America.” (189)
