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She was dressed and booted to face the culture’s adversity during her nascent career, strutting to the beat of her own drum. In 1995, Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man teamed up with Blige for the GRAMMY Award-winning hit “I’ll Be There for You / You’re All I Need to Get By.” Crooning the irresistible riff and verses of the 1968 Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell staple “You’re All I Need to Get By,” Blige confidently stood her ground in the center of hip-hop’s masculine-operated sphere, boldly opening up the space for Black women’s perspectives about the hardships of love and life to be realized. Most importantly, Blige herself rose as a pioneering figure in hip-hop, where women are commonly displaced and neglected in its cultural spaces among their male counterparts and even disregarded for creating their own. While hip-hop idioms were already at the heart of the genre by the time Blige arrived, the slick flourishes that derived from New Jack Swing excesses shifted toward a tougher, street-savvy aesthetic that felt neither forced nor routine. In an era when chart-dominating divas ruled the pop stratosphere and hip-hop was undergoing crucial changes that would eventually signal the end of its golden age, Blige’s music established a significant precedent for modern R&B. Certainly, audiences and critics alike agreed with the attribution. In the past decade before she seemingly reached the freedom she yearned for, the Yonkers native emerged in the early Nineties as the reigning “Queen of Hip-Hop Soul,” an honorific title that music mogul and producer Andre Harrell attributed to her masterful use of her gutsy, gospel-based voice over sample-heavy beats and productions. By the time she released No More Drama in late August 2001, the cathartic journey from self-destruction and pain that she struggled with shifted toward the concepts of redemption and healing. She embodied the harsh realities of the streets. Struggle was always at the heart of her message, no matter what she sang because she lived it. She was always a transparent musician from the time she emerged on the scene, using her music as a vehicle to externally reflect the struggle.
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The stunning beauty of Blige’s genius was her courage to delve into the depths of her soul to reveal such woes of her painful past while inspiring others to reconcile their pain, through changing the narrative of their realities. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assert that the “Forever No More” piece also served as a social response to the responsibilities of the generation she derived from, advocating for her fellow peers and community to end the corruption they’ve committed toward themselves and others, while striving to become the saviors for the new era. With each line functioning as spiritual prophecies, she declares her freedom from the pits of her own purgatory to complete tranquility from it all. For the penultimate interlude of the 17-song set, Blige breaks into a spoken word piece entitled “Forever No More.” Only a minute long, she speaks in the prose of a beat poet, revealing and discarding all of the relationship strains, insecurities, and baggage that stem from the demons she experienced in her life and percolated through her artistry. Blige’s fifth studio album No More Drama. Blige, “Forever No More” ( No More Drama, 2001).Ī profound moment occurs in the concluding minutes of Mary J. “All I ever wanted was to be as I once was – unbounded, / Somehow it got twisted and before long sounded / As though life was continuous connive-thrive-drive, / Choking out the simplest joy of just being alive.” - Mary J. Blige’s fifth studio album No More Drama, originally released August 28, 2001.