She was the Grammy-winning platinum-selling queen of R&B, but still Mary J. Blige wasn't happy. Then she quit cocaine, reinvented herself and God sent her a husband. On the eve of her New Zealand tour, she talks to Stephanie Merritt
KEY POINTS:
On Mary J. Blige's eighth album Growing Pains, there's a song entitled Grown Woman, a hymn to self-respect, dignity and the kind of confidence that comes with maturity and self-knowledge. "I wear these Seven jeans, but baby they don't wear me/I keep it covered up'cause I'm a lady," she asserts, and certainly the 37-year-old woman sitting before me in a London hotel room overlooking Hyde Park seems to have found a grace and poise a million miles away from her once formidable diva reputation.
Dressed discreetly in a cerise sweater, tight jeans (Seven, presumably) and boots, she pauses frequently to swipe her thick caramel fringe away from her wide almond eyes, and smiles. Her eye contact is still tentative but she often used to wear sunglasses for interviews, so this seems like progress. Today she looks every inch a sophisticated, mature woman who has grown into her beauty and accepted herself. Given that her songs always provide such a transparent running commentary on each stage of her life, is Grown Woman the song that best tells us how the Queen of Hip-Hop/Soul feels about herself in 2008?
"Uh-uh," she says, shaking her head. "That would be `work in progress', that's definitely it." This is one of the most personal songs on the album, a warning to onlookers not to imagine that, just because she has dramatically turned her life around in the past few years, this means she has it all sewn-up.
"Take one more look, past my celebrity/That's where you'll find the real me/To you do I still look complete?" it asks, and goes on: "Just like you, sometimes I get down, sometimes I want to cry, sometimes I get depressed".
"This music business can suck all the love out of you, all the compassion for people - you can start to think you're better than them. But I want to let people know that I'm no better and no worse, I'm just like you," she says earnestly.
Yet she seems happy. She seems ... together is the word that comes most readily to mind. She looks pleased, erupting into one of her unexpected bursts of warm, melodic laughter.
"Well, I am, because it's such a new place for me, but you have no idea how hard I have to work to continue being here. When you come from so many damaged places you don't ever want to spiral back there, so you gotta continue to check yourself. You have to make sure that one drink is not turning into 20 drinks, or that you're not even thinking about going back to drugs, or that you continue not to react and get angry. But it's how you respond that determines how it's going to be."
Mary J. Blige has never shied away from sharing her most painful experiences, both in her music and in print, and it is partly this willingness to step off the pedestal reserved for icons that has endeared her to fans. Seven years ago, as she entered her 30s, she was already a multi-platinum-selling R&B legend, at the top of her business and living the whole ghetto-fabulous dream, festooned in statement jewellery and a riot of designer labels, spending every night high on drink and cocaine, surrounded by hangers-on eager to get a piece of the lifestyle her money provided.
She became notorious for her demands, her tantrums and, famously, for once allegedly threatening to punch an interviewer. But all the bling masked a mess of self-hatred and a self-destructive streak that was leading her to destroy her greatest gift - that extraordinary voice. At one point she was smoking a pack of 20 cigarettes a night to counter the effects of all the cocaine she was taking. Wouldn't fans have been amazed to know that someone who appeared to have made it so big could hate their life so much?
"People know what they see but they don't know what's happening inside,' she says firmly.
"If you want to know who you are and how you feel about yourself, take a look at your environment. And my environment then was telling me that I hated myself. All the things I was doing, the hanging out late, late, late, always looking in the mirror and thinking I was ugly inside and out, the people I hung out with. Those people didn't really like me or care about me and they were causing me to lose my career. They were the reason I didn't make it to interviews on time, they were all getting paid but they didn't want to tell me what I should be doing because they were all scared to lose the chance of hanging around Mary J. Blige, the superstar.
"And there's not one of those people who's around me today,"' she adds, with emphasis.
It was only when she met the man who is now her husband, music producer Kendu Isaacs, that she finally found someone prepared to tell it to her straight, but the desire to change her life pre-dated meeting him.
"Before all of that, it was prayer," she says. "Even when I was drinking and getting high, I knew there was a God. So one day I started to pray - I just said: `God, you gotta send me somebody to help me because I'm tired of living like this but I don't want to die."'
Was that a real fear? She nods slowly.
"People started dying around me - like, one of my beautiful girlfriends is dead today because of something she was dealing with and then someone I knew in the music business died [the singer Aaliyah] and then the World Trade Centre blew up and I was like: `okay, I'm next.' I seriously thought I was going to go."
Meeting Isaacs might have given her the impetus and the support to believe she could change her life, but the reality was not straightforward. For a start, he made her look with new eyes at the people she considered friends. She offers one story as an example.
"There was one time I went to a club with these people, and I thought everyone was paying for their own drinks. Then I got the receipt for the drinks and I was like: `Oh, I guess I'm paying for the drinks then.' Then we went to get our cars from the parking lot and they had all put their cars on my ticket.
"My security guard went back and told my husband and he was just like ...", she adopts a gently admonishing, parental tone, "`I told you.' And to be challenged like that - it hurts, because you're in denial, you want to believe that people are your friends."
Was it isolating, then, to walk away from that lifestyle definitively?
"When I said I'm not drinking anymore, not hanging out - it was almost like people ran away from me." Her voice is neutral but she looks away when she says this, her eyes downcast.
It was only when she met the man who is now her husband, music producer Kendu Isaacs, that she found someone prepared to tell it to her straight."They just vanished. It hurt me really, really bad because there was a point where I believed those people loved and liked me, I really did. And that's devastation - but for me it's a little easier, I know how to turn off from the world and go into a hole and stay there by myself; I know how to do that and it hurts, but I'll do it just to survive."
This disappearing act was her means of surviving a childhood and adolescence that these days would be the stuff of a bestselling memoir. Mary Jane Blige grew up in the housing projects of Yonkers, north of New York, surrounded by drugs and crime. Her musician father, Thomas, left the family when she was 4; her mother Cora, who was 17 when Mary was born, worked long hours in a series of jobs. Then, at age 5, Mary was sexually abused by her mother's friend, something she was unable to talk about for years, until her journey of reinvention began.
"I saw that I was insecure and I hated myself, and I was like: `okay, why?' And when I tried to find out why, not to go into all those details but it goes back to the time when I was a 5-year-old kid and I realised: this is not my fault. I can't undo what they did, but I owe it to myself to make my life better."
When the break came, it happened unexpectedly. She always knew her voice was exceptional, "but I thought I was a needle in a haystack; like, what are the chances of somebody like me getting out, getting into the music business? It was so far-fetched, but then sometimes I'd listen to myself singing and it would just make me feel good. And I knew the things other artists could do - Tina Marie and Anita Baker - I could do those things, too."
In fact, it was imitating Anita Baker on a karaoke version of Caught Up in the Rapture, recorded for a laugh at the local mall when she was 17, that launched her career. Through her mother's then boyfriend, the tape found its way to Andre Harrell at Uptown Records, who signed her. In 1992, when she was 21, her debut album What's the 411? was produced by Sean Coombs (later to become P Diddy) and went triple platinum.
As her career began to soar, her personal life grew increasingly tumultuous. For six years she was involved in a relationship with K-Ci Hailey, frontman of R&B quartet Jodeci, which she has repeatedly described as abusive. That, added to the memories of her childhood, left her with some serious hang-ups when it came to trusting men. Then, just at the time she began praying for God to send her some help, she met the man who would become her husband.
These days, between work commitments, she and Isaacs live a quiet life in their exclusive corner of New Jersey (their neighbours are Chris Rock and Denzel Washington), though the best part of this year is going to be spent touring with Jay-Z. Now she's 37, does she have any plans to have a family?
"I do have a family, I have my stepchildren," she says, almost affronted.
"As far as having my own child, that's not something that's on my list to do right now, but I definitely would like to take time out, to walk away for about three years and say whatever happens, happens - if I get pregnant and have a baby, great. Although ... three years, I don't know. I think I'll go crazy!"
In the meantime, she is busy loving life. Growing Pains has sold more than 2m copies worldwide and is still riding high in the Billboard album charts. In December she won two Grammies out of three nominations, taking her career total to eight. She's also slated to play Nina Simone in a biopic of the jazz singer, though this is a project that has been talked about for some time. "I have the script now," she says, "but as far as the production goes, I just don't know - when I know, you'll know."
The project of becoming Mary J Blige is the real work in progress, but it's one that is making her happy. That she's finally in the right place and happy to be there is palpable in everything she says.
"I have never thought so clearly and seen life so crystal clear in my life," she says, smiling almost shyly. "The way I was - I would never want to go back there again. I love to be able to be a woman and be powerful through being kind and even being vulnerable. That's hard at the end of the day but I can see all the things I need to do, and I love being a grown woman - to me that's a lot of fun."
What about the downsides of maturity? Would she ever consider surgery? She hoots with laughter. "Not me, I don't care! I'm already old. Older, so I'm OK. I'll turn 40 or 50 and still be OK, I think. Now I'm not killing myself over vanity, I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do - you're supposed to want to exercise and get dressed and look nice but it becomes obsession when you're running to the clinic to get your lips bigger or you're looking at some chick on a magazine, you know what I'm saying? You gotta be smart about it. The older I get, the more I pull back. I got my man - as long as he's happy. And the day he's not happy," she grins and shrugs, "well, I still gotta be happy with what I got."
LOWDOWN
Who: Mary J Blige, the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul
Born: January 11, 1971
Achievements: Released eight studio albums, sold forty million records and over 10 million singles worldwide. Twenty-six Grammy Award nominations for her work and eight wins
Latest album: Growing Pains (2007)
Where & when: Auckland's Vector Arena on June 16 and Wellington's Michael Fowler Centre on June 17. Tickets on sale tomorrow via Ticketmaster
