On the remix of “ You’re All I Need to Get By,” she plays Tammi Terrell to Method Man’s Marvin Gaye.
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On the plus side, Combs hadn’t yet turned sampling into the mechanical Puff-ery of the late-’90 No Way Out era he lets Blige tiptoe over the vocal melody of “You Bring Me Joy” without the rhythm track from White’s “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me” overcoming her.Īfter My Life strengthened her commercial appeal, Blige embraced traditional feminine roles on duets. To listen to “I’m Goin’ Down” in sequence after the torpid “I Never Wanna Live Without You” is to wonder how a covers album of classic-R&B deep cuts recast as manifestos of self-reliance might’ve played. Blige isn’t tacky she’s incapable of bad taste, which sometimes cuts into her sense of fun. Indeed, she has less in common with her soul forebears than with Annie Lennox, also blessed with pipes so formidable that she sings like a lead guitar, bending and stretching notes on material that, fortunately, didn’t stint on tackiness and depended on shows of vocal derring-do. Less gifted predecessors compressed Blige’s whole career into five minutes, as Karyn White did with “Superwoman.” When Blige out-sings on tracks like “Don’t Go,” her technique strands her. Tensile, brassy, and confident, her mezzo-soprano has little warmth. Belters like Blige rely on audience submission: Admire the voice, ignore the material. While pairing artists for the sake of consolidating streams is the way the business works in the 21st century, the guest spots expose My Life’s often ho-hum songwriting. and Method Man’s “The What” into a transformed “I’m Goin’ Down”? And who knows how many young listeners gave rap a try after Combs and Thompson wove Notorious B.I.G. The presence of Smif-N-Wessun and LL Cool J on the second disc’s remixes attest to her dialogue with hip-hop Blige had no interest in settling for Anita Baker’s market share. Hayes and White, after all, had long stopped scoring pop crossovers here was a Black woman artist modernizing them as part of glistening triple-platinum product. The anniversary edition confirms the novelty if not radicalism of the Hitmen’s approach: R&B as tradition and living history.
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A ’90s fly girl hearkening back to Ella Fitzgerald over a Reagan-era jam, Blige had learned how to contextualize her melancholy. On the other hand, “Mary Jane (All Night Long)” finds her and the source material in harmony: by brightening Rick James’ original synth-flute line, Thompson and Combs give Blige the chance for some old school scatting over the outro. The title track interpolates the hook and ascending three-note keyboard from Ayers’ 1976 “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” creating a healthy tension between Blige’s blue mood and the sample’s shafts of light. These ancestral voices reassure but offer subtle contrasts, too.
There's Isaac Hayes and Barry White, Roy Ayres and Slick Rick-history as group therapy. My Life, nevertheless, emanates from some deep, dark place where both sadness and happiness cohabitate and turn into one single, beautiful sorrow.Sandwiched between the buoyant debut What’s the 411? (1992) and the austere, inevitable divadom of Share My World (1997), My Life positions Blige as heiress to an R&B fortune, thanks in large part to the sampling acumen of Bad Boy’s Hitmen team members Chucky Thompson and Sean “Puffy” Combs.
Blige's strain is sleekly modern and urban, and the grit in it comes from being streetwise and thoroughly realistic about the travails of life.
Blige took a huge leap in artistry by penning almost everything herself (the major exception being Norman Whitfield's "I'm Going Down") in collaboration with co-producers Combs and multi-instrumentalist Chucky Thompson, and everything seems to leap directly from her gut. My Life is, from beginning to end, a brilliant, wistful individual plea of desire. The hip-hop part of the combination takes a few steps into the background, allowing Blige's tortured soul to carry the album completely, and it does so with heartwrenching authority. But it is some of the finest modern soul of the '90s, backing away to a certain extent from the hip-hop/soul consolidation that Blige introduced on her debut album.
This certainly isn't your parents' (or grandparents') soul. The melodic sources this time around, though, are so expertly incorporated into the music that they never seem to be intrusions, instead playing like inspired dialogues with soulsters from the past, connecting past legacies with a new one. The production is not exactly original, and there is evidence here of him borrowing wholesale from other songs. Perhaps the single finest moment in Sean "Puffy" Combs' musical career has been the production on this, Mary J.
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