Mary J. Blige Transformed Her Pain Into the Sound of an Era. Her Joy Sounds Just as Good.
glamour.comWe didn’t think hip-hop would ever make it to 50 years,” Mary J. Blige says definitively. Across our late-summer conversation about hip-hop, healing, and staying in the present, Blige’s voice is suffused with characteristic sincerity. “We thought it was gone be done, the way people were trying to cancel it and parents weren’t trying to hear it,” she says. “So it’s just a blessing and a miracle that it’s still around.
And I feel good that I’m at the forefront of that, being the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul and R&B.”Here, at the half-century mark for hip-hop, , 52, the woman who gave the genre its soul, is living life in the sunshine.
The woman who invented honey blonde hair on honey brown skin has earned nine Grammy Awards and dozens more nominations, netted Academy Awards nods for music and acting, and sold 50 million units in music sales.
Thousands of iterative moments from a life of exceptional promise and pain, and some extraordinary successes, are the roses and stones that have brought Blige to this hard-fought “now.”And as we absolutely expect a girl from Yonkers, New York, to be, Blige is entrepreneurial too.
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