“Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” reads Proverbs 18:21. Her vocal prowess is seductive and raw, as the lyrics are direct and undisguised. She warns him not to follow in the tracks of his unwise father, who likely made the mistake of letting a good woman go. On the sure-footed track, “I’m the Only Woman,” with its cold production inspired by a romantic scene in Mayfield’s Super Fly 1972 film, Blige provides definitive reasons to her man why another female can’t contest her love. When you listen to My Life, you can immediately hear the music that Blige was attracted to as a child and influential in shaping her instrument as an emotionally open performer. Listening to music from legacy artists such as Franklin, Wonder, Roy Ayers, Curtis Mayfield and Anita Baker gave her a reason to be happy, if only for a moment in time. Drug addiction and alcoholism, the cries of women abused, and everything else a child her age should never bear witness to.īut not every day was a bad day, according to Blige in previous interviews. Raised as Mary Jane Blige in the Schlobohm housing project in Yonkers, New York, she had seen and heard it all. It didn’t just revolve around hardships that came along with it, but the music that carried her through. Her point of reference? Her life, of course. So, who better than Blige to produce the narrative of her sophomore album if not the predecessor’s masterminds. But, besides Puff Daddy, who spearheaded What’s the 411? her monstrous 1992 debut album, none of the day-one songwriters and producers were involved with the 1994 follow-up. On the outside, there was a concern, as evidenced in the suspenseful My Life intro, that she couldn’t do it again. Pioneering a genre that inspired many artists - from Mariah Carey to Alicia Keys to Keyshia Cole to Jazmine Sullivan, and many others - had to be stressful for an artist who came into the business at a young age, and not realizing such a thing was ever possible. It’s a feature retrospect at how one of the most crucial albums in music history, made during the most vulnerable time of her life, solidified her as one of the soul greats. In her acceptance speech, Blige revealed the release date of her much-anticipated Amazon Prime documentary titled Mary J. She also earned the sash as the youngest living artist to be inducted.

She was inducted into the historic Walk of Fame, following in the footsteps of cited influences and former collaborators such as Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, and Patti LaBelle, to name a few. In May, more than 25 years later, Blige, 50, would return to the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, not as a performer but as an honoree.

Mary j blige my life album