Some artists reject equating their personal lives with their artistic ones. In the tradition of the most magnificent women in soul, Mary J. Blige has always invited it, freely discussing her travails and liberally exploring them within her songs, no matter how cutting. Yet on Strength of a Woman, ardent followers might find it jarring that the R&B diva should once again find a reason to look within for affirmation, at age 46 as she does on her 13th album’s luminous, boom-bap opening track “Love Yourself.” After a career peppered with songs detailing her abusive relationships and substance addiction, she appeared to find a plateau, a lane where she finally uncovered the happiness she deserved. My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1) (2011), closed the chapter on those tumultuous years, untethering her enough that she could—on part of 2014’s acclaimed The London Sessions—finally manifest as the classic house diva she deserved to be—free and exultant, unburdened by BPMs.
Wounds reopen, though. Blige is currently embroiled in an acrimonious split from her longtime manager/husband Kendu Isaacs—the source, fans presumed, of much of that early happiness—and so Strength of a Woman finds its power in going back to basics. As a whole experience, it luxuriates within the magisterial hip-hop-soul queendom she formulated in the ’90s and the attendant themes that trace back to wronged-woman blues. The bulk of the arrangements, by DJ Camper, hover in the realm of classic soul with slow-jam sensibilities, leaving space for her warm, inimitable relatable voice to speak her truth.
Strength of a Woman’s classicism is, in some ways, a relief despite the success of The London Sessions’ more modern tracks; in an era of young R&B acts that bury their vocals in hazy, gossamer production to the detriment of cohesion, it’s refreshing to hear Blige sticking with what she knows. Mary will never not be Mary, and through the deep-dive into self-empowerment and, as ever, self-discovery, that is this album, she understands her voice is her most effective tool—and her emotion its understudy. “I’ve been broken for a long time, now I’m standing in the sunshine” she intones radiantly over a simple piano accompaniment on “Smile.” The magic in Blige’s music has always been in her ability to transform straightforward, would-be schmaltzy sentiment into universal truths, and here she does that magically, perhaps more fully invested in actualization than she’s ever been. While newer R&B fans might not be drawn to the stoicism Blige embraces, particularly those who gravitated towards her via Disclosure, it’s inarguable that she’s set the template younger faves want to emulate; in an era of musical confessionalism, Blige’s instinct has always been the most confessional of all.
That said, Blige is never far from the culture at its most current. Just like rappers will sing, so too will Blige rap; on hyper-dense verses in triple-time cadences, her antipathy lives in the rhythm. Aside from “Telling the Truth,” a typically clanging club track produced by Kaytranada, she is at her most indulgent and delicious on the “Glow Up” featuring Quavo and Missy Elliott, a gleaming revenge track in which she declares herself petty in a Migos flow—“I’ma glow up! Throw it in ya face like yeahhhh”—and vows to stunt on a spurned lover; Kendu, we presume.
On Strength, Blige’s soon-to-be ex-husband (or his avatar) is the equivalent of a cartoon villain, both centered as the antagonist in Blige’s betrayed dirges and merely serving as a plot point in the ones that chat chart her own growth through the break-up; to that point this is precisely what a Mary J. Blige album has always been, a document of a woman facing and subsequently never succumbing to her obstacles, all combatted with gritty trills and not-quite-perfect vibrato that mirrors her not-quite-perfect truth. She has never been the most precise singer and thus she is the exact right person to deliver such apparently intimate missives from the soul. Vocally, there’s nary a chirp, even in her soprano—just a conjuring deep in the diaphragm. It manifests as she is, what you hear is what you get.
