In the ’90s, Blige prophesied a future in which hip-hop would be baked directly into pop music. The hits on this collection show her just getting started.
As a singer, Mary J. Blige didn’t have the church-choir precision of a Whitney Houston or the range of a Mariah Carey. What she did have was a bottomless well of soul and swagger. When she signed to Uptown Records in 1989, she began working with a guy named Sean Combs, then an employee at Uptown Records and still years away from being known as Puff Daddy. Together with the upstart producer, she prophesied a future in which hip-hop would be baked directly into pop music.
With her 1992 debut What’s The 411?, Blige folded the nascent sounds of hip-hop into her music and its aesthetic into her style. HERstory Vol.1, a box set available in 7-inch, LP, CD, and digital formats, reflects on that era and on Blige’s emergence as the “queen of hip-hop soul.” The collection, spanning singles, collaborations, and remixes, maps her early trajectory from “Real Love” all the way to 1997’s “Love Is All We Need.” Even alongside some of the most acclaimed rappers of all time—Jay-Z, Method Man, Nas, and Biggie—Blige pierces through.
To someone listening for the first time in 2019, her style might even sound dated. But even when they extracted influences from her sound, few singers could access her desperate yearning. Blige’s “Real Love” would serve as something of a blueprint for hip-hop soul—powerful hooks, smoky singing, slang-informed writing, and textured, sample-based beats that could easily be rapped over. “If I stay strong, maybe I’ll find my real love”—this ability to evoke pain, desire, and an iron will would characterize much of the rest of her career, elevating her as an icon of triumph and transformation. HERstory Vol.1 offers the reminder that she had that power as young as 18 or 19.
Long before it was the norm, Blige was forthcoming about the difficult circumstances that shaped her world. She’d endured childhood sexual abuse and a drug and alcohol addiction that began when she was 16. In her music, she imagined an escape from that misery, even if she couldn’t quite see it at the time. With her second album, 1994’s My Life, Blige grew from singer to songwriter, crafting some of the biggest hits of her career. Songs like “Be Happy” and her cover of Rose Royce’s 1976 soul single “I’m Goin’ Down,” steeped in the darkness of her own experiences, offered the mingling of agony and hope that became her signature. “All I really want is to be happy,” she begs on the hook of “Be Happy,” stretching a simple statement into something pained and profound.
She would soon realize that wish, escaping an abusive relationship, finding sobriety, and transforming into the anti-drama crusader we know her as today. “I am the living proof that any person going through any tragic situation in their lives, you can get out,” she said in a 2011 episode of VH1’s Behind The Music. Today, Blige enjoys “beloved auntie” cultural status; in recent years, she has been both a meme and a record-breaking Oscar nominee. When she made the music of HERstory’s first volume, she was just getting started.
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